twitter.com/disquiet: Tokyo, Simulacrum, Greenacre

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each Saturday, collating most of the tweets I made the past week at [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet), which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up sooner in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com. I’ve found it personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. This isn’t a full accounting. Often there are, for example, conversations on Twitter that don’t really make as much sense out of the context of Twitter itself.

▰ You could tell the first episode of Tokyo Vice is a Michael Mann production just by listening to it. The mix of ambient score, traffic noise, and the sound of occasional human gestures in the scene in the first episode when the police and reporters document a dead body is exceptional. The term “master class” has been degraded beyond rehabilitation. This is Mann in full control.

▰ The 1-star Yelp reviews of hotels in Manhattan are often a riot. So many noise pollution complaints, as if it’s specific to a given hotel.

▰ It’s enough to make you think we live not only in a simulacrum but one trying to evade our awareness of it if high-grade consumer text-to-speech would rather hear two bits of nonsense than acknowledge the existence of the word simulacrum.

Why I recorded myself saying this sentence: I was recording myself right after waking. The broader subject was how I’d lifted my phone a split second before the phone’s morning alarm went off. The original subject was the eerie synchrony. Then text-to-speech leveled-up the eerie.

▰ One of my favorite little parks in Manhattan, Greenacre on 51st, though I do wonder how loud this fountain’s substantial roar is in the neighboring apartments. I believe the water is turned off over night, when the park’s fortress-grade gate is shut. Here’s some video: [instagram.com/dsqt](https://www.instagram.com/p/CcN0mmFAEfI/).

▰ Alarms getting old never gets old

▰ The hotel alarm clock features a vestigial organ of the digital revolution.

▰ According to Gustave Flaubert (according to novelist Julian Barnes), trains in mid-1800s France were Web 2.0.

This is from *Flaubert’s Parrot*, the ninth novel I’ve finished reading this year. Loved the first third. After that it gets especially collage-like.

▰ RIP, actor Michel Bouquet (b. 1925), whose work I first encountered thanks to the great film Toto the Hero (Toto le héros), which also introduced me to the music of Charles Trenet.

▰ The sound my phone made when an alert this morning about the Brooklyn shooting popped up was like six cups of coffee in a split second.

▰ Thursday was Avril 14th. Celebrate accordingly. I did a quick thread of recent covers of the Aphex Twin song: [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet/status/1514675343227076608).

▰ Thing I just discovered: if you hit your YubiKey at an inopportune moment during a call it sends out a peculiar, alien screech.

▰ On the flight Thursday evening back to San Francisco from New York, I used my excellent noise-cancelling headphones to muffle the weapons-grade drone of the airplane — and I then found myself, instinctually, pumping white noise into my ears so I could concentrate on work.

▰ And on that note, have a good weekend, or best you can.

– Listen to two records at once.

– Use IMDB to trace the work of a sound professional from a TV show you enjoy.

– Sell some old LPs you no longer like. Trade them for something new.

See you Monday. Or maybe Tuesday.

A Chorus of Sorts

On the way back from Brooklyn

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The subway was my destination, and all the more so when I reached the top of the staircase. This was in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, last week, toward the end of a recent trip I took back east. I’ve since returned to the Bay Area, where the world is considerably less dense — with people, with activity, with sound. In Greenpoint, it seemed, in that moment — in the moment preceding this audio — like a chorus might be performing down below the surface of the city, the voices gaining heft in the twisting, tiled hallways. I was in no rush to return to Manhattan, so when I took my first step down, I was looking forward to lingering. Buskers are one thing. Buskers transformed by the cavernous sound conduit that is a subway is something else entirely.

However, as is often the case with audio illusions (or hallucinations, perhaps), the impression I had fallen prey to was dispelled the moment I reached for my phone’s record button. It’s not simply a matter that I can’t hear the chorus in the audio I recorded. It’s that I no longer heard it when I was there. It simply evaporated. But the change in atmosphere did not deter me. I continued to record as I made my way.

