Miéville’s Ear

"Listen the Birds," from his collection Three Moments of an Explosion

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I finished reading the excellent recent collection of China Miéville’s short stories. It’s an ice cream sundae made of climate dread and narrative ellipses. It’s titled Three Moments of an Explosion, and much of the work is new to the book. Among the new pieces is a series of scripts for movie trailers, each one treating the form of a trailer much as Miéville does the form of a short story, as a cloudy mason jar filled with ambiguous portent: You know something’s in there, but you don’t know quite what it is.

“Listen to Birds” is the third and final of those trailer-stories. In it a person identified as P records birds, and his interlocutor, D, prods him on the undertaking. Eventually the act of recording the birds seems to trigger something in the birds. There may be cross-species contagion. Simple technology may itself be reshaping reality, or at least P’s perception of reality. The result, fractured and deliberate, mundane and otherworldly, comes across like a muted tone poem by Shane Carruth or a willfully bad trip from Terrence Davies.

Here’s one snippet:

>P in a café, talking to a young woman. We hear the noise around them. P’s words sound distorted. They are not in synch with his lips.
>
>He says, “There’s a problem with playback.”

Here’s another:

>P walking down a crowded city street.
>
>Voice-over, P: “There’s a signal and I can’t tell if it’s going out or coming in.”
>
>Unseen by P, one person, then two people behind him raise their heads and open their mouths skyward as if shrieking. They make no sound.

The whole things lasts under a minute and 20 seconds. It’s a little surprising that a search on YouTube doesn’t yet bring up a fan film version of it.

*This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the February 17, 2016 (it went out a day late), edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound”email newsletter: [tinyletter.com/disquiet](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet).*

Sound Course, Week 2 of 15

A Brief History of Listening

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

IMG_20160210_145505

Each week I summarize the lecture and discussion from my course on the role of sound in the media landscape. In cases where I’ve already documented the discussion fairly thoroughly, as with week two, I’ll link to the full summary, and do a more concise one here.

The second week of sound class is the first full lecture, the first week of sound class having been a combination of an extensive overview of the syllabus and a compacted run through the use of music in the work of JJ Abrams, from the “un-theme” of Lost’s opening credits to the highly “originalist”(“ur-theme”) adherence to John Williams’ modus operandi in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

The second week’s lecture takes a long view. Titled A Brief History of Listening, it covers in less than three hours about 200,000 some odd years of human development, physiologically (the development of hearing and speech), technologically (from homing pigeons to moveable type to recorded sound), and culturally. The latter bit, the cultural facet, focuses on two subjects. The first discussion is about how Socrates’s anxiety regarding the move from oral to written culture can be mapped to contemporary concerns about transitioning into a digital world. The second discussion is on John Cage’s 4’33”, about the work’s conception and reception, about the idea of an anechoic chamber, and about the way Cage connects, in his book Silence, the ideas inherent in 4’33”beyond music to architecture and sculpture.

As I state occasionally in the early weeks of this course, I’m not trying to convert students to work in sound full time. I don’t need a single student ever to decide to go into sound design or sound engineering to feel that I’ve accomplished something. Quite the contrary, I’m trying to develop sleeper agents who will bring a creative conscientiousness in regard to sound to whatever field they choose to pursue — art direction, design, and so forth.

The big challenge early on in the course is shepherding the students’ off-site work, specifically in the sound journals they’re required to maintain, four days a week, for the full length of the course. For the first entries I ask that they simply list the sounds around them. Inevitably these come back not as sounds but as sources of sounds: door, not door creaking; fan, not fan whirring; baby, not baby cooing. Moving from source to sound, from sound to description, from description to meaning is where we’re headed. It can be painstaking, but learning about sound is like learning a language or achieving a significant improvement in an athletic pursuit. It’s all about dedication and persistence. It’s about practice.

Today’s class (week 3, more on which in next week’s This Week in Sound newsletter) narrowed the scope: last week was 200,000 years; this week was just about 100 years, as the subject was the role of sound in film and television. The timing of today’s class may have been fairly timely, because I was just approached by an organization to give a talk about the past and future of sound in film, and I’m now piecing together an approach for the talk. Here’s a first-draft summary:

>Eyes are forgiving, ears less so. Eyes want to be seduced. Ears are sensitive to incongruity, discontinuity, artifice. How can sound reinforce narrative? How can sound be narrative? How can sound design serve as score? We’ll explore the past and the technologically enabled promise of film sound.

And, yeah, when I say “promise” I’m using alliteration as a way to get out of saying “future.” More on this as it comes together.

