Two Pages from a Diary

On Taylor Deupree's ongoing sound journal

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

[Earlier this month](https://disquiet.com/2014/07/07/moving-past-free-downloads/) I mentioned that the Downstream section of this site would no longer be restricted to (legally) freely downloadable music, that the section — which makes note of a piece of music daily — would expand to include music that is streamable for free in full. I chose to make the announcment with an appreciative nod to Taylor Deupree’s ongoing [near-daily sound diary](https://disquiet.com/2014/07/07/moving-past-free-downloads/). This was both because it was a fine example of the sort of format and material that was being bypassed undesirably when the Downstream was restricted to free downloads, and also because an earlier such project by Deupree, [back in 2009](https://disquiet.com/2009/10/23/taylor-deuprees-sound-a-day-project-mp3s/), had served as a big source of inspiration at the time for the power of casual, mid-process artist posts to provide insight into a musician’s creative process.

To wit, today’s Downstream entry is another in Deupree’s ongoing series of sonic studio snapshots. Recorded and posted just yesterday, as the track title makes clear, [“July 28, 2014”](https://soundcloud.com/12k/july-28-2014-shapeshifter-001) is a thick, slow-motion tempest of cicada activity: whirring wing beats and crepuscular drone. In an extended liner note, Deupree digs into the technology he used to make the track, all in this case part of his return to modular synthesis. Even if you don’t follow instrumentation with an particular interest, what is of interest is just how new some of this tech was to Deupree at the time of the track’s recording. The newest item, an oscillator, had been played by him for under an hour.

Here’s another recent piece from Deupree’s sound journal ([“July 25, 2014”](https://soundcloud.com/12k/july-25-2014-a-slow-wander)): a creative use of a sequencer to play a piano-like series of notes, all heard here as if through melted glass:

Track posted originally at [soundcloud.com/12k](https://soundcloud.com/12k/sets/2014-studio-diary). More from Deupree at [taylordeupree.com](http://www.taylordeupree.com/) and the record label he runs, [12k.com](http://www.12k.com/index.php/site/artists/taylor_deupree/).

A Classical Timbre

An ambient frozen moment from Forelight

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Forelight’s “Speckled Light” bears the primary tag “ambient” in [its SoundCloud posting](https://soundcloud.com/forelight/speckled-light). The track embodies a certain ether vibe that certainly accounts for the association, but the track challenges the category as well. For all its shaft-of-sun frozen-moment epiphany-on-hold stasis beauty, it opens with a fast moving crescendo and comes to embody waves of underlying rhythmic current, the sort of motion that can cause disorientation, like being in the back seat of a cab after a long night. It’s a beautiful track. There are numerous “types” of tonality in ambient music, from dance-club lounge, to slick synth spiritualism, and the timbre here is more inherently symphonic: chordal, dense, rooted. And there’s the added mystery of about two minutes of hissy near silence that follow the five-and-a-half-minute audio.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/forelight](https://soundcloud.com/forelight/speckled-light).

Two by Robert Crouch

A live improvisation and a microsonic excursion

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Two pieces from one musician. “June 19” is a rich drone-informed excursion with a slowly morphing core. Robert Crouch, who committed “June 19” to tape, explains in a brief liner note that it is “completely improvised,” and that such an approach is unusual for him. He lists an array of modular synthesis components employed (“Mutable Instruments Braids, Intellijel Korgasmatron II, Makenoise Rene, Makenoise Echophone, Pittsburgh VILFO, Grendel Formant Filter, and Harvestman Tyme Sefari II”), but the music is the thing, in this case an often sultry piece of near stillness that sounds like what Herbie Hancock might have recorded in the early 1970s after spending a long afternoon in at a museum exhibit of a John Cage retrospective.

While “June 19” dates from a little over a month ago, an untitled piece from about a year back makes a good point of contrast. In breathy tempo and general hazy aspect, it is a parallel work, but slight adjustments in tone make is considerably less sultry and more ethereal — less Earth, more Heaven. Crouch has tagged it as “microsound” and it has a lower-case aesthetic certainly that’s fitting to that tag, though an underlying texture, like that of a ragged speaker cone, serves ultimately to ground the recording.

[“June 19”](https://soundcloud.com/robert-crouch/june-19) and the [untitled piece](https://soundcloud.com/robert-crouch/untitled) were originally posted at Crouch’s [soundcloud.com/robert-crouch](https://soundcloud.com/robert-crouch/) account. More from Crouch, who is based in Los Angeles, at [robertcrouch.com](http://www.robertcrouch.com/).

SOUND RESEARCH LOG: Is Voice the Uncanny Valley?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There may have been no better place than io9.com to keep track of Comic-Con, and this popped up in a summary of the Person of Interest panel. That’s the CBS series with an admirably long-game approach to narrative. It’s about an AI coming into sentience. That AI has become more of a character, and as the series enters season four it now is up against a competitive AI:

“Pressed for an answer about whether or not the AIs would get voices, Jonathan Nolan responded, ‘We’re working on the voice thing. But you may not like where it goes.’”

Full coverage at io9.com. It’s rarely advisable to read comments, but there are some strongly worded concerns in the resulting thread about lending voices to the AI, worth checking out if only as an expression of a point of view.

This entry cross-posted from the Disquiet linkblog project sound.tumblr.com.