Disquiet – Page 595 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

This Week in Sound: Fungus + Echolocation + Deepfakes + …

A lightly annotated clipping service

June 9, 2019June 9, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

**Earworm-Ready:** In an effort to find consumer-grade utility for synthetic biology, researchers developed [headphones grown from fungus](https://www.fastcompany.com/90354704/the-worlds-most-beautiful-headphones-are-here-and-theyre-made-of-fungus), as well as “bacteria and biosynthetic spider silk.” (Via Subtopes)

**Trainspotting 2.0:** Learn about the “oto-tetsu” scene in Japan, where [musicians use railway sounds to create music](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2019/05/28/music/aboard-art-sampling-japans-railways). “At the heart of what oto-tetsu creators do is love. The love of trains, the love of making tracks about trains. They are well-known only by each other; they’re not fame-seeking because it’s a scene that feeds itself.” (Thanks, Paul Socolow)

**Pod People:** Apple out of the blue released [a new iPod](https://www.macstories.net/news/apple-launches-updated-ipod-touch-with-a10-chip-larger-256gb-storage-option/), the seventh generation of the device. The sixth generation came out way back in 2015. In related news, Apple is rumored to be retiring iTunes at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California, this week.

**Practical Magic:** In a kind of low-rent version of *The Matrix*, much of the ingenuity attributed to virtual assistants [“relies on massive data sets built by subcontracted human workers earning low wages.”](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/28/a-white-collar-sweatshop-google-assistant-contractors-allege-wage-theft)

**3D Eavesdropping:** New technology is combining echolocation and artificial intelligence [“to decipher what the person is doing from the reflected sound alone.”](https://www.wired.com/story/this-ai-uses-echolocation-to-identify-what-youre-doing/)

**Political Slur:** Deepfakes are an emerging technology of deception, but you don’t need to stick someone’s head on someone else’s body to create disinformation. The Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has criticized Facebook for not removing a doctored video that showed her [“appearing to slur her words and stammer and has been viewed and shared on social media millions of times.”](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-29/pelosi-rebukes-facebook-for-enabling-lie-with-doctored-video)

**Bose Silence:** When physicists worked in a lab to confirm Stephen Hawking’s black hole theory, they used “the point of no return” for sound rather than light, called [the Bose-Einstein condensate](https://gizmodo.com/laboratory-black-hole-shows-stephen-hawking-was-right-1835097982).

**Ear Buds:** There’s a parody of fine dining in the new Netflix film from Ali Wong and Randall Park and directed by Nahnatchka Khan, *Always Be My Maybe* (much of which is set in my longtime San Francisco neighborhood, the Richmond District). In a scene shot downtown, transforming the playful geometry of Daniel Libeskind’s Contemporary Jewish Museum into a hushed, haughty restaurant, a character (whom I won’t identify so as not to spoil a separate joke) asks the waiter, “Do you have any dishes that play with time, the concept of time?” The waiter replies: “It comes with headphones so you can hear the sound of the exact animal you are about to consume.”

**Thinking About Frameworks:** I didn’t want to waste time at the start of this issue noting how long it’s been since I last sent one out. It takes awhile to get an issue together, all the more so when I miss a week, when life and work intervene. The sonic data runneth over. I love running this newsletter. I’ve run various email newsletters since 1994. The This Week in Sound email, to me, provides a framework. I think a lot about frameworks. There are various frameworks that help me process things, get things done, move ideas forward, close the loop on ideas.

Disquiet.com, which I’ve run since 1996, is a framework in the form of a long-running blog (I think it might even be OK, at this point, to refer to it as a very long-running blog, to the extent that its launch predates the word blog by several years). The Disquiet Junto music community, now in its 8th year, is a framework for collaborating with musicians and working out ideas about sound, music, and networked creativity in real time. The course I teach each spring, “Sounds of Brands,” at a local art college here in San Francisco is a framework for focusing specifically on that topic and working through the ideas with students, who, thanks to being from all over the world, bring their own diverse experiences and perspectives to the discussion. (It’s the only place I have experienced a student from Kazakhstan talk about the stultifying silence of Eastern Bloc educational institutions. The only place I have witnessed a chance conversation between students from Thailand and Saudi Arabia about the whistles they attach to their pet birds. The only place I’ve heard a student, whose family lives in a vast desert, talk about how compounds employ rifles to signal distant neighbors regarding everything from “There’s an emergency!” to “The party has started!”)

