Join a Cellular Chorus

At the invitation of Patricia Wolf

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Chances are you have more than one internet-accessible device in your home. Gather them together, and pull up the following webpage on each: [cellularchorus.com](https://www.cellularchorus.com/).

Every time you invoke the Cellular Chorus page, a random audio file will be set as the browser’s default. (There are currently 64 different audio files in all.) Then let them play, all of them at once. Move the devices around the room. Don’t let any single device take prominence. Adjust the volume accordingly. Use the pulldown menu or the forward/back buttons to alternate between tracks. Note how the same file will sound different on your rattly old tablet than it does on your brand new laptop, how your humble kitchen speaker can’t hold a candle to your bleeding-edge smartphone.

Now dim the lights. Each instance of sound comes with its own shade of gradated color, like a little handheld Olafur Eliasson installation. Let them illuminate the room. Also note how the sounds work together. This is due to the planning and intent of Patricia Wolf, the Portland, Oregon-based musician who came up with Cellular Chorus, which she describes as “a work of spatialized aleatoric music using smartphones to bring people physically closer to have an interactive and collective experience with light and sound.” (The website was designed and developed by Jaron Heard.)

“The sounds I made are meant to harmonize,” she notes on the site’s info page. “There is no right or wrong way to play them.” Many of the tracks are drones, some electronic in origin (like number 5), others employing the human voice (12). Some (like number 9 and 34) are percussive.

In an email to me, Wolf explained a bit more about the project’s origin, about how the cold Northwest winter inspired her to employ a tool of online social activity, the smartphone (hence the name of the piece), to bring people together in person.

So now use one of your devices to get in touch with some friends. Have them over, and get them all to use [cellularchorus.com](https://www.cellularchorus.com/) at once, together.

More from Patricia Wolf at [instagram.com/patriciawolf_music](https://www.instagram.com/patriciawolf_music/), where [recent videos](https://www.instagram.com/p/B88aUTlBWRL/) have highlighted footage of the Cellular Chorus in action, and at [soundcloud.com/patriciawolf_music](https://soundcloud.com/patriciawolf_music). More from Jaron Heard at [jaronheard.com](http://jaronheard.com/).

Where Industrial and Ambient Meet

And ambient takes control

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There are spaces where industrial music and ambient meet. One such space exists where the drone of archaic, mechanized activity joins up with a concern less for the routinization of modern life, and more for the machinery itself. It’s less about, perhaps, the metronomic pulse of life, and instead more about the underlying hum of activity. Beats go by the wayside as an aesthetic affection for rust, for the texture of a grinding gear, for the serrated whir of equipment takes control. This is the industrial ambient of the first side of *Session One*, the album a pair of lengthy tracks (17 and nearly 13 minutes each) by Ariana van Gelder and Ars Troitski. Presumably *Session One* isn’t a split single — that, instead, the two musicians are acting in tandem, or at least trading files toward a singular, collaborative whole. The first side is a rich, slowly evolving soundfield, through which various airborne irritants make their conflicting paths, leading to a whorl of action in what might seems, on first listen, to be a portrait of stasis. The flip side (neither has a name, save “side a” and “side b”) is where a more familiar rendering of industrial rears its gearhead. After a slow build, it is all heavy klang, though even here the klang is still more about volume and power than about tempo. Gorgeous stuff.

Album originally posted at [pomusic.bandcamp.com](https://pomusic.bandcamp.com/album/session-one). P.O. is a record label based in Moscow, Russia. More from Ariana van Gelder at
[arianavangelder.com](https://arianavangelder.com/) (I didn’t locate a link for Ars Troitski).

Listened to While Listening

The annals of music publicity

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I receive three PR emails for music recordings. Which of these would I be least likely to check out?

1. A link to an audio stream.

2. A downloadable press kit with audio files.

3. A link that first alerts me that my email and IP address will be saved, processed, and forwarded to the “product owner.”

Understand that there are days when I get hundreds of such emails.

For the record, it’s #3: I see no need to grant approval for email and IP address alignment and tracking simply to listen to an advance recording. (Even if it is one of my favorite musicians — and experience has shown that in such rare cases, an email request from me will allow me to bypass the digital protections because, ultimately, the publicist is glad to have found someone interested.)

Once upon a time, bushels of CDs arrived, at great expense, the cost put on the artist, onerously and not always transparently. Now, today, when sending a digital file costs virtually nothing, there is, in some PR corners, a need perceived to track the personal information of the listener. Or, in the best of circumstances, an anonymized data cluster showing generalized habits.

I suppose that this way the PR agency can report data back to the artist, but the data doesn’t register the varied interest of people who simply opt out because such tracking is just an even more invasive branch of DRM (digital rights management, the thing you don’t have to concern yourself with if you download music from Bandcamp or SoundCloud).

The resulting data doesn’t even matter because PR doesn’t exist to tell artists whether or not (anonymous?) individuals are listening to the work. The PR exists to help the musicians get the word out. Anything to the contrary is specious at best, and counterproductive at worst. One needn’t be listened to while listening.

If as a recipient of such PR requests, you refuse such tracking, you get a word sent back the other direction: These practices are invasive and unnecessary. I’d rather wait until the music is out and be, heaven forbid, “late.” And the fact is, there’s plenty (vastly more) to listen to that isn’t secreted behind a veil of invasive protection. That’s where I’ll spend my listening time.

