SoundCloud Single-Track Repeat

A welcome addition to the service's interface

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I’m not sure how long this has been part of the SoundCloud interface, and if it’s been a long time then I’m embarrassed to say I’m only just noticing it, but SoundCloud now has single-track repeat available. This track-repeat function is part of the “now-playing bar,” a tool that was introduced awhile back to show what is playing. The tool in general is helpful because after a track plays, the service automatically proceeds to another track, and the bar both shows the name of what’s playing and is clickable through to that track. If you’re playing a set, then after the track you’re playing it moves on to the next one in the set, but if you’re playing just a standalone track, then the tracks are drawn from the general SoundCloud database based on what the previous track was, the latter option providing a nice, low-key “discovery” apparatus. The “now-playing bar” emulates the “mini” view of audio players like VLC and iTunes, among others. The “single-track repeat” function appears courtesy of the fairly ubiquitous treatment of a circular arrow with a “1” in it.

The bar looks like this, if you’re not familiar with it. It resides in the lower-right corner of the page:

20141201-bar

And this is how the implementation appears on the SoundCloud webpage:

20141201-scpage

PS: A SoundCloud employee just let me know (today, December 1, 2014) that the single-track repeat has been active for “about two weeks.”

Disquiet Junto Project 0152: Comet 67P Cover

The Assignment: Record your own cover version of the "song" sung/emitted by the comet Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20141127-comet

Each Thursday in [the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com](https://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/) and [at Disquiet.com](https://disquiet.com/tag/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.

This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, November 27, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, December 1, 2014, as the SoundCloud deadline — though the encouraged optional video part of the assignment can wait a day or two longer, if necessary.

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 0152: Comet 67P Cover

The Assignment: Record your own cover version of the “song” sung/emitted by Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

The mysterious song of the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has been floated as a likely subject of a Disquiet Junto project since it first was announced by the European Space Agency. Thanks to everyone who suggested it, and I hope you find this approach to the material of interest.

Step 1: Record your own cover version of the “song” sung/emitted by the comet Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. You can hear the “original” here:

Step 2: Upload the finished track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.

Step 3: Listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Note: Per the track’s SoundCloud page: “To make the music audible to the human ear, the frequencies have been increased in this recording. This sonification of the RPC-Mag data was compiled by German composer Manuel Senfft (www.tagirijus.de). Read full details in ESA’s Rosetta blog: wp.me/p46DHN-Li.”

Length: Your finished work should be between roughly 1 and 3 minutes long.

Deadline: This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, November 27, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, December 1, 2014, as the deadline.

Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this assignment, and 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.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0152-comet67pcover” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track, please be sure to include this information:

More on this 152nd Disquiet Junto project — “Record your own cover version of the ‘song’ sung/emitted by the comet Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko”— at:

Disquiet Junto Project 0152: Comet 67P Cover

Copyright Notice: Original Data Credit: ESA/Rosetta/RPC/RPC-MAG. Sonification: TU Braunschweig/IGEP/Manuel Senfft, CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

https://disquiet.com/forums/

Credit for image associated with this project:

ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM ”“ CC BY-SA IGO 3.0.

This Week in Sound: Fahrenheit, Sonar Sabotage, Unsilent

An occasional clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

**Audiobook Culture:** The past weekend’s Sunday Book Review in the New York Times had an extensive section of audiobook coverage, including a review by Dave Itzkoff of Tim Robbins reading Ray Bradbury’s classic *Fahrenheit 451*. The conflict in Itzkoff’s piece seemed to be how the rise of the audiobook somehow is part of the gadget-ization of culture. And he credits Bradbury’s book for having posited the notion “that it was not a distant stretch from dismissing books as quaint and obsolete to banning them outright.” He writes, as well, “Fortunately, a few thousand years ago, we gave ourselves a sustainable and still reliable mechanism to provide shelter from these distractions, as well as the option to use it or not” — this “reliable mechanism” is, of course, the physical book. What he doesn’t mention in the review is how Bradbury’s book itself closes with an image of an even more ancient mechanism, in which people — not just people, but maintainers of culture — tell each other stories out loud. Full disclosure: I didn’t so much “read” Itzkoff’s review as listen to it via text-to-speech thanks to the function that is part of the New York Times’ Android app.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/books/review/fahrenheit-451-read-by-tim-robbins.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/books/review/fahrenheit-451-read-by-tim-robbins.html)

**Sonar Sabotage:** The headline says it all: “Study Shows Bats Jam Each Other’s Sonar to Snatch the Best Prey” (via Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner). Rishi Iyengar reports in Time magazine on research published in the journal Science that bats can block each other’s frequencies. Science’s Penny Sarchet likens it to “sonar sabotage.” It’s nature’s own EMP. The researchers are Aaron J. Corcoran and William E. Conner.

[http://time.com/3571704/study-bats-jam-sonar-hunting/](http://time.com/3571704/study-bats-jam-sonar-hunting/)

**Secular Robot Choirs:** Unsilent Night is the annual secular caroling event, in which communal processions of boomboxes layer ambient scintillates provided by the composer Phil Kline. The schedule for the 2014 holiday season is now appearing online, including Manhattan on December 13, San Francisco also on December 13, and Toronto on December 19, with more dates to be added soon. I’ve walked the route in San Francisco, in the Mission, for many years, listening as Kline’s music fills narrow alleys and disperses into the street, as slight variations in playback create false echoes backward and forward in time. If it’s coming to your town, don’t miss it. If it isn’t, consider taking a trip.

[http://unsilentnight.com/schedule.html](http://unsilentnight.com/schedule.html)

*This post first appeared in the Disquiet email newsletter: [tinyletter.com/disquiet](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet/letters/disquiet-2014-11-25-how-sound-frames-vision).*

Office/Bus Playlist

Also a test run toward a year-end top 10.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

What’s on repeat, in estimated relative order of frequency.

– Loscil’s [*Sea Island*](http://www.rdio.com/artist/loscil/album/Sea_Island/) (Kranky, 2014): Gentle beeps and light burrs, so much happening from so little. I was asked, on Twitter, what this sounded like when I was just three tracks in, and I replied: “like a rainy day after the Singularity.” Many days of listening later, it still does.

– Stafford Bawler, Obfusc, and Grigori’s [*Monument Valley (Original Soundtrack)*](http://goo.gl/x5qPVJ) (ustwogames, 2014): The score to the beautiful “casual” game is the perfect backdrop for a game that is itself only slightly more active than wallpaper.

– Gavin Bryars Ensemble’s [*The Sinking of the Titanic (Recorded Live on 2012 Centenary Tour)*](http://goo.gl/x3Jfyh) (GB Records, 2014): A live performance of a work that always felt like a studio concoction. Listen as a band continues its performance even after the ship goes down.

– Grouper’s [*Ruins*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJgXdSVFnJE) (Kranky, 2014): Haunting, at times willfully unintelligible, dirges.

– Michel Banabila and Oene van Geel’s [*Music for Viola and Electronics*](http://banabila.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-viola-and-electronics-2) (Tapu, 2014): A lovely duet for complementary toolsets, one analog, the other digital. It’s to the album’s credit that it isn’t always clear where one of those ends and the other begins. One track, “Dondergod,” gets a bit intense, in a European free improvisation sort of way, but the rest is elegant as could be.

*This post first appeared in the Disquiet email newsletter: [tinyletter.com/disquiet](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet/letters/disquiet-2014-11-25-how-sound-frames-vision).*