Writing freelance articles is a framework. Working for clients is a framework. Writing books is a framework. Fiction I’ve been working at provides a framework. In any case, This Week in Sound is a framework I value a lot, despite the gaps in when I manage to send it out.

*This was first published in the June 2, 2019, issue of the free weekly email newsletter [This Week in Sound](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet/).*

Disquiet Junto Project 0388: Random Less

The Assignment: Make a single piece of music with very few tools, all selected at random.

June 6, 2019June 7, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the [Disquiet Junto group](https://disquiet.com/junto/), 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 Monday, June 10, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, June 6, 2019.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0388) for the duration of the project.

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

**Disquiet Junto Project 0388: Random Less**

The Assignment: Make a single piece of music with very few tools, all selected at random.

Step 1: For this project you’ll be using just a few instruments, optimally three, to create an original piece of music.

Step 2: Select three instruments available to you at random. (Alternately, you can roll a die and add one to determine the number of instruments, yielding a result between two and seven.)

Step 3: Create a piece of music employing only the instruments determined in Step 2.

**Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:**

Step 1: Include “disquiet0388” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0388” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0388-random-less/

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

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #disquietjunto 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 Monday, June 10, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, June 6, 2019.

Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0388” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, post one finished track with the project tag, and 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: Consider setting 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 388th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Random Less / The Assignment: Make a single piece of music with very few tools, all selected at random — at:

https://disquiet.com/0388/

Interviewed for Wired

On generative apps and their discontents

May 31, 2019June 1, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

I was interviewed for [this Wired article](https://www.wired.com/story/generative-music-apps/) by Arielle Pardes, published this morning, about a new wave of generative music apps, among them Endel and Mubert:

>Marc Weidenbaum, a writer and cultural critic who studies ambient music, sees this adaptive quality reshaping the future of music itself. “The idea of a recording as a fixed thing should’ve gone away,” he says. With a generative music app, there is potential not just to listen to something organic and ever-changing, but something that strives to emulate your desired mind state exactly.
>
>Weidenbaum says we may be seeing a surge in generative music because our phones are capable of more computational power. But another reason might be that the genre offers a way for companies, advertisers, and game-makers to skirt licensing issues when adding music to their products.
>
>”That’s a little cynical,” he says, but “I think it has a lot to do with cost savings, control, optimization, and a veneer of personalization.” For the rest of us, these apps offer a pleasing surrender to the algorithms–ones that shape the world to our desires and ask nothing in return.

Now, to be clear, I love generative music. I was an early and strong supporter of the RJDJ app, which later evolved, in a manner of speaking, into the Hear app mentioned in the article. (RJDJ creative director Robert M. Thomas has been a frequent participant in and friend of the Disquiet Junto music community.) I’ve also avidly tracked and used Bloom, among other apps created by collaborators Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers. A central theme in my book about Aphex Twin’s album *Selected Ambient Works Volume II* is the wind chime, a pre-electronic tool for generative expression.

The distinction I’m drawing is between art and commerce. Art projects of course have financial restraints of their own, but it is modern commerical products and services that undergo rigorous cost-benefit analysis as part of their ongoing development and maintenance. This distinction is what led to my self-described cynical (perhaps a better word is skeptical) view of certain economically incentivized flourshings of generative music.

Much as Uber and Lyft are simultaneously employing countless drivers and pursuing driverless transportation, some activities in generative music seem less like artistic ventures and more like attempts to remove the need for human participation. If the clear primary goal is simply to cut costs through automation, that’s when I think the venture should be viewed (and, to mix the imminent metaphor, heard) through a keen, critical lens.

As [a friend](https://soundcloud.com/missushardy) recently reminded me, ambient music has its foundation in the writings on cybernetics by Norbert Wiener, a mathematician and philosopher who inspired Brian Eno, the genre’s originator. A key text is Wiener’s 1948 book, *Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine*, which developed a following in management theory. You might even say that the interest by corporations in generative sound in 2019 is the 70-year-old cybernetics concept coming full circle. Then again, in his later book, *God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion* (1964), Wiener employed the image of the golem, a pre-Frankenstein symbol of artificial life gone awry. Which is to say, skepticism isn’t unprecedented.

Read the full piece at [wired.com](https://www.wired.com/story/generative-music-apps/).

Disquiet Junto Project 0387: Everything & More

The Assignment: Make a single piece of music using every single instrument that you have at your disposal.

