Disquiet Junto Project 0552: The Radio in My Life

The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, 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, August 1, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 28, 2022.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

**Disquiet Junto Project 0552: The Radio in My Life**
The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation.

This project is the second of three that are being done in collaboration with the 2022 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 7 through 11. The topic this year is “unvermittelt,” which is a little tricky to translate. Literally it’s “unmediated,” but it can also mean “sudden,” “abrupt,” or “immediate.”

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 fourth year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern.

Select recordings resulting from these three Disquiet Junto projects will be played and displayed throughout the festival.

Step 1: There’s a great moment in the recorded conversations of composers John Cage and Morton Feldman when they discuss a trip to the beach. Feldman isn’t pleased by the way transistor radios let music, and sound in general, appear in places it hadn’t previously. Cage jokes that having composed music that involves multiple radios, whenever he hears them he thinks, “[W]ell, they’re just playing my piece.” You can listen to it in the first 2.5 minutes of this excerpt:

[https://youtu.be/chEvxoypyUo](https://youtu.be/chEvxoypyUo)

Step 2: Think about Cage and Feldman’s conversation, in particular about the idea of what is and isn’t a sonic “intrusion” in our lives.

Step 3: Record a piece of music that reproduces or otherwise suggests the sympathetic (i.e., non-intrusive) commingling of radio and everyday sound.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0552” (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 “disquiet0552” (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:

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0552-the-radio-in-my-life/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0552-the-radio-in-my-life/)

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:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, August 1, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 28, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0552” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

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 552nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Radio in My Life (The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation) — at: https://disquiet.com/0552/

Thanks to Tobias Reber and Musikfestival Bern for collaboration on this project. More on the festival at:

[https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/](https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/)
[https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern](https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern)
[https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern](https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern)

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0552-the-radio-in-my-life/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0552-the-radio-in-my-life/)

Start a blog.

Expect to not know what you have to say until you've written.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Start a blog. Don’t amplify stuff you disagree with. Mute stuff that bugs you. Focus; veer occasionally. Add context to links. Consider waiting a day after writing something before posting it. Write for yourself first. Expect to not know what you have to say until you’ve written.

Yutaka Hirose’s Varied Spaces

An archival release from WRWTFWW Records

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I sometimes wonder if the steady stream of archival, often never before heard, ambient music from Japan is, in fact, an artful ploy, an aesthetic provocation in the form of a narrative prank — like a music-history equivalent of the Wikipedia user, Zhemao, who reportedly created an expansive fictional medieval history of Russia (see: [vice.com](https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgbwm/chinese-woman-fake-russian-history-wikipedia)). Also, not a prank in the *Punk’d* “gotcha” sense, but more in the sense of the RE/Search book, a compendium that argued they “constitute an art form and genre.”

In any case, there’s a fine new collection of historical material, *Trace: Sound Design Works 1986​-​1989*, out from musician Yutaka Hirose. Many of its 11 tracks have the deep, echoing resonance of sound recorded *in situ*, like the dubby beading of “Inner Voice,” all moist clangs and spatial ambience, and the mechanical soundscape of “Voice from Past Technology.” This physicality represents what Hirose told critic Narushi Hosoda in a [*Tokion*](https://tokion.jp/en/2022/06/18/interview-yutaka-hirose-vol1/) interview published last month: “I wanted to build sounds based on space rather than do something musical.” Other tracks further expand the scope, allowing for seemingly virtual spaces, like the lofi beats and warped vocal of “The Breath of Cyberspace.”

Album released at the Bandcamp page of the [WRWTFWW Records](https://wereleasewhateverthefuckwewantrecords.bandcamp.com/album/trace-sound-design-works-1986-1989) label.

This Week in Sound: Leaving Room for the Sound Design

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the July 25, 2022, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound: [tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet).

As always, if you find sonic news of interest, please share it with me, and (except with the most widespread of news items) I’ll credit you should I mention it here.