*This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the February 17, 2016 (it went out a day late), edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound”email newsletter: [tinyletter.com/disquiet](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet).*

disquiet.com/ambientalist

A Spotify playlist of recent(ish) ambient(ish) music

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I’ve tried this before, on Spotify and on SoundCloud, and again I’m giving a go at putting together a regularly updated public playlist. This is resulting from three things: (1) my switch to Spotify after Rdio’s shutdown (and after a recognition that neither Google Play and Apple Music has a functioning social component), (2) my endlessly delayed plans to get a proper podcast together, and (3) my desire to investigate the (apparent) popularity of playlists (and of Spotify) by working in the form. (For all this Spotify activity, the vast majority of my listening is still SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and promotional copies I receive. One thing I’m repeatedly struck by is how little of the music I listen to on SoundCloud appears on Spotify — in fact, how few of the musicians I listen to on SoundCloud appear on Spotify.)

For me, context is everything. I don’t like listening without having access — not necessarily for immediate, but for eventual, consumption — to more of a sense of what I’m listening to, which generally means written context. I’m likely in the minority in this regard, or so the streaming services seem to believe. Then again, I listen to refrigerators hum for pleasure and get turned down for sound design projects because my RFP feedback begins “you really don’t need to add music.” Spotify provides little more information than Apple or Google. It’s a little frustrating that Spotify’s playlists don’t allow for unique cover art (as a podcast might have) or even liner notes, but I’ve done a low-rent hack by titling the podcast with a URL ([disquiet.com/ambientalist](https://disquiet.com/ambientalist)) that might invite individuals to click through and read more.

The first edition is 41 minutes and features tracks from Kid606, Nonkeen (a new trio including Nils Frahm), Taylor Deupree in a duet with Marcus Fischer, Lisa Gerrard (from her score to *Jane Got a Gun*, recorded with Marcello De Francisci), Scott Tuma (off *Eyrie*, which I thought I’d written about when it first came out, around the time I initiated an interview with him, but I can’t find any mention), Grouper, Marina Rosenfeld, DJ Krush, Lesley Flanigan, and Stephen Mathieu.

The playlist is at this inelegant URL, if you have a Spotify account:

https://open.spotify.com/user/dsqt/playlist/2W8PS8cf2aHe72vZDRdN8Y

I’m not sure how this is going to develop, whether I’ll switch out all the tracks, or just add over time so the thing gets entirely out of control, length-wise. I do know the current plan is to stick to current work. Everything here was released (or re-released) in 2015 or 2016, with the exception of those artists who have nothing that recent in the Spotify database. In those cases I’ve selected something from their most recent release that Spotify does provide access to.

What Sound Looks Like

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Photos don’t necessarily depict scale well, or context for that matter. This doorbell, set as it is inside a small brass frame (brass or some near equivalent disguising itself conspicuously as gold), which is then set inside a second, much larger frame of the same material, is one of two at the entrance to an otherwise modest, two-family home. It is also well over a foot tall. A duplicate doorbell, equally well tended to, burnished and cleaned, faces this one. Neither doorbell is labeled. It’s understood that each doorbell correlates with the door to which it is placed perpendicular. The visual overkill is, perhaps, an attempt to cover up some sizable hole in the wall. More likely it is, quite simply, an attempt at opulence, a bold declaration — bringing to mind one of those pricey designer, logo-emblazoned, leather cases that cost more than the tablet computer they contain. In our age of Internet-connected homes — of doorbells that double as security consultants, of thermostats that aspire to butler status, of audio-controlled centerpieces that consider themselves concierges on the cusp of sentience — this doorbell is the quartz watch of entryway technology. It’s a large expensive block with one technical function, and a simple function at that. It may not do much, but it brings with it some not insignificant authority. Simplicity is not austerity. The owner of this home may not have a state-of-the-art security camera out front, but it quite likely has serious security just inside that front door.

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

The Utterly Digital Joy of Hideyuki Kuromiya’s “Sinedance”

A generative act of play

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Listening to the blippy, partially random, utterly digital joy of Hideyuki Kuromiya’s “Sinedance”is a kind of puzzle. Trying to make sense of its internal play is a bit like watching the lights flicker on and off in a distant office building after night falls, and wondering what the patterns might mean: is it a shift in staff schedules, the arrival of a clean-up crew, an active emergency, the filter of a thick mist passing in the middle-ground? After a deliriously chaotic opening, the piece falls into place as a sequence of ever so slightly shifting tweaks on a melodic pattern, the pixelated melody varying as if the results are being plucked from a nanoscale bingo cage.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/kuromiya-hideyuki](https://soundcloud.com/kuromiya-hideyuki/sinedance-hb349-20160216). Kuromiya’s album *Tokyo Noisescape* came out last September. It’s at
[manyfeetunder.bandcamp.com](https://manyfeetunder.bandcamp.com/album/hideyuki-kuromiya-tokyo-noisescape)