This Week in Sound: Deepfakes, Subways, NSFW

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s been a while. Best way to dust off the This Week in Sound apparatus is to kick out a new issue, which I did last night (subscribe at [tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet)). Things have been busy. A lot of writing, a lot of working, a lot of pandemic-era living. As always, tips on topics related to sound are always appreciated. Send them my way, please. They’re in no short supply, but the best examples often originate from sources deep into a seemingly non-sonic topic that ends up having unique sonic components.

▰ There’s a company called Pindrop that was created to pinpoint the presence of deepfakes. They think they’ve sorted out which bits of the recent Anthony Bourdain movie, Roadrunner, were created artificially. The director, Morgan Neville, had said they would be “undetectable,” writes Tom Simonite, when Neville elected to have machines impersonate Bourdain to record things the late author and television personality had written but never spoken. Pindrop (and various online commenters) now think otherwise. As for the filmmaker’s ethics, this section of Simonite’s Wired story is especially solid: “[I]t is still possible to inform listeners about the source of what they’re hearing. At one point in Roadrunner, a caption advises viewers they are hearing ‘VOICE OVER – OUTTAKE.’ It’s not clear why Neville didn’t use a ‘synthetic audio’ caption for his AI-generated clips — or if disclosing them in the film, not just interviews in which he boasted they were undetectable, would have softened the backlash.”
[https://www.wired.com/story/these-hidden-deepfakes-anthony-bourdain-movie/](https://www.wired.com/story/these-hidden-deepfakes-anthony-bourdain-movie/)

▰ I can’t remember the last time an article was shared with me more often than the recent New York Times online piece, complete with audio selections, about the sounds of subways around the world. It’s filled with choice details, such as how the “synthetic ‘doo-doo-doo'” of the Montreal system has its roots in a sound that was a byproduct of the circuitry. And with nuances regarding the employment of sound: “It seems to a layperson like a door chime is innocuous, but it’s a really critical part of keeping the capacity of the subway up,” reports a New York City Transit conductor. (Article by Sophie Haigney and Denise Lu, design by Gabriel Gianordoli and Umi Syam.)
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/13/arts/subway-train-sounds.html](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/13/arts/subway-train-sounds.html)

▰ Without quoting it directly, I will simply say there is a NSFW and highly satisfactory anecdote in Rebecca Mead’s profile of Jesse Armstrong, writer and creator of the HBO series *Succession*. I recommend reading the whole thing, but you can also just search for the word “slapping” and learn about the role of music in masking the sonic byproduct of certain group activities.
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/30/the-real-ceo-of-succession](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/30/the-real-ceo-of-succession)

▰ R. Murray Schafer, to whom we owe the modern concept of the “soundscape,” has died at age 88. “In a way, the world is a huge musical composition that’s going on all the time, without a beginning and, presumably, without an ending,” he is quoted by Robert Rowat in this obituary. Schafer died a little under a month after his birthday, July 18, which has served, in his honor, as the date of the annual World Listening Day.
[https://www.cbc.ca/music/r-murray-schafer-composer-writer-and-acoustic-ecologist-has-died-at-88-1.5404868](https://www.cbc.ca/music/r-murray-schafer-composer-writer-and-acoustic-ecologist-has-died-at-88-1.5404868)

▰ Quiet Parks International (quietparks.org) is identifying the “last quiet places” on our planet, ranging from the rural, such as the remote Zabalo River in Ecuador, to urban ones, such as Hampstead Heath in London. According to Nell Lewis, the organization has identified “260 potential sites around the world.”
[https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/quiet-parks-quiet-places-noisy-planet-spc-intl/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/quiet-parks-quiet-places-noisy-planet-spc-intl/index.html)

▰ Hans Zimmer has written music for numerous movies, and now he’s added a book to his resume, alongside providing sounds for everything from apps to cars. He hasn’t written a book. He’s written music to accompany a book, specifically a limited edition art book on Denis Villeneuve’s forthcoming adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel Dune. Zimmer also scored the film, of course. And don’t fret the “limited” situation. Abbey White reports that it will be available for streaming and download.
[https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/hans-zimmer-second-dune-score-film-companion-book-1234997876/](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/hans-zimmer-second-dune-score-film-companion-book-1234997876/)

