Disquiet Junto Project 0536: Metaphor Play

The Assignment: Take a figure of speech as a creative prompt.

/ 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 11, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 6, 2022.

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

**Disquiet Junto Project 0536: Metaphor Play**
The Assignment: Take a favorite figure of speech as a creative prompt.

Step 1: Think of a metaphor you frequently use or that you particularly love.

Step 2: Think about how that metaphor could be applied to making music or otherwise working with sound.

Step 3: Make a piece of music in which that metaphor plays a role in how you plan and execute the work.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0536” (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 “disquiet0536” (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-0536-metaphor-play/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0536-metaphor-play/)

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 11, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 6, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0536” 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 536th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Metaphor Play (The Assignment: Take a favorite figure of speech as a creative prompt) — at: https://disquiet.com/0536/

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-0536-metaphor-play/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0536-metaphor-play/)

This Week in Sound: Voiceprint Lawsuits, Breath of a Blackbird

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the April 4, 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.

▰ “A flexible, wearable, fabric microphone”: that’s the topic of recent Nature coverage. It’s a report on MIT professor Yoel Fink’s “fabric ‘ear.'” Not only can one fiber of Fink’s ear technology capture sound, two fibers can “be used to identify the direction that a sound came from.” The potential deployment of this technology is still in the works: “Yoel thinks that a wearable fabric mic that sits directly on the body opens up a wealth of potential applications, from helping people with hearing aids to focus their listening on a specific speaker in a noisy room to providing long-term, comfortable monitoring of heart or respiratory function, even monitoring a baby in the womb.” ➔ [nature.com](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00760-w#MO0)
*(Thanks, Rich Pettus!)*

▰ According to the National Law Review, “voice recognition data — another growing area of potential litigation risk.” ➔ [natlawreview.com](https://www.natlawreview.com/article/just-released-2022-q1-aibiometric-litigation-trends)

▰ Opinions are coming in on the Zone, a Dyson product that combines air purification with Bluetooth headphones. The Verge: “we’ll have to see whether customers will be willing to embrace this extremely odd-looking product.” Wired: “either a bold new world of personal pollution protection or an economic and PR disaster for Dyson. Frankly, we’re not sure which it will be.” The Guardian: “sure to draw quizzical looks.” Designboom: “bizarre combo.” Nerdist: “you don’t want to look like a Benzite from Star Trek.” ➔ [wired.com](https://www.wired.com/story/the-bizarre-dyson-zone-pollution-mask-doubles-as-headphones/), [theguardian.com](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/mar/30/dyson-launches-zone-air-purifying-bluetooth-headphones-with-visor), [designboom.com](https://www.designboom.com/technology/dyson-bizarre-combo-noise-canceling-headphones-pollution-mask-03-30-2022/), [nerdist.com](https://nerdist.com/article/dyson-wearable-noise-air-pollution-purifier/)

▰ “The world’s cities must take on the cacophony of noise pollution” — a report from the Financial Times: “Good measures have been applied already in urban areas across the world: from London’s Ultra-Low Emission Zone, ‘noise radar’ in Paris and Berlin’s new cycle lanes on wide roads to Egypt’s national plan to combat noise and Pakistan’s 10bn trees ‘tsunami’.” ➔ [unep.org](https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/opinion/worlds-cities-must-take-cacophony-noise-pollution), [ft.com](https://www.ft.com/content/ffacda24-da6e-4a95-9ce5-a3343e23bc06)

▰ “It’s a regular beanie hat with a reinforced flap around the ears wherein two materials have been combined to make it sound-absorbent and noise-blocking.” That’s the Little Snooze, a children’s hat. ➔ [innovationorigins.com](https://innovationorigins.com/en/combating-noise-pollution-with-a-beanie-little-snooze-is-doing-it/)

▰ “PetSmart required warehouses workers to use the technology to create an individual voiceprint, unique to each person,” according to a putative class action lawsuit. “Workers then carried out orders sent from a central computer by interacting with voice recognition software, which responded based on their voiceprint. The voiceprints, stored in a file containing the worker’s name and employee number, could have been subject to hacking and put the workers at risk for identity theft, according to the lawsuit.” ➔ [hrdive.com](https://www.hrdive.com/news/class-action-challenges-petsmarts-use-of-voice-recognition-tech/621057/)

▰ “The project aims to understand whether artificial motor sounds on electric scooters can improve audible detectability of these vehicles by people with visual impairments while avoiding contributing additional noise pollution to our cities.” Read about the collaboration between the Royal National Institute of Blind People, the University of Salford, and Dott, a European mobility operator. ➔ [theiet.org](https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2022/03/electric-scooter-warning-noise-research-sounds-note-of-optimism/)

▰ You must click through to see the breath of a red-wing blackbird in frigid air while it sings: ➔ [thisiscolossal.com](https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2022/03/kathrin-swoboda-red-wing-blackbird/)
*(Via [warrenellis.ltd](https://warrenellis.ltd/mc/waiting-for-the-right-breath/))*

Sound Ledger¹ (Dyson’s Mask)

Audio culture by the numbers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

0.1: The size, in microns, of particles filtered by the Dyson Zone

5: Number of liters of clean air delivered per second by the Dyson Zone

90: Number of minutes of use of the Dyson Zone at its highest level

________
¹Footnotes

[theguardian.com](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/mar/30/dyson-launches-zone-air-purifying-bluetooth-headphones-with-visor)

*Originally published in the April 4, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Get it in your inbox via [tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet).*

Fell / Treanor / Bradbury Interview

Which I moderated last month

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Mark Fell, Rian Treanor, and James Bradbury beamed in on the big screen at Gray Area in the Mission last month, on March 11, so I could interview them in front of a live audience. The setting was the second-ever Algorithmic Art Assembly conference-cum-festival.

There was a meta quality to the hybrid live/Zoom scenario, in that the topic of discussion — the trio’s excellent web audio project at [intersymmetric.xyz](https://intersymmetric.xyz/) — was the way they created virtual environments for individuals to make music collaboratively from a long distance. They discussed how it arose out of the constraints of pandemic performance, how unsatisfying they found live-streaming of traditional concerts, and how they did test runs of the software with children, among other aspects of the project. (Speaking of meta, I kind of love how in the video you see my gesticulations and facial expressions repeated behind me on the video screen, and how they’re delayed ever so slightly, like a split second. It’s latency in action.)

This is the interface of their first intersymmetric.xyz project, commissioned for the No Bounds festival in 2021:

This is the interface of their second intersymmetric.xyz project, commissioned for Algorithmic Art Assembly 2022:

And here’s footage of a live performance by Fell and Treanor on the AAA version of intersymmetric.xyz, introduced by AAA founder Thorsten Sideb0ard: