The barometer over time for words about atmosphere
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
1. I would have thought it the opposite (ambiance > ambience).
2. I would have thought “ambience” on the rise in particular the past few years.
3. Maybe Google’s Ngram is looking at different sources than I am.
4. If these two are on the decline, what is on the rise?
. . .
Braulio Agnese noted for me the relative prominence is flipped in Google Trends.
. . .
A friend, Jimmy Kipple, suggested “chill,” and that seems like a good bet, even more right than I’d imagined.
*Chill is the word (is the word, is the word that you heard)
It’s got a groove, it’s got a meaning
Chill is the time, is the place, is the motion
Chill is the way we are feeling*
. . .
Another friend, Robert Boyd, had a good call: “vibe.” On the one hand, “vibe” is lower than “ambient” or “chill.” On the other, “vibe” is a much closer synonym for “ambience” and “ambiance,” and its rise aligns with their decline. (Vibe’s overall rise in the Ngram, it should be noted, begins almost exactly with the launch, in 1993, of the magazine *Vibe*.)
A sonic subculture on the other side of the screen
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
YouTube is filled with videos of ambient sound from cities and nature alike. There are [walking tours of Notting Hill in London](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsShjs–8I4), and still-camera video documents of [redwood forests](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F0RLk7fYQ4). You can even hop aboard someone’s bike as they [cycle around Tokyo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz_7guYo4tA), mic to the world, picking up traffic and chatter and wind. Some of these are too good to be true. If your browser finds you in picturesque desert or drenched Amazon rain forest, there’s a good chance the sounds originated elsewhere entirely, perhaps nowhere — which is to say, the nowhere that is an audio technician’s computer, refining idealized sounds of what we think the world sounds like, what the world “should” sound like. Reality is rarely as good as one might hope, especially reality recorded for hours straight without an edit and immediately uploaded to the internet. As for fictional reality, that is something else entirely. Right alongside the audio-video of seaside boardwalks and mountain tops are extracted segments extracted from television, movies, and video games. This one, for example, shows different settings from the video game *Cyberpunk 2077*, soaking with precipitation, the city streets circled by occasional cars, haunted by solo pedestrians, and flush with enough little sound objects — a honk here, a crossing signal there, the buzz of electricity everywhere, the halfhearted appeal from advertising on repeat — to feel not so much real as dourly welcoming, a false reality that’s arguably all the more real than the hyperreal hillside lake or [island paradise](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nep1qytq9JM), or [campsite fire that manages to stay lit for a quarter of a day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqqpcFj8G-s).
Video originally posted to the [Slow Walkthroughs / Video Game Ambience](https://youtu.be/hKq7kqtS9ts) channel at YouTube.
You should know this old line, “Question: What was the acoustic guitar called before the electric guitar? Answer: the guitar.” Now, here’s a new one: “Question: What was the guitar pedal called after Emily Hopkins? Answer: the pedal.”
Emily Hopkins’ videos are always a treat. She regularly puts her massive harp through guitar pedals, transforming both in the process. We hear the harp as it is rarely heard, and we hear the pedals put to use that is unusual for them, as well. In this video, Hopkins plays the same exact phrase through no fewer than 50 guitar pedals. Sometimes we just hear the phrase, rendered through echo, or delay, or crushed nearly beyond recognition; others we hear it on repeat as the pedal is itself manipulated — or, in a manner of speaking, played. The result is a sparkly rainbow of electronic possibility.
Video originally posted at [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU_OdU9NDtc).
Another post in acknowledgement of the small bits of music that pop up on Instagram over the course of the week and are enchanting on loop. Instagram doesn’t particularly lend itself to [the playlist treatment](https://disquiet.com/2021/04/23/a-certain-type-of-ambient-youtube-performance/) I do on YouTube.
▰ This is [Sarah Belle Reid](https://www.instagram.com/p/CNpsLd0hdT4/), based in Los Angeles, California, excerpted from a livestream concert, combining her flugelhorn with software and hardware synthesis:
▰ This is exactly the sort of lovingly sodden, deeply nostalgia-laden synthesis listeners of [Orbital Patterns’](https://www.instagram.com/p/COF2EkHhCrY/) music have come to expect. He’s based in Rochester Hills, Michigan, and is one of my favorite modular synthesizer wizards:
▰ This is [Todd Kleppinger](https://www.instagram.com/p/COD5T7EJesz/), of Fairfax, Virginia, producing delightful melodic, rhythmic patterning on the [Orca](https://100r.co/site/orca.html) software, running on a [Monome Norns Shield](https://monome.org/docs/norns/shield/) and stimulating an [Elektron Digitakt](https://www.elektron.se/products/digitakt/).
▰ This is Mark Lentczner (aka [Electric Kitchen](https://www.instagram.com/p/CN09j8jA-Tp/), of Mountain View, California) producing industrial joy with a combination of the [Recursive Machine](http://www.thehumancomparator.net/rm.html) and the Beebo from [Poly Effects](https://www.polyeffects.com/).
▰ Listening to UK-based [Ryan Lerigo-Jones](https://www.instagram.com/p/CODM0KTJv_w/) drum along with synth collaborators is one of my fave new pleasures:
I do this manually each week, collating tweets I made at [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet/), my public notebook. Some tweets pop up (in expanded form) on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.
▰ Someone rides a skateboard down the block weekday mornings around 7:15am. It’s such a beautiful sound, almost always entirely alone in the serene quiet, the cars still dormant. I imagine its rider, heading likely to a job, and I enjoy the clatter of wheels on pavement equally.
▰ Why didn’t anyone tell me the new Godzilla vs. King Kong movie features a young deaf actor whose character, acting as a human seismometer, recognizes the vibrations of Godzilla arriving long before the actual alarms go off?
▰ There are things I wish would happen, and among those is a subset are things I kinda expect to happen, and one is that online crosswords will let us enter words in two colors: black if we’re certain, and a second if we’re uncertain.
▰ Good time to play Prince’s [“Baltimore”](https://youtu.be/hMLI7LFf84w):
▰ Recent but Tired: Taking comfort that the majority of concerts I attend are usually below 25% attendance.
Upcoming(ish)* Wired: Being part of as many of those 25% audiences as possible.
*Pending, you know, a whole lotta tier-based variables
▰ TFW you think spellcheck is broken or paused because nothing in the document is underlined but it’s simply because nothing in the doc is misspelled
▰ Q: What’s the plan for the upcoming 500th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project?
A: I’m not sure one project can properly note the collaborative effort represented by the 500th project. So, we’ll probably celebrate the 500th project for the next 500 weeks until we hit 1,000.
