What’s “This Week in Sound”?

This Week in Sound is newsletter for fellow listeners interested in the role sound plays in culture, technology, politics, science, ecology, storytelling, warfare, art, society, and anywhere else it might resonate. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and archive. Never miss an update.

Who Publishes This Week in Sound?

My name is Marc Weidenbaum. I founded the website Disquiet.com in 1996 at the intersection of sound, art, and technology, and since 2012 I've moderated the Disquiet Junto, an active online community of weekly music/sonic projects that explore constraints as a springboard for creativity and productivity. Its activities have been covered by The Wire, Buzzfeed, CDM, and Bloomberg Businessweek, as well as in books published by Knopf and Oxford University Press.

My sonic consultancy has ranged from mobile GPS apps to coffee-shop sound design, comics editing for Red Bull Music Academy, and music supervision for two films (the documentary The Children Next Door, scored by Taylor Deupree, and the science fiction short Youth, scored by Marcus Fischer).

A former editor of Tower Records’ music magazines (Pulse!, on which I was a senior editor; Classical Pulse!, which I co-founded; and epulse, the weekly email newsletter that I founded in 1994 and which ran for a decade), I'm the author of the 33⅓ book on Aphex Twin’s classic album Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Bloomsbury, 2014, later translated into Spanish and Japanese), and I've written for Nature, Boing Boing, The Wire, Pitchfork, Downbeat, NewMusicBox, Art Practical, Hilobrow, and The Atlantic online, among other periodicals.

My sound art has been exhibited at galleries in Dubai, Los Angeles, and Manhattan, as well as at the San Jose Museum of Art. For many years I taught the “Sounds of Brands” course, on the role of sound in the media landscape, at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

Straight to Your Inbox

The beauty of a newsletter, as a medium, is that it comes directly to your inbox, so you don’t have to worry about missing anything. In other words, it comes to you rather than you having to go to it. As mentioned above, I started running my first email newsletter back in 1994, when I was an editor at the magazines published by Tower Records. It’s a great format.

What’s This Cost?

Nothing — though, of course, certainly feel free to pay a small amount to support the effort More importantly, I’d appreciate any examples of sound you come across. Thanks!

Subscribe to This Week in Sound

A newsletter for fellow listeners interested in the role sound plays in culture, technology, politics, science, ecology, storytelling, warfare, art, and society.

People

Marc Weidenbaum founded Disquiet.com in 1996 and moderates the Disquiet Junto music community. He’s written for Nature, Boing Boing, The Wire, Pitchfork, and NewMusicBox, and he wrote the 33 1⁄3 book on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II.