Some Sounds on My Mind

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.

Life Imitates Bechtle

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

When I exit an art exhibit or a film, one means by which I find myself gauging its impact on me is the extent that the world seems transformed by the aesthetic of what I had just been immersed in. Does the neighborhood outside the museum somehow correspond visually with the paintings I’d just spent hours staring at? Does the street outside the theater look as if framed and lit by the filmmakers? Does the impression kick in immediately, or take a beat to surface — and how long does the halo effect last? Today, when I left the De Young Museum — where I went specifically to check out a show of prints and drawings by the photorealist Robert Bechtle — I wandered out of Golden Gate Park to Fulton Street, where I was immediately faced with what could very well have been a Bechtle painting itself: the old-school car, the late-afternoon light, the perfect geometries, the muted palette. San Francisco is, of course, a city from which Bechtle drew vast inspiration throughout his career, so the deck was stacked for such an occurrence, but the appearance of this scene was striking, nonetheless. Photorealism brings a certain complexity to the idea of life imitating art, especially when the art in the first place was such a perceptive depiction of life here.

Scratch Pad: Houston, Scalzi, Doctorow, Welsh

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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. 

▰ I’m in the supermarket squeezing produce when Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” comes on, and I’m like: Yup.

▰ Me: I’ve bought enough (e)books for 2023.

Me 10 seconds later: there’s an $18 sale for 21 John Scalzi books on Humble Bundle for charity, and the new non-fiction book by Cory Doctorow (The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation) is $2 at Verso.

▰ The TV series Irvine Welsh’s Crime: in which the captioning does a fine job of deciphering the Scottish accents, but then you still need to look up plenty of words