▰ Windows 11 is due make users less “jumpy” thanks to a new suite of sound cues produced by sound designer Matthew Bennett. “The new sounds have a much rounder wavelength, making them softer so that they can still alert/notify you, but without being overwhelming,” according to a company spokesperson. Bennett shared some examples, including default beeps and calendar notifications.
[https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/22/microsoft-delivers-calm-system-sounds-in-windows-11.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/22/microsoft-delivers-calm-system-sounds-in-windows-11.html)

▰ The “quiet” of the title locale in journalist Stephen Kurczy’s new book, The Quiet Zone, is not literal. The town is Green Banks, West Virginia, and the “quiet” involves restrictions on “devices emanating electromagnetic emissions,” writes Don Oldenburg. This is all so as to not interfere with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. And as it turns out, this town is in many ways the opposite of quiet.
[https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2021/08/04/stephen-kurczys-the-quiet-zone-explores-town-without-cell-phones/5471413001/](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2021/08/04/stephen-kurczys-the-quiet-zone-explores-town-without-cell-phones/5471413001/)

Immersive Cinema and Ghost Ship Anniversary

A review I wrote for The Wire of the 2019 Recombinant festival

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

**Recombinant Festival**
Various venues, San Francisco, US

Like many major cities, San Francisco is haunted by numerous defunct cinemas, left behind by technological and cultural shifts. These buildings linger as decrepit shells, occasionally refurbished as anything from batting cages to video game arcades and non-profit offices. Hollywood has fully divested; all that remain are the marquees.

One such theater, the former Grand in the city’s Mission District, was revived in 2014 as the latest home to Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. It has since become a key location at the contested intersection of tech and the arts by hosting concerts, coding workshops, and occasionally actual films.



*Rrose is the center of attention.*

Gray Area coordinates with two neighborhood galleries for the week-long Recombinant festival, founded by longtime immersive-cinema impresario Naut Humon, co-founder of Asphodel Records. Events range from sonic abstraction to trenchant dance music, the one constant a massive six by 12 meter screen in Gray Area’s seatless main hall. The satellite installations are expressly audiovisual: Ulf Langheinrich’s *NIL*, a stroboscopic barrage at the Ohio gallery, coaxes retinas toward altered states with vibrant color fields, while *Earthworks*, a multiscreen sprawl at the Lab, quivers and gurgles with amoeboid correlations to seismic data, a creation of Superconductor, aka the duo of Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt.

Each performer at Recombinant either embraces or evades the massive screen’s presence. Aïsha Devi bled images onto adjacent walls, challenging the surface’s dominion, her music a joyous torrent of cyber-spiritual extroversion. When musicians such as Hiro Kone, pushing out downtempo beats, and Marcus Schmickler, emanating artful noise, treat the screen as an afterthought, the relative absence feels intentionally spartan.

Most acts employ the vast canvas as a synchronized backdrop to sonic activities, like Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS on opening night, his cyclopean industrial momentum a score to journeys through environmental footage reminiscent of his color-coded album covers. Electric Indigo make a strong impression with what might be called sound-design techno, the screen occasionally reorienting to a dramatic beat. In the lobby, additional installations explored color-sound alignment, including therapeutic simulations from Li Alin and Craig Dorety.



*Herman Kolgen mid-flight*

The festival highlight is Herman Kolgen, who for two nights took over the hall, moving from large screen to stage to intimate set-ups. He commands the room, shifting attention as he roams from station to station. The show opened with accompaniment by William Winant and Antonio Gennaro on percussion, performing a sleek rendering of Steve Reich’s “Different Trains” to video of tragic locomotives (some damaged miniatures, others exploded CGI renderings). Kolgen’s “Isotopp” is a showstopping marvel, as he coaxes a corona-like glass circle into states of electrostatic ecstasy, and the audience along with it. Another highlight is Rrose, who the night before, courtesy of heavily protected floor cabling, performed a set of fierce, terse techno.