This Week in Sound: Bracelet of Silence + …

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is lightly adapted from an edition first published in the February 17, 2020, 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.

➕ **”I know the microphone is constantly on,” said one computer scientist to the other.** They are spouses, and the microphone in question was in their home. So while much of society routinely accepts domestic surveillance as the price of convenience, Ben Zhao and Heather Zheng set out to find a solution, and in the process developed a “bracelet of silence” (much tidier than the old Get Smart cone), though still somewhat clunky, like the severed arm of a robot octopus. “[T]he bracelet has 24 speakers that emit ultrasonic signals when the wearer turns it on. The sound is imperceptible to most ears, with the possible exception of young people and dogs, but [nearby microphones will detect the high-frequency sound instead of other noises](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/technology/alexa-jamming-bracelet-privacy-armor.html).”

➕ **”A new kind of red light is going viral — one that stays red as long as drivers keep honking their horns.”** If you follow the noise-pollution beat, you know that no English-language reporting amasses more coverage than that originating in India. Mumbai has taken a highly tactical approach to the problem: “The police hooked a decibel meter to the signal and said [if the decibel level went over 85, the red light would get longer](https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a30874745/red-light-honk-noise-pollution/).” (Factoid side note: “Mumbai and Manhattan don’t even crack the top five noisiest cities, according to the World Hearing Index: ‘Guangzhou, China, ranked as having the worst levels of noise pollution in the world, followed by Cairo, Paris, Beijing and Delhi.'”)

➕ **”Square’s acquisition of Dessa comes after the financial tech company snatched up Eloquent Labs, a conversational AI services business** founded by two leading natural language processing researchers.” AI startups are sometimes described as technologies in search of solutions. The company Dessa, born DeepLearni.ng, [specializes in deepfakes, both visual and audio](https://venturebeat.com/2020/02/07/square-acquires-deepfakes-research-firm-dessa-labs-for-an-undisclosed-sum/), and has been acquired by Square, the financial technology company led by Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey.

➕ **”Google has started adding an incredibly error-prone automatic punctuation feature to its voice typing** input method that can’t be turned off, and it’s driving. People. Nuts.” If you’ve ever tried to insert punctuation with voice technology, you know the drill. Google has tried out a solution, but it’s. Causing. [More problems. Than perhaps were. Expected.](https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/02/10/google-voice-typing-automatic-punctuation/)

➕ **”For X-Files fans and nerdy boys n’ girls who’ve crushed on Anderson for decades, it might all be too much.”** [Gillian Anderson has recorded ASMR to promote her new comedy, *Sex Education*](https://boingboing.net/2020/02/09/gillian-anderson-does-asmr-to.html).

➕ **”A telescope in Canada has found a source of mysterious fast radio bursts that repeat every 16 days**, according to a new paper. It’s [the first regularly repeating fast radio burst known to science](https://gizmodo.com/telescope-detects-fast-radio-burst-hitting-earth-every-1841577264).” The signal’s origin is reportedly about half a billion light-years away from Earth, so you have time to re-read *Childhood’s End*.

➕ **”Your personality’s central organ is your voice”:** That’s one of numerous sentences that volunteers must repeat as part of [a Northeastern University project](https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/02/06/in-less-than-three-hours-you-can-donate-a-voice/) to “donate their voices” [for use by others who lack their own voices](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/09/centre-tackle-speech-loss-preserving-voices-artificial-intelligence): “For someone who has never been able to speak due to conditions like cerebral palsy or severe autism, VocaliD can blend a donated voice with the nonverbal sounds from a recipient to create a personalized voice that represents what that person would sound like if she could speak.”

➕ **When the Oscars were being broadcast last weekend, I didn’t pay a lot of attention.** I was cooking dinner. When someone called out the nominees for a given category, I’d take an educated guess as to who might win. That’s how the Oscar game is played. But when it came time for the best composer, I said I would guess not who I thought would win, but who I wanted to win: Hildur Guonadottir. Then her name was announced ([for *Joker*](https://variety.com/2020/film/awards/hildur-duonadottir-wins-academy-award-oscar-joker-original-score-1203498316/)), and I screeched loud enough to alarm the neighbors. She was the first woman to win in nearly a quarter century. Last year was a blockbuster for Guonadottir, who also did the music for the HBO series *Chernobyl*. (Forgive me for not including the accent marks, but at the moment the third letter in Guonadottir breaks my website’s content management system. I’ve been looking into it.)

The Music of Tentacle

By novelist (and musician) Rita Indiana

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Finally, this afternoon, finished reaching the short but dense and complex novel *Tentacle* by Rita Indiana (originally *La mucama de Omicunlé*), in a translation by Achy Obejas. I started it just over [a month ago](https://disquiet.com/2020/01/18/rita-indianas-doorbell/), and it’s the sort of book you read two chapters at a time, let them sink in, and then read some more.

Indiana is also a musician, and it shows on the page. There isn’t a heap of music in the book — there’s more contemporary art in this dystopian future — but when Indiana employs music in her story, as she does toward the novel’s end for a climactic party sequence, she locates a vibrant kinship between hybridized popular culture and the book’s more trenchant themes: Santeria, gender fluidity, and ecological collapse.