Disquiet – Page 381 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Sound Ledger¹ (Kondo, Aerodynamics, Paris)

Audio culture by the numbers

January 24, 2022 / By Marc Weidenbaum

**75:** Cost in $US of a tuning fork from Marie Kondo’s online store. Crystal included.

**18:** Number of fewer decibels produced by owls than by other birds when flying at similar speed.

**5,500,000:** Estimated number of Parisians exposed to road noise 55 dB or higher, the largest of any European city. London came in a distant second at roughly 2,647,600.

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¹Footnotes: Kondo: [konmari.com](https://konmari.com/how-to-use-a-tuning-fork/). Owls: [sciencefocus.com](https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/owl-inspired-technology-may-reduce-noise-pollution/). Paris: [swlondoner.co.uk](https://www.swlondoner.co.uk/news/21012022-londoners-exposed-to-the-second-most-road-traffic-noise-in-europe/).

*Originally published in the January 24, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter [tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet).*

Three Important Aspects of the Disquiet Junto

Per Jason Richardson

January 23, 2022January 23, 2022 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Jason Richardson, a longtime and prolific member of the Disquiet Junto community, posted this great short appreciation:

Here’s a lightly edited transcript of the short video:

The Disquiet Junto offers three aspects that I think are quite important.

The first is a direction, because Brian Eno had the idea that any creative project needed to outline the constraints, and this helps focus in on what you’re going to achieve.

The second is a timeframe. Duke Ellington famously said, “I don’t need time, I need a deadline,” and that’s my feeling that, particularly in the past when I wasn’t working: having a deadline really helped focus and make things happen.

The third part is the community, because you do get that feedback from people, but you also get to see how other people approach the project, and that expands your creative horizons.

I’m really grateful for the Disquiet Junto being part of my life and creative practice.

Drawing Sound Media

And the (possible) return of the CD

January 23, 2022January 23, 2022 / By Marc Weidenbaum

With the news that [sales of CDs have risen](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/cd-revival-compact-discs-rob-sheffield-1284487/) for the first time in years, I got to reflecting on the media on which we replay sound. There is a lot of talk about form and function, which makes me wonder where nostalgia comes in. Is it a feature, or just something that helps us appreciate the bugs — the fragility of tape cassettes, the crackles of vinyl? Or perhaps that is nostalgia’s feature.

When I edited the comics in Tower Records’ *Pulse!* magazine from 1992 through 2002, it was a challenge to veer from vinyl as a romantic signifier. Once in a while I managed to encourage an illustrator to use a CD or CD player in place of an LP player, and it generally worked. Hand-drawn, the object had its own resonance. However, when a comic pictured a device for mural playback, it was almost always an LP player.

Last week I flipped through a stack of old *Pulse!* strips just to see what examples were on hand. The following details and individual panels are all from old *Pulse!* comics:

Detail of turntable by John Porcellino (1994):

LPs as drawn by Keith Knight (1994):

Technically not a turntable in the sense of an LP player, but instead a recording device by Tony Mostrom (1995):

A mention of a Walkman in a panel from a comic by Dylan Horrocks about Arvo Pärt (1994):

One by J.E. Fullerton, intentionally run in Swedish (1995):

Of course, our instinct for nostalgia went prior to LPs, like this detail from a piece on ragtime composer Joseph Lamb by Chris Ware (1994):

One by Matt Madden (1995):

This flip through memory lane was inspired by an article by my friend Rob Sheffield in *Rolling Stone* ([“Jewel-Box Heroes: Why the CD Revival Is Finally Here”](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/cd-revival-compact-discs-rob-sheffield-1284487/)) and [a tweet by Bruce Levenstein](https://twitter.com/BruceLevenstein/status/1483871119258140677). This originally ran, in slightly different form, as a [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet) thread.

twitter.com/disquiet: Drones, Sirens, Conway

From the past week

January 22, 2022January 22, 2022 / By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each Saturday, collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up in expanded form or [otherwise](https://disquiet.com/2022/01/21/two-flashlights/) on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s 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.

▰ Trying to decide which drone musician my dishwasher thinks it’s a tribute band for.

▰ As often happens when an emergency vehicle’s siren approaches, I listen for it to disappear as eventually it passes by and then heads further away. Except this time it didn’t disappear. It stopped quite suddenly. Because there was a car accident right outside.

▰ Walking inside my home with noise-cancelling headphones on after a call ends. Life ends up like one of those scenes in a movie when they replace “actual” silence with digital silence (sometimes due to artistic intent, often due to a lack of thought about sensory reality).

▰ I’m more of a New York Times mini-crossword guy.

CONWY
GAMEO
WORDL