May 30, 2019June 1, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0387) for the duration of the project.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, June 3, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, May 30, 2019.

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

**Disquiet Junto Project 0387: Everything & More**

The Assignment: Make a single piece of music using every single instrument that you have at your disposal.

There is only one step to this project:

Step 1: Make a single piece of music using every single instrument that you have at your disposal.

**Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:**

Step 1: Include “disquiet0387” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0387” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0387-everything-and-more/

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

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #disquietjunto 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 Monday, June 3, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, May 30, 2019.

Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0387” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

**For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:**

More on this 387th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Everything & More / The Assignment: Make a single piece of music using every single instrument that you have at your disposal — at:

https://disquiet.com/0387/

Speaking Privately to the Algorithm

What happens when we assume that always stating our opinion is in anyone's best interest

May 25, 2019May 25, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

I spend a good amount of time watching YouTube videos by musicians. Not just of them, but generally by them: studio-journal videos that musicians make to show how they work. Not just recordings of their music, but [videos of the process](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MJxihgJkCPEnehAPvjoF71-), of the effort, required.

And I marvel at (which is to say, more directly: am dismayed by) instances when a positively received video on YouTube also receives a small handful of dislikes. By this I specifically mean mute negative gestures, devoid of any comment, just a downward-facing thumb. Say what you will about haters, at least when they comment they leave some fingerprint on their dissenting opinion. There’s a uniquely buzz-killing pall cast by the unqualified, unidentified, anonymous thumbs down.

Certainly everything will have its detractors, but I wonder if something else might be going on here. (Now, by “popular” I don’t mean the given video has racked up hundreds of thousands of views. I just mean maybe a couple dozen accounts have given it a thumbs up, and the video is innocuous, not to say inconsequential, just a musician doing their thing.)

I wonder if the issue is that the YouTube interface should provide an opportunity for the watcher/user to say, privately to the algorithm, “I’m not interested in this.” That suggestion is in contrast to requiring, as YouTube currently does, that you register your disinterest publicly.

Right now it’s like the waiter asks how your meal was, and your only option is to stand up and announce it to your fellow diners. And the issue may not be the food; it may not be that you didn’t like the food. The issue may be that it just wasn’t your sort of food, or you would have liked this for lunch but it didn’t satisfy your dinner appetite.

As I’ve thought about this user-interface conundrum, I’ve become entranced by the concept of speaking “privately to the algorithm.” Perhaps that should be capitalized: “I’m speaking, privately, to the Algorithm.”

In that formulation, it’s like a confession, not a religious confession toward addressing your personal spiritual and all-too-human shortcomings, but a confession in the hopes of tailoring your reality. That is, toward addressing the shortcomings you perceive in (digital) reality.

And this is where the constant request for feedback can have (big surprise) unintended consequences. The tools have trained us to let them know what we think, because it’s in our best interest. But is it in anyone else’s interest that you found the given musician’s music uninteresting? While making your world better, have you yucked someone else’s yum? What is the good in that? What does it mean when acting to address the shortcomings you perceive in your digital reality has the direct effect (not merely a side effect, but a direct and immediate one) of negatively impacting the digital reality of other people?

Note the following three different scenarios on YouTube and how the user’s feedback is constrained, even directed, by the interface.

Below is a screenshot of the egregious situation I’m currently describing. If you’re on the page for a video, you have only the options to ignore, comment, or give it a thumbs up or thumb down, and of course to “Report” it, but that’s a different situation entirely:

Contrast that with the option you have for videos that YouTube serves up to your account based on what you’ve viewed before. Note that here, there is a plainly stated means to say “Not interested”:

And note that this isn’t merely a matter of whether you arrive at the video through your own actions or through the recommendations of YouTube. For example, if you subscribe to channels on YouTube, you can still, from the Subscriptions page, elect to Hide something:

Now, perhaps if you select “Hide” that is all that happens. Perhaps it just takes the video out of view. Perhaps YouTube doesn’t register your action as a means to adjust how its algorithm triangulates your viewing taste. But that seems unlikely, doesn’t it? We use these interfaces today with the impression that they will inform our future use of a given tool. Which is why when faced with no “Not interested” or “Hide” equivalent on a page, the user is, if not justified in registering their disinterest, forgiven a little for registering their dissatisfaction.

The issue is that the user’s dissatisfaction isn’t necessarily with the video. It is, indirectly and yet significantly, with YouTube.