You can hear those footsteps, my foosteps, here. I had two pairs of footwear on the trip: sneakers that are like marshmallows, and boot-like shoes that are firm as tires. This day was a tire day, and the hard tap of each step is evident. Once upon a time, the presence of those footsteps in the recording would have disappointed me. I would have thought of evidence of my being in the place as a taint. Instead, the footsteps lend a linear context to the sounds. They confirm for a listener, even one who was not present at the time, that space is being navigated. And I was, in the end, rewarded with a voice — not a chorus, per se, but a municipal announcement so utterly altered by the echo that it became a sort of chorus itself. Perhaps the very chorus that had caught my imagination earlier on.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/disquiet](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/footsteps-subway-announcement).

Disquiet Junto Project 0537: Penitent Honk

The Assignment: Do sound design for "a missing gesture" of vehicular life.

/ 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, April 18, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 14, 2022.

Tracks will be added to the (https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0537) for the duration of the project.

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

**Disquiet Junto Project 0537: Penitent Honk**
The Assignment: Do sound design for “a missing gesture” of vehicular life.

Step 1: Consider the sounds drivers make using their car horns. A firm, accusatory blast. A short, sharp alert. A held tone of vein-popping exasperation. What the horn isn’t easily capable of, however, is apologizing. If you make a mistake, and you want to signal your chagrin, there’s no button for that. The writer Rob Walker files such a concept under the heading of “a missing gesture.” Think about that for a moment.

Step 2: For more context, read the issue of Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing newsletter in which a subscriber suggests the following: “We have so many rude gestures, many of which we use while driving. But we don’t have a good gesture to say ‘I’m Sorry!’ If we accidentally cut someone off, we should be able to indicate it wasn’t intentional.”

[https://robwalker.substack.com/p/around-the-block/](https://robwalker.substack.com/p/around-the-block/)

Step 3: Think about what a car horn would sound like if it were apologizing for the driver’s actions.

Step 4: Record the sound you thought of in Step 3.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0537” (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 “disquiet0537” (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-0537-penitent-honk/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0537-penitent-honk/)

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, April 18, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 14, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you. Don’t hog the road.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0537” 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:

This project was proposed by Rob Walker.

More on this 537th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Penitent Honk (The Assignment: Do sound design for “a missing gesture” of vehicular life) — at: https://disquiet.com/0537/

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-0537-penitent-honk/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0537-penitent-honk/)

The Room Tone of the City

A field recording four times over

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I was sitting in a room, perhaps like the room you are in as you read this. It was very early on April 13, 2022, and I had been listening to the city I was in, Manhattan, as it woke, and as I woke along with it. Construction had already begun by the time I lifted my head, and I hit record on my phone to capture the combination of irritant and coziness that the muffled sounds of building provided. On the one hand, these were not comforting noises. On the other, they were quite quiet, especially from my tiny, 12-floor hotel room. I thought about how much the annoyance of the sound was tied not just to the time of day, but to how the small sounds could permeate my otherwise remote and private hotel room: how the sounds could be present without being overwhelming.

And so, having recorded 45 seconds of the sound from where I was seated, at a small desk, I decided to combine the outdoor sound with itself — to, in effect, magnify it. To accomplish this task, I played the initial 45-second recording on my laptop’s speakers, and recorded it as it sounded in the hotel room, while a variation on the outdoors naturally (or unnaturally, depending on your perspective) proceeded. Then I did this layering a second time, and then a third. Each time I added sound, the result was not particularly louder, or even all that eventful. There was clanging and droning, but there was still a lot of space present, not silent space but quiet space: the room tone of the city.

At first I thought I would just upload the fourth track, but instead I made a longer recording that presented the transition from one segment to the next. I treated each of the four recordings with a fade-in, and then I concatenated them, so just before the first recording ended, the second one began, and then the third, and then the fourth. And then I faded out the fourth track, so the full piece didn’t end suddenly. It’s quite remarkable how little happens in the finished piece, how the sound combined with a variant on itself multiple times is not that much more dense, not that much more full, than was the original. It speaks to both the relative quietude of morning Manhattan, and to the way the ear processes aberrations and unwanted occurrences. This is “Construction Kit.”

Track originally posted to [soundcloud.com/disquiet](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/construction-kit).