▰ Sara Novic, who is deaf, writes about the comfort in silence: “Taking out my hearing aids is a relief, not unlike freeing my feet from a long day in dress shoes, except the thing being squeezed is my brain. I choose to wear hearing aids in a variety of work-related or social situations, but they create a dull throbbing around the circumference of my head. For all the technological power and benefit the aids provide, lately I’ve found their greatest value is in the pleasure of removing them.” ➔ [nytimes.com](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/19/magazine/silence-deafness.html)

▰ A synesthete chef, Eric Kim, bakes an A.S.M.R. cake for a deceased friend. “The sound of people eating, chewing, enjoying food makes me sleepy, which is unfortunate, considering that I cook for a living. … I always thought I was a freak. I didn’t have a name for what I thought was a medical condition until 2012, when I stumbled upon a black-screen YouTube video of a young man eating a taco bowl. When I came to, an hour later, I had a name for it. Soon after that, I started making A.S.M.R. videos myself.” ➔ [nytimes.com](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/magazine/chocolate-cake-recipe.html)

▰ “In an ambitious cross-cultural study, researchers found that adults around the world speak and sing to babies in similar ways. … Regardless of whether it helps to know it, researchers recently determined that this sing-songy baby talk — more technically known as ‘parentese’ — seems to be nearly universal to humans around the world. … The results, published recently in the journal Nature Human Behavior, showed that in every one of these cultures, the way parents spoke and sang to their infants differed from the way they communicated with adults — and that those differences were profoundly similar from group to group.” ➔ [nytimes.com](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/science/parentese-babies-global-language.html)

▰ “Leaving room for the sound design, even when there’s a cue playing, was an important part of the way I approached it.” That’s Michael Abels, who composed the score for Jordan Peele’s Nope (he also did Peele’s Get Out and Us), saying something not enough composers (or perhaps, more to the point, directors) give thought to. ➔ [indiewire.com](https://www.indiewire.com/2022/07/nope-jordan-peele-michael-abels-score-1234743718/)

▰ Thúy N Trần, CTO of Astrid, an education technology company, breaks down the way AI is impacting language-learning. ➔ [venturebeat.com](https://venturebeat.com/2022/07/23/how-ai-is-changing-the-way-we-learn-languages/)

▰ “A new feature that lets you extract a short audio clip from a Twitter Space is getting a widespread release on iOS and Android.” However, the clips expire after 30 days. ➔ [theverge.com](https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/21/23272456/twitter-spaces-clipping-ios-android-widespread-rollout)

▰ So-called “prairie madness,” an affliction of 19th-century settlers of the Great Plains of America, may have been the result of the region’s “eerie soundscape — the silence and the howling wind.” The work is by paleoanthropologist Alex D. Velez of the State University of New York at Oswego. ➔ [atlasobscura.com](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/prairie-madness-study-silence-great-plains) *(Thanks, Joe Planisky and Glenn Sogge!)*

▰ “A federal lawsuit filed against the city of Chicago is calling into question law enforcement’s use of controversial gunshot detection technology for gathering key pieces of evidence. … The suit accuses police of putting ‘blind faith,’ in ShotSpotter’s supposed evidence.” ➔ [gizmodo.com](https://gizmodo.com/chicago-shotspotter-gun-crime-1849319960)

Sound Ledger¹ (Noise Accounting)

Audio culture by the numbers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

27,000: Cost, in $US, of a “noise-monitoring camera” purchased by the city of Knoxville, Tennessee

25: The distance, in feet, it is illegal in Florida for sound from your vehicle to be audible

244: Number of sound level meters purchased by police in Delhi, India, to fight noise pollution

________
¹Footnotes

Knoxville: [knoxnews.com](https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/2022/07/23/downtown-knoxville-car-noise-documented-city-sound-camera/10110276002/). Florida: [motorbiscuit.com](https://www.motorbiscuit.com/new-florida-law-loud-car-music-exhausts-illegal/). Delhi: [timesofindia.indiatimes.com](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/93013481.cms).

*Originally published in the July 25, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Get it in your inbox via [tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet).*