-
about
Marc Weidenbaum founded the website Disquiet.com in 1996 at the intersection of sound, art, and technology, and since 2012 has moderated the Disquiet Junto, an active online community of weekly music/sonic projects. He has written for Nature, Boing Boing, The Wire, Pitchfork, and NewMusicBox, among other periodicals. He is the author of the 33 1⁄3 book on Aphex Twin’s classic album Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Read more about his sonic consultancy, teaching, sound art, and work in film, comics, and other media
Subscribe
Current Activities
Upcoming
• July 28, 2021: This day marks the start of the 500th consecutive weekly project in the Disquiet Junto music community.
• December 13, 2021: This day marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of Disquiet.com.
• January 6, 2021: This day marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community.Recent
• There are entries on the Disquiet Junto in the forthcoming book The Music Production Cookbook: Ready-made Recipes for the Classroom (Oxford University Press), edited by Adam Patrick Bell. Ethan Hein wrote one, and I did, too.
• A chapter on the Disquiet Junto ("The Disquiet Junto as an Online Community of Practice," by Ethan Hein) appears in the book The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning (Oxford University Press), edited by Stephanie Horsley, Janice Waldron, and Kari Veblen. (Details at oup.com.)Ongoing
• The Disquiet Junto series of weekly communal music projects explore constraints as a springboard for creativity and productivity. There is a new project each Thursday afternoon (California time), and it is due the following Monday at 11:59pm: disquiet.com/junto.• My book on Aphex Twin's landmark 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, was published as part of the 33 1/3 series, an imprint of Bloomsbury. It has been translated into Japanese (2019) and Spanish (2018).
Most Recent Posts
disquiet junto
Background
Since January 2012, the Disquiet Junto has been an ongoing weekly collaborative music-making community that employs creative constraints as a springboard for creativity. Subscribe to the announcement list (each Thursday), listen to tracks by participants from around the world, read the FAQ, and join in.Recent Projects
• 0484 / A Movable Heart / The Assignment: Transplant the sounds of Chris Kallmyer's wind chimes to a new location.
• 0483 / Type Set / The Assignment: Use a recording of yourself typing something as the underlying rhythmic track for a piece of music.
• 0482 / Exactly That Gap / The Assignment: Make a musical haiku following instructions from Marcus Fischer.
• 0481 / Capsule Time / The Assignment: Record a time capsule for yourself in the future.
• 0480 / Ongsay Aftcray / The Assignment: Record a piece of music by employing Pig Latin as a technique.Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 484 consecutive weeks to date.Tags
app audio-games brands of sounds Buddha Machine chiptune classical comics copyleft current activities field-recording film free free download gadget generative i-hop IFTTTgram installation ios ipad iphone ipod ipod touch junto live-performance live performance modular netlabel noise recommended stream remix saw2for33third science-fiction score site-maintenance software sound-art sounds-of-brands studio journal this week in sound turntablism TV video video-games voiceMost Recent Comments
- Marc Weidenbaum on Q: Why Blog? A: Blogs Are Great.: “Thanks on both counts, Jeremy. ”
- Jeremy Cherfas on Q: Why Blog? A: Blogs Are Great.: “An excellent piece, to which I will refer anyone who asks. I know you don’t want to get into plumbing… ”
- Jason Richardson on Q: Why Blog? A: Blogs Are Great.: “I like this and hope your encouragement of bloggers will become as increasingly entertaining going forward. Seriously, you should interview… ”
- Marc Weidenbaum on This Must Be the Place: “PS: I’ve gone ahead and done what Ray and others have suggested. I compiled much of the Twitter thread into… ”
- Marc Weidenbaum on This Must Be the Place: “Thank you. I love your blog (circlingcrows.blogspot.com), for those reading along). The post are always so detailed and considered. ”
tag: IFTTTgram
Ballroom
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
Industrial Music
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
Think I found the perfect studio space for that dub techno project I’ve always wanted to do.
Physical Algorithm
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
The pandemic-period grocery deliveries are labeled with single words to ease the sorting of multiple-bag orders. Sometimes these words seem a little too close for comfort, the Algorithm surfacing in the physical world.
Weekend Plans
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
“Skin conductivity, what’s your function? Hookin’ up modules like VCAs and gates.” These are the AllFlesh buttons, for use with modular synthesizers and other devices that accept the sort of control voltage that makes Eurorack equipment, such as pictured here, function. Usually one would patch a cable into one of those jacks from another device that would send it directions, but with AllFlesh the human body, specifically the finger, completes the circuit and thus any input jack can, in effect, become a button. (Details at landscape.fm/allflesh.)
Reading Waveforms
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
I spent a lot of time over the weekend editing audio and I never got sick of looking at waveforms. If anything, these guides for my work became distractions from my work. This particular image was barely a blip in a lengthy expanse of signal and noise. It signified a near-silence that I felt was necessary to silence further.
There were other silences, as well, silences of differing sorts, clusters of which came to represent shared characteristics, subsets, a typology of silences. If individually the beautiful images distracted me, the patterns they suggested in combination helped me get my work done, served as guideposts: an atlas of the quiet. I could tell which silence, for example, was room silence and which was still-mumbling human silence. I noticed that “um”s looked like goldfish, and that when someone said the same word twice, the second time somehow could overlap the first, as if for an instant they were saying two words at once — well, one word, the end and the start of it simultaneously, a snake eating its own tail. If words were repeated as a verbal tick, I could sometimes tell from looking at them which was right. Not which was right objectively, but which was right in the context of the words around it.
The silences were especially interesting. There’d be a silence between words, and I’d cut it in half, and it’d still feel longer than half the original length. I’d cut that in half, and it continued to feel long. Trim and trim, and still I had to cut hard to get it right. It’s as if the measure of silence between words isn’t about length of time at all. It’s about a particular threshold, under which is natural speech, and beyond which is noticeable hesitation. And in the waveform I could see the hesitation. And in the editing tool, I could excise it. And the most beautiful waveforms — some spare, elegant curves, others little squashed and distended curlicues — were invariably the ones representing audio that never made the final cut.