"Extending the Musical Worlds of the Films"
Also: listening to clouds + necessitated subtitles + recommended music + more
This Week in Sound: "Extending the Musical Worlds of the Films"
November 15, 2022
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Modus Operandi
Listening to art ▰ Playing with audio ▰ Sounding out technology ▰ Composing in code ▰ Loitering in video games ▰ Rewinding the soundscape
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Introduction
In this issue:
▰ Immersive sound of Harry Potter
▰ TV subtitle causality
▰ Listening to clouds
▰ Recommended recent music
And those are just a few of the stories, observations, and projects This Week in Sound.
My name is Marc Weidenbaum. I live in San Francisco and at Disquiet.com. Thanks for reading TWiS and for passing this issue to fellow listeners interested in the role sound plays in culture, technology, politics, science, ecology, storytelling, warfare, art, society, and anywhere else it might wheeze.
Thanks for your support. Also appreciated: sound-related stories from your field of specialization. A reply to this newsletter is a good way to get in touch — or reply in a comment on Substack.
A friend asked how I can tell when the newsletter is going well. I mentioned how cool it’d be if I had an issue where every recommended This Week in Sound item came from a reader. That, as it turns out, is this issue (which apparently came close to maxing out Substack’s allowed length). Thanks, folks!
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Sound Ledger¹
Audio culture by the numbers
50: Percent of TV viewers using subtitles
55: Percent who find TV dialogue hard to hear
189: Number of noise complaints to Thailand’s Pollution Control Department this year from Bangkok, the capital (and noisiest city in the nation), out of a total of 718 (down from 766 last year)
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This Week in Sound
A lightly annotated clipping service
First, a quick thanks to Glenn Sogge, who first introduced me to that nifty SoundPrint app that I mentioned in Friday’s issue. (I’d accidentally neglected to mention him at the time.)
▰ CLIMATE MEDIATION: More from Karen Bakker (mentioned here in recent weeks), supporting her recent book, The Sounds of Life: “Digital technology is so often associated with our alienation from nature, but I wanted to explore how digital technology could potentially reconnect us, instead, and offer measured hope in a time of environmental crisis.” (Thanks, Jason Richardson!)
▰ MUFFLIATO!: I'm not a Potterite by any means, but I am certainly fascinated by the hold those stories have on people. An article (“‘A Magic Beyond All We Do Here’: Musical and Sonic Worldbuilding at Harry Potter Tourist Attractions”), by Daniel White, looks at four in-person spinoffs of the books (a concert series, a studio tour, the Universal Orlando tourist destination