Disquiet Junto Project 0498: Sonic Entomologist

The Assignment: Create a new hybrid insect from the sound of two different insects.

/ 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, July 19, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 15, 2021.

Tracks will be added to the playlist for the duration of the project.

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

**Disquiet Junto Project 0498: Sonic Entomologist**
The Assignment: Create a new hybrid insect from the sound of two different insects.

This project is the second of three that are being done over the course of as many months in collaboration with the 2021 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 1 through 5 under the motto “schwärme” (“swarms”). For this reason, a German translation is provided below. 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 third 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: You will be playing mad scientist this week, or at least sonic scientist. Put that hat on.

Step 2: A large number of insects were invented for the previous project in this series. Many of them were made available for download and subsequent remixing. Check them out here:

[https://we.tl/t-dWFMGwmyad](https://we.tl/t-dWFMGwmyad)

Step 3: Choose two insects from the ones available in Step 2. Imagine a hybrid of the two insects, created in a laboratory.

Step 4: By combining the sounds of the two insects selected in Step 3, record the sound of that hybrid you imagined. What does it sound like? Is it a refined creation, or a Frankenstein nightmare? Is it better, stronger, faster, or prone to mutation and ill health?

Background: There will be public display cases at the festival, and we will set up motion triggers that cause an insect sound to occur when people pass by. We will do so with signage explaining that it documents experimental insect life. The participants whose work is included will be listed by name.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0498” (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 “disquiet0498” (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 tracks in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

[https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0498-sonic-entomologist/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0498-sonic-entomologist/)

Step 5: Annotate your tracks with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #disquietjunto and #musikfestivalbern 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.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, July 19, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 15, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track should be 20 seconds.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0498” 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 498th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Sonic Entomologist (The Assignment: Create a new hybrid insect from the sound of two different insects) — at: [https://disquiet.com/0498/](https://disquiet.com/0498/)

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/](https://disquiet.com/junto/)

Subscribe to project announcements here: [https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/)

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0498-sonic-entomologist/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0498-sonic-entomologist/)

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this project is by Nick Southall, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:

[https://flic.kr/p/7Syf86](https://flic.kr/p/7Syf86)

[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/)

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Continue reading “Disquiet Junto Project 0498: Sonic Entomologist”

Speech-to-Text as the New Cut-up

Jamming algorithmic econo

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Judging by this recent interaction with my phone, speech-to-text (STT) still has a long ways to go. Consider that the message being transcribed here was, with the exception of my name (Marc Weidenbaum, apparently aka “Mark we D Bond”), a rote automated robocall script that thousands of people have no doubt received. (That is “Mark we D Bond,” aka “Mark, we didn’t bun,” aka “Mark, we did one.) You’d think that after that many attempts by a system to transcribe the same audio over and over and over, the system would have accomplished a closer approximation.

A friend who saw me post this on social media, when it was a slightly more inchoate thought, pointed out that this STT incident was like the machine had written lyrics for the band the Minutemen (an especially ironic observation, since the band’s singer was D Boon and the Minutemen recorded for a label called SST). That idea made me think about the [cut-up](http://www.languageisavirus.com/creative-writing-techniques/william-s-burroughs-cut-ups.php#.YO9iz0xlBS8) work of William S. Burroughs, and how with STT you could write rough-draft lyrics for a song by saying words along with the melody, and then have the transcription service make mincemeat gibberish of the rough draft, and then you could sing the resulting mincemeat gibberish with full conviction.

Oh, and the “Prima Newman” sentence was in Spanish, as was part of the preceding sentence. “Newman on the way day” is “número nueve” (number nine, number nine, number nine …). It is fascinating, and revealing, that the automated STT service can’t switch gears particularly well when the speaker, even an automated one, changes language so quickly. For individuals in situations (protests, authoritarian regimes, etc.) where they are trying to avoid STT surveillance (scenario: audio > STT > algorithmic filter > legal/police action), this multilingual approach seems like a potential tactic (along the lines of playing copyrighted material to avoid footage being archived publicly on YouTube, TikTok, etc.).

“I’m On”

Even if "I" seem to be off, or even a little off

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Time and again I’ve learned that the surest way for people to interact with technology is for them to experience the technology as not just a useful tool, but as a presence that is eager to help. I saw a fascinating presentation a few years back by a researcher who showed that simply adding a pair of stick-on googly eyes to a device would significantly increase the likelihood that people would interact with it.

There is a lot of discussion about matters of gender in the roles of today’s personal digital assistants, such as Siri and Alexa, though less so about the tone of those interactions, the balance they strike between authoritative resource and obsequious servant. The intelligences that animate our phones and “smart home” devices walk a tightrope that is suspended across the deep chasm we have come to call the Uncanny Valley (the scenario in which certain approximations of the human by the digital have the opposite effect of the googly eyes: repelling us rather than enchanting us).

As time passes, these digital assistants will serve as interpersonal middleware, along the lines of the Google Duplex service, which can initiate and make a call on your behalf, communicating a request to someone on the other end — and perhaps at some future date, to a digital assistant serving your intended interlocutor. The two parties’ mutual assistants might have numerous communications before their human guardians ever might speak to each other directly.

The humble doorbell, a device that serves as a technological messaging tool, is a model of such interaction. The tradition intercom, by extension, facilitates communication without itself participating, to varying degrees. In the case of this apartment building’s aftermarket solution, one takes for granted that the “I” in “I’m on” is not one of the human inhabitants, but the device itself. This intercom’s screen may have gone dead, but its purpose, its utility, lives on, and someone sorted out that by telling the visitor so in an enthusiastic tone would improve the intended interaction.

Also: Note the nose-like protuberance that is the exposed lock mechanism, a bit of chance anthropomorphism. Also: Note that one doesn’t “just” push the apartment number; one also pushes the hashtag (né pound, as in one must pound the button to make certain it has its desired effect).

Freeze-Dried Musique Concrète

Patzr Radio hits 229

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

As it nears its 250th episode, the Patzr Radio podcast continues to traffic in musique concrète with a distinctly contemporary flair. The latest track, its 229th, is by no means pop music, and yet somehow it can feel like pop, at least after the first dozen or so listens on repeat. Perhaps pop crumpled up and freeze-dried and then pulled apart with pliers, but pop nonetheless. There is something to the track’s shifty, beat-like rhythmic material, and to the pause two thirds of the way through, and to the redacted quality of the source audio, that feels as if it is responding to pop, creaking in pop’s shadow, sort of the inverse to how OG musique concrète was almost inseparable from the symphonic and chamber music it sought to occlude. The impression is fed by the opening snatch of voice, a woman in a slightly superior tone saying, “Exactly, and then they lose their function.” Lost its function, perhaps, but not its DNA. Excellent, as always.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/patzr-radio](https://soundcloud.com/patzr-radio/patzr-radio-two-hundred-and-twentynine-and-palaaka).

Not in the Forest

Nor a robot

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I spent an hour in the park and took a half dozen pictures. Then on the walk home I took [more than five dozen](https://www.flickr.com/photos/disquietpxl/). If you can’t identify any forest in these images, it’s not because you’re a robot.

What music I make often aspires to the hum of a refrigerator, and apparently my photos aspire to those of a captcha lineup.