*Drew McDowall and Florence To in their time machine*

Recombinant’s final night coincides with the second anniversary of the Ghost Ship fire, which killed 36 people at a warehouse concert in nearby Oakland. Early in the evening, two acts — ichael Gendreau and the aptly named Infrasound — pay homage by pushing low-frequency audio to ceiling-rattling effect. Drew McDowall and Florence To closed the festival with Coil’s waveform-maximalist work *Time Machines*. To’s low-res images providing limited illumination, the dense and shuddering music served as a proper memorial, alternately numbing and euphoric.

*There’s some additional context in [a post](https://disquiet.com/2019/02/07/my-first-article-for-the-wire/) I made when I first announced the article’s publication. This was my first article published in* The Wire. *I took all the above photos. None of them accompanied the article. I’m just fond of them, and while the one of Rrose isn’t great, it really captures for me my experience of the highly memorable moment.*

*This article I wrote originally appeared in the March 2019 issue (number 421) of* The Wire.

Kenneth Goldsmith by way of PDQ Bach, and More

An early (April 2020) pandemic livestream review I wrote for The Wire

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

**Happy Valley Band + Erin Demastes + Repairer of Reputations**

Various locations/Twitch

The valley in the name of Happy Valley Band is for Silicon Valley. The happy today, April 18, 2020, is nominal, due to widespread Covid induced seclusion. Happy Valley Band, an AI-arbitered experiment, is headlining a live stream that features noises from Erin Demastes and synth flashbacks from Ryan Page, the latter performing as Repairer of Reputations. The live stream phenomenon, like the coronavirus itself, is still novel.

The concert, held by the experimental promoter Indexical, occurs on Twitch, a platform for watching other people play video games. The Twitch website is correspondingly colorful and antic. For those less engaged in gamer culture, it can also be confusing. Like a waiter missing the hint that you have no interest beyond the club’s minimum drink requirement, Twitch often pesters you about ways to level up, mystifyingly so.

Demastes’ opening set is brightly illuminated, and otherwise a stark contrast to the manic framing of Twitch’s interface. On screen, color fields shift slightly and meaningfully. She is patiently engaged in microsound, in closely miking textiles and other materials. Her audio is at first quiet, so much so that latecomers keep entering the Twitch chat room to ask if the sound is even on. It is. (One good thing about Twitch concerts is that musicians and audience can silence crowd chatter with a click.)

As the volume rises, more sounds are heard as she probes and amplifies things seen through a microscope. These are as curiosity-invoking as they are abrasive. An after-show interview sheds additional light. Demastes lists her tools. These include beads, Styrofoam, and corkboard (that “gross brown stuff,” she reminds us), as well as a Slinky, a lobster fork, and a doorstop.

Happy Valley Band go second. Like the audience, the group’s members have assembled, far and wide, from the comfort of private spaces. They appear in the all too familiar virtual-conference grid of torsos. David Kant, the band’s leader, sets a self-mocking tone: “We’re going to be here for the next … too long, destroying your favorite songs.” What Happy Valley do is play music as heard through artificial intelligence. The musicians — including Kant on tenor sax, Mustafa Walker on bass, Alexander Dupuis on guitar, and Pauline Kim on violin, among too many members to list here — play notation produced by software that listens to pop classics and spits out what the algorithms observe. The Happy Valley Band are Kenneth Goldsmith by way of PDQ Bach: cultural plundering in the service of joking forensic dismemberment. They churn through hits like Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” and James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” Much as synthesizers have an easier time inferring pitch from woodwinds than from multi-timbral instruments, the barebones nature of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” yields the least frantic results of the show: the chords are anything but standard, but do leave space for the ear to focus on individual elements. The bombast of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” however, yields frenzied mush.

Like Demastes, Page performs work where visuals and sounds are inseparable. Throughout his set, the screen fills with ancient cathode-ray images, snatches of what seems like a VHS tape of a forgotten Roger Corman horror flick. The occasional narration reads like the script to a text adventure (*”You open the door. … As you enter, you are sure this is your house”*). The eeriest thing, nonetheless, is just how period-perfect are the synth-score cues that Page plays to accompany the footage.

