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. These days that mostly means post.lurk.org.
▰ lightning -> thunder -> dogs -> sirens
▰ First two novels I finished reading this year: The Mother Code by Carole Stivers and And After the Fire by Lauren Belfer.
▰ Outside, it’s nonstop rain. My Facebook feed is nonstop Jeff Beck RIPs.
▰ This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the second of the year, but the first that I wrote up in the redesigned Disquiet.com backend. Felt good — a little unfamiliar, certainly, but it went smoothly.
▰ It’d be nice if YouTube Music was available in “split screen” mode (or “slide over”) on the iPad. A small wish for 2023.
▰ If “the song that was #1 on your 23rd birthday is how your 2023 will play out,” then apparently Prince’s “Batdance” (maybe my least favorite Prince hit) is my year ahead. I have no idea what that means. (Could be worse — in England on that day it was Jive Bunny’s “Swing the Mood.”)
▰ There are many strange things about the first episode of Seinfeld, among them that, naturally, the audience doesn’t cheer when Kramer walks into Jerry’s apartment.
▰ Sentence I typed today: I aspire to be the love child of Alexander Isley and E.E. Cummings
There are reasons I find myself reading thrillers that have less to do with the thrills, less to do with the vicarious, Walter Mitty pleasure of someone fictional doing outlandish things while I sit in my chair, of being transported momentarily to their circumstances, or with the tension of these death-defying pressures and conspiratorial motivations having been brought to bear for my casual entertainment — reasons instead that have far more to do with the simple fact that the characters in such books (and in the good ones their authors as well) spend a lot of time listening very closely to their surroundings, interpreting the world around them with their ears and wits.
This following bit is from the novel Take No Names by Daniel Nieh. In it, a character has just messed up badly, risking drawing attention to his presence and that of a criminal colleague. He has nothing to do but wait to see if has endangered his life. Since this moment occurs a few pages into the book, the likely answer is that no, of course, he has not.
What further elevates that instance is one that comes earlier. Even before this character, named Victor Li (who was also the protagonist of Nieh’s previous book, Beijing Payback), comes to fear that his clumsiness has cost him everything, we witness him simply listening — not out of need, but out of habit:
That paragraph comes toward the opening of the same chapter. It serves to prime the reader’s awareness of Victor’s awareness. I’ll be listening along as I read further. I’m 25% of the way through, according to my trust ereader.
The Assignment: Get a musical New Year's resolution out of the way.
/ 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.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 16, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 12, 2023.
Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the llllllll.co discussion thread.
The Assignment: Get a musical New Year’s resolution out of the way.
Step 1: Think of something, recording-wise, you want to accomplish musically this year — something you can attempt to accomplish now with the tools you have on hand and a little bit of time.
Step 2: Give the goal you set for yourself a go right now. Take a first stab at something that might, of course, require concerted effort over the remainder of the year to really make progress on. The first step is often the most difficult. Why not get it out of the way now?
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0576” (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 “disquiet0576” (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. Set a short-term goal, not a lengthy one.
Deadline: Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 16, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 12, 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 576th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Casual Resolution (The Assignment: Get a musical New Year’s resolution out of the way), at: https://disquiet.com/0576/
These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the January 10, 2023, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound.
▰ PERIOD PIECE: Jill Linz, a physics instructor at Skidmore College, has a project that “mapped atomic data into unique audible tone,” yielding an “aural periodic table.”
“By examining the waveforms and tonal qualities of each element in the table, she’s beginning to explore how this ‘sonification’ of atoms might reveal unexpected structural relationships among elements.”
These are waveforms of the first dozen elements:
“From top to bottom, the left column shows hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium; the middle column shows boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen; and the right column shows fluorine, neon, sodium, magnesium.”
“Then there’s the noise-canceling issue with the headphones. Yes, noise pollution is certainly a problem in cities like Manhattan with its cacophony of car horns and sirens. But, as annoying as those sounds can be, completely cutting them out in a dense metro area could constitute a health hazard. Situational awareness is pretty important with that many vehicles and people nearby.”
▰ TALK THERAPY: Novelist V. V. Ganeshananthan, author of Love Marriage and Brotherless Night, wrote for Time about turning to voice recognition software after losing use of her hands — and how much the tools still need to improve in order to truly serve the disabled:
“I found that I preferred Mac voice control and Google Docs voice typing because the lag between what I was thinking and what the software was typing was shorter; even if the difference was infinitesimal, it mattered. Because of its speed and its slightly better performance with non-Anglo proper nouns, I chose Google Docs for my novel. Sometimes I closed my eyes and muttered scenes into the screen, my former copyeditor’s self unable to bear the typo-written transcription. Sometimes when I could not resist touching the keyboard, I ended up having to wear ice sleeves. Sometimes I opened my eyes only to find that the dictation had stopped working partway through my sentences. If I used a phrase that was also a song or film title, Google would sometimes capitalize it. (“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” one character might have said to another.) As when I had typed for myself, I found that I could not write fiction in the presence of others. It felt too intimate. But eventually that self-consciousness fell away. It had to: The software was capable of composition, but when it came to revision, the amount of time and skill it would take to get things done was beyond me and my looming deadline.”
▰ SPEAKER SYSTEM: Apple is experimenting with using AI voices to narrate audiobooks: “[S]ome in the publishing industry are skeptical about replacing human narrators—often professional voice actors or the authors themselves—with A.I. They say that audiobooks are a form of art, and that human narrators help enhance the experience.” Meanwhile, apparently Amazon requires its Audible audiobooks “be narrated by a human.”
▰ BUG REPELLANT: The noisier humans get, the less successful grasshoppers are at having sex. Even though “their calls can reach intensities of 98 decibels at one metre, which is about as loud as a hand drill,” we can muffle that with our own sound: “As this species is highly dependent on acoustic communication for mate location, the reduced calling effort demonstrated by males at both study sites might have a negative impact on mating success.”
▰ QUICK NOTES: RING TONE: The Kitchen Sisters have an episode on the great sound artist Bill Fontana’s work based on the silenced bells of Notre Dame. (Thanks, Lotta Fjelkegård!) ▰ LIST LESS: Nothing particularly sound related ranked among the top 10 technological innovations as determined by MIT’s technologyreview.com, nor among the four additional items readers are to vote for.▰ LEADER BILLBOARD: Ranking the 10 best games based on their sound design: thegamer.com. ▰ FOLEY DU JOUR: Learn how game designers behind Dead Island 2 made the sound of zombie guts, among other subjects.
42: Percent of rickshaw drivers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, reporting hearing loss
15: Percent rise in brand awareness after a hair salon franchise employed ASMR to promote itself
300,000: Settlement paid by Whole Foods under Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) for allegedly using “voice recognition system without properly obtaining consent” of its workers
