I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.
▰ Annual heteronym joke: Fernando Pessoa died on this day in 1935 — taking with him dozens of others
▰ “Fairytale of New York” will hit extra hard this year
▰ I would have recorded the intense Lynchian HVAC drone of this roadside fast food establishment’s restroom but the piped-in holiday music would have been nixed by copyright bots. (Side note: yes, “roadside fast food establishment” suggests there’s a roadside fast food underground.)
▰ [Rapidly scrambles for mute button prior to sneezing]
▰ Me years ago: This is a nice wallet, especially because it has no logo.
Me now: I need a new wallet because my old one is falling apart but I have no idea what company made my old wallet.
This feels like a broader metaphor about some life lesson that’s been evading me.
▰ C B7 C A7 D7 G7 C G7 — pretty much all I’ll be doing on guitar the next few weeks is cycling through these chords, and variations on them in various voicings, while working on fingerpicking
I dug Lauren Oyler’s novel Fake Accounts. She has a keen sense of the micro-interactions between people, as well as those between people and technology, and especially those between people when technology is what is between them.
I’ve been joking with friends that it reads like Bridget Jones’s Diary as if recast so as to be adapted for film by David Fincher. And the manner in which it ends feels, in a way, like a realist standoff between the Joker and a Harley Quinn.
The Assignment: How do you depict a shadow in sound?
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just under five days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time and interest.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, December 4, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 30, 2023.
Disquiet Junto Project 0622: Know the Shadow The Assignment: How do you depict a shadow in sound?
Step 1: Think about what a shadow is.
Step 2: Think about how a shadow might be expressed in sound.
Step 3: Record a piece of music employing the ideas that arose in Step 2.
Seven Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0622” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.
Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0622” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.
Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.
Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.
Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you. Is it a low winter sun or high noon?
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, December 4, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 30, 2023.
Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.
Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).
For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:
More on this 622nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Know the Shadow (The Assignment: Use recently discarded material to make something new), at: https://disquiet.com/0622/
I suppose this post is what this website would be like if I simply quit social media
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Some sounds and sound-related things I’ve been thinking about:
▰ When I open the refrigerator in the morning, it makes a sound like a Star Trek spaceship warp core cooling suddenly when coming out of hyperspace. That’s what it sounds like, though I don’t think that specific sound effect actually correlates with what my appliance sounds like. It’s more of an association.
▰ Elsewhere at home: the washing machine has, with the correct balance of preparation, a sudsy seesawing that can lull me to sleep any time of the day.
▰ When I listen to an audiobook while going for a walk, occasionally I miss a word, even just a syllable. The app will, with the push of a button, bounce back 15 seconds, but that’s a lot of words — as many as 30 or 40. If I hit it immediately, my being distracted due to having missed a word means I miss subsequent words, as well. So what I have to do is wait, listen some more, and then hit rewind, within the 15-second window. When I have this down, it’s as natural as my stride.
▰ I record audio notes for myself throughout the day, much as I jot down notes throughout the day. I have been trying out a variety of apps to transcribe my audio recordings, and one thing I’ve noticed is how much context matters. When I record a few words, the machine can’t always make them out suitably. It’s in my interest to make a full statement, so that the machine can form the correct words from the syllables.
▰ My phone (an iPhone) has too many options to mute sounds, including alerts and alarms. These variables have varying impacts that I can’t always keep track of: the little slider on the side, the volume, the “focus” level, the app-specific “notification” settings. It gets confusing. It’s like different committees control each of the options, and these committees haven’t met in a while.
▰ Speaking of my phone, I use the Background Sounds option quite a bit, to aid concentration, and a recent update to the software has made the tool oddly difficult to access: you have to swipe once and then hit four subsequent buttons simply to turn on the noise. It’s quite odd.