*There’s some additional context in a post I made when I first announced the article’s publication ([“This is the first freelance concert review I have ever written on the same device on which I witnessed the concert”](https://disquiet.com/2020/06/20/indexical-happy-valley-band/)).*

*This article I wrote originally appeared in the July 2020 issue (number 437) of* The Wire.

twitter.com/disquiet: Jacks, PKD 2.0, Thunder

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each Saturday, collating recent tweets I made at [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet), which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets [pop up](https://disquiet.com/2021/08/17/toward-bandcamp-playlists/) in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.

▰ I’ve come to so associate high-pitched whines with the aftereffects of combat as portrayed in TV and film, that when one emanated from the supermarket’s public address system I briefly wondered which of my fellow shoppers had just barely survived a mortar round.

▰ I’ve apparently adjusted to the reappearance of the bus that goes up and down our block a bit more quickly and less vociferously than have the neighborhood’s canine residents.

▰ Hard won

▰ Private rail

▰ “It was — and for me, at least, remains — a truly strange thing: an audio jack that leads nowhere. … The jack had the so-called ‘male’ end, and then it dead-ended. It was, I learned later, called a dummy jack.”

Happy to see my little essay reprinted at [semiovox.com](https://www.semiovox.com/articles/2021/08/18/dummy-jack/).

▰ What ongoing (i.e., currently still in progress) science fiction (or spy) series should I read? Thank you. I’m up to date on The Expanse novels, and Fonda Lee’s Jade books, and Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, and the latest William Gibson trilogy, and Murderbot.

▰ PKD 2.0:

We Can Remember It for You Freemium

Flow My Tears, the Surveillance Capitalist Said

The Man in the High Stack

▰ The new Disquiet Junto project, going live asks participants to do something the projects rarely do: to sing. In the end, though, it won’t sound vocal. (Via [tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto), though I’m thinking of switching to Buttondown or another tool, if anyone has thoughts.)

▰ I love Thursdays. An [idea](https://disquiet.com/0503) goes out, and then music starts flowing in. I have some idea what will come of it, but often that idea is nothing in comparison with what arrives.

▰ The teacher from *Stranger Things* as a teacher on *Stargirl* in a setting like *Breakfast Club* quoting *Ferris Bueller’s Day Off* made my Tuesday night. *Stranger Things* has now been around long enough to be a source in addition to a recipient of references.

▰ When you’re thinking, “Oh, why have a white noise app running when I can just listen to someone walking in a rainstorm around Manhattan,” and then … BOOM 🌩️ there’s massive thunder. Massive.

▰ Computer 5000! There’s a longtime computer store in the neighborhood called Computer 5000, which I always assumed was, like, *Tron*-era scifi hyperbole. Today I recognized that 5000 is its street address.

Not Song but World, Not Composition but Soundscape

A new track from HEXA (aka Lawrence English and Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

My favorite atmospheric music is often produced by people who have a pronounced and longerm dedication to environmental field recordings. These individuals bring to their synthesized sounds the immersive experience of real world recordings. The scale of their work is not song but world, not composition but soundscape. Such is the gloriously harrowing “Elastic Body,” the first preview track from *Material Interstices*, a forthcoming album from HEXA, the duo of Lawrence English and Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart. It is a droning turmoil of white noise and shuddering dread, of voices straining against unseen forces to be heard and pipes echoing as they’re pulled long distances against rough surfaces.

It is neither a surprise that the sounds were inspired by dreams, nor that those dreams are deeply personal ones for the musicians, nor that the dreams have surfaced for them during the extended period of the pandemic. English describes it, in part, as follows: “The dream usually started with me playing on the lunar dirt and gradually a sound would emerge from a large concrete pit that was in the centre of the space. The sound would get louder and eventually I would have to go and inspect it. It called me in, there’s no other way to describe it.”

More on the album at [lawrenceenglish.bandcamp.com](https://lawrenceenglish.bandcamp.com/album/material-interstices). It is due out October 15, 2021.