Holly Haworth wrote an excellent essay recently for Nautilus, “What an Oyster Hears,” that might, in an earlier draft, have been titled “What an Oyster Might Hear,” since as she acknowledges early on, the oyster has no ear. However, the oyster does resemble an ear, and thus provides Haworth’s rangy article with plenty of opportunity to reflect on the creature as a living metaphor for so many forms of sonic reception.
There’s its presence at the shoreline, where the two very different habitats of our planet meet. There is the dense audio world beneath the ocean’s surface, which she experiences thanks to the use of a hydrophone. There is the work of acoustic ecologists to use sound for us to better understand the alien realms we live amid. And there is Jonathan Sterne’s proposed connection, from his book The Audible Past, between the rise of canned goods and of canned music (including a quote from John Philips Sousa that sums up modern anxieties many have about Spotify, AI, and their combination.)
To read the article is to witness Haworth’s own perceptions change, improve, elevate, and sharpen. She writes:
“The headphones amplified the sound of the oyster reef while they also made me feel alienated from my surroundings. I quickly noticed that I could hear much of the snapping without the help of the machine. By amplifying the noise and concentrating it in my ears, the headphones had helped to tune my listening, a useful technology. Now I realized what I could hear without them.”
I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week (or in this case, the past two weeks). These days that mostly means post.lurk.org (Mastodon).
▰ The hazard lights in this electric car I’ve been driving aren’t mechanical. They make the familiar clicking sound for the first minute or so and then they turn off. The lights keep blinking but they no longer click. It has a vague “We’re done with the charade” vibe. What’s interesting is how it seems that in the transition from fossil fuel to electric, even things unrelated to gasoline end up electrified, rather than being left mechanical. Or something along those lines.
▰ For all the improvements of laptop computers over the years, the one I’m perhaps most thankful for is that the thing is immediately functional when I open it
▰ Sources of late-morning sounds: passing bus, washing machine, creaking of floorboards, neighbor’s garage door, gentle whir of air filter (allergy season), muffled voices as people walk by outside
▰ Sound of the day goes to the tiny, tinny radio on which a construction crew was listening to a sports event, the play-by-play announcement of which was reduced to some exceptionally narrow band of what might be described as the high treble spectrum. From halfway down the block, it was like listening to mice stage whisper, and it grew no more comprehensible as I approached. I’m not convinced the crew even understood much of it, either. It was more like a comforting story being told in an adult nursery.
▰ The best part of Succession ending will be never having to hear that melody again in yet another instrumental arrangement
▰ That thing where you take a handful of awkwardly named wav files that constitute an album and put them in iTunes (excuse me, Apple Music) and fix the song titles and add the year and the track numbers and the art, and then hit save, and it doesn’t break the set into three different mini-albums. And you take a slow breath as you back away and promise yourself never to touch those files again. Whew.
▰ It’s 2023. I don’t need to take my keychain out of my pocket to start the car. I do need to in order to access certain accounts from my computer.
The Swiss artist Zimoun’s motorized cardboard sculptures are whimsical explorations of physical properties. He regularly assembles small armies of simple objects that, in combination, rapidly escalate into complex systems. He has gotten better and better over the years at documenting his work. The visuals in this recent video, for example, of a suspended grid of little boxes, suggest a virtual rendering, filmed as the materials are in such a bright white space.
The virtual-ness of the video reinforces the fundamentals-first quality that is the foundation of Zimoun’s installation art. Listen as the light brown cubes — each assembled with brown tape and hung with stark black strings from a panel as white as anything in George Lucas’ THX-1138 — gently rumble. There is white noise, and pink noise, and brown noise, and there is Zimoun noise.
The Assignment: Make music by processing a static 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 over four 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, May 29, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 25, 2023.
Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.
Disquiet Junto Project 0595: Filter Progression The Assignment: Make music by processing a static sound.
This project is the second of three that are being done in collaboration with the 2023 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 6 through 10. The topic this year is « √ » — as the organization explains: “the radical, or square root symbol and the power of its symbolism are central to the festival and these will be translated into music in multifarious ways.” All three projects will engage with the work of Éliane Radigue, who is the Composer-in-Residence for the 2023 festival.
We are working at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the fifth year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern.
Select recordings resulting from these three Disquiet Junto projects may be played and displayed throughout the festival.
Step 1: Choose a static sound, such as a field recording of a specific place, or a held tone, or a recording of noise.
Step 2: Experiment with animating the static sound selected from Step 1 by slowly, subtly, manually modulating it, using only filter frequency and resonance.
Step 3: Record a track resulting from the techniques you developed in Step 2.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0595” (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 “disquiet0595” (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.
Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.
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. Sometimes longer is better.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 29, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 25, 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 595th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Filter Progression (The Assignment: Make music by processing a static sound), at: https://disquiet.com/0595/
This went out this evening to paid This Week in Sound subscribers: a playlist from Amulets, Drowse, Tuonela, and the collaboration of Jeremiah Fraites and Taylor Deupree.
