When I posted this image on Instagram, I got an immediate warning. Apparently the phrase “Time to cull” is often associated with posts, presumably images, that are removed from the site for being inappropriate. This alert was, to say the least, surprising to me, and I did briefly consider whether I should proceed with the post. (I did.) But in any case, I do wanna trim some of my vinyl (and CDs, for that matter).
Scott D. Brown has created an elegant web interface for creating starkly beautiful circular spectrograms for uploaded audio files. The above one is the result of a 30-second recording I made of a fire alarm. The one below is of birdsong played in a bathroom (read for more details). Note how much less self-evidently rhythmic it is, and how the shading between frequencies is more varied and nuanced:
The next one, resembling a slice of a tree, is the sound of a train beginning to slow as it approaches a station. Looking at field recordings is a great way to listen to them. By observing how machines register to machines, you can find touchstones for your own attention.
And this final one, from the earliest of my recent spate of field recordings, is the phase shift of contrasting beeps from retail protection devices, plus occasional appearances of cashier pings and muffled human speech (read for details). You can actually see the phase shift as the distance between rhythmic elements grows smaller and then larger, round and round.
You can upload your own sounds to see what they sound like at spectrogram.scottbrown.co.nz. Brown is, per the URL, based in New Zealand.
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ Through an earbud, an incoming message is read to me mechanically via text-to-speech (TTS). The message concludes with the emoji TY, short for thank you. I know this because I hear “tie” at the end of the sentence. Then I wonder if in the future people will say “tie” aloud when they mean thank you. Perhaps some already do.
▰ Occasionally these various speech-to-text (STT) voice recording apps I use for note-taking will insert descriptions of the sounds they can’t transcribe. Today I got “(snow crunching)” which I’ve never gotten before, and I can’t help but wonder if it gave this San Francisco that interpretation because I’m (briefly) in New York.
▰ Huh, so if my phone is reading a text message to me, I can say “Stop,” and not only does the reading stop, it initially does a quick little fade-out. I will make much use of this new superpower. (Interesting detail: If I say “Stop” while the message is being read, my “Stop” isn’t itself interpreted by my phone as a voice-to-text message.)
▰ It’s funny. San Francisco certainly doesn’t have more traffic noise than Manhattan, but since it’s not 10ºF here, I can open the windows, and thus there are way more sirens than I heard for the past week. Good to be home, either way.
▰ “Blue Liz,” “Petrified Forest,” “Cosmic Cobalt” — these are some of the many colors of crayons that Disquiet Junto participants are exploring for their sonic content in this week’s project. … Oh, and “Permanent Geranium Lake” — an old-school banger, as crayon color names go
▰ New York was great. It’s great to be home. These things are mutually compatible.
The apparent bend in the photo — noticeable particularly if you look at the Cliff House, the large building on the right — is because I angled the camera upward, so as to limit the presence of the volleyball activity, and instead capture more of the sky.
▰ Kinda entranced by the way my various speech-to-text tools describe stray noises, most recently: “(pages rustling)”
▰ Didn’t finish reading anything this week, but made solid progress on, among other books, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin, the coincidence of the titles (along with fact that both jump around in time while considering the subject of cleaved societies) having just occurred to me.
There is an apartment building on Long Island, in New York, where I stay over on occasion. When the place first opened, the fire alarms had a tendency to go off. There was one trip I took where both there and at a hotel where I spent a few nights in Brooklyn, fire alarms ruined multiple nights of sleep. That experience — of the alarm along with the flashing light that accompanies it — set me on edge for the entirely of the trip, and the impact has lingered. The apartment building’s alarms haven’t gone off for some time now, at least when I was present, but I still bear a bit of a grudge, and my latent concerns were brought to the surface when one suddenly rang out during a recent trip, in late January 2026. At least by recording the sounds, as I did here (on my iPhone Pro 17), the incident served some purpose, provided some utility. By recording the alarm, I transformed it from annoyance to object of study, from nemesis to item in a Petri dish. The pause after every third instance is what I find myself focused on, and not just because the brief quiet offered a respite. The silence suggested a rhythmic pattern, something I may put to musical use down the road. I made a second recording, shortly after this one, when the alarm had ceased but the light that blinked along with it kept on blinking. The blink was audible, a sharp, persistent cut in the air. I tried to upload the second audio file to Freesound, but the site kept rejecting it, likely because my recording was too low-volume. The click was quite evident in person. Guess you had to be there, though I can’t recommend it.
The track is on Freesound and SoundCloud.
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.
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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.
Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the llllllll.co discussion thread.
Disquiet Junto Project 0736: Feed Me
The Assignment: Write a piece of music emulating the dopamine engine that is social media.
Step 1: The author Robin Sloan recently cited a comment by journalist Nicholas Carr about how “the essential content of social media is now the feeds produced by the platforms, not the individual messages posted by users.” The observation made me think of the first time I watched someone, waiting at an airport years ago, flipping rapidly through Reddit — a mode of blipvert-like media consumption ratcheted up later on TikTok and elsewhere. Consider this remark, especially in the context of your own experience.
Step 2: Record a piece of music inspired/informed by the insistent, swift, and often jumpy pace of social media consumption. Produce a piece of music consisting of brief bits of disparate sound that fly by just as soon as they’ve registered with the listener, and that encourage the listener to keep listening through vibrancy and momentum.
Background: You can read Sloan’s post here:
https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/feed-content/
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0736” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.
Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0736-feed-me/
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you. How long did you scroll?
Deadline: Monday, February 9, 2026, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.
About: https://disquiet.com/junto/
Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/
License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).
Please Include When Posting Your Track:
More on the 736th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Feed Me — The Assignment: Write a piece of music emulating the dopamine engine that is social media. — at https://disquiet.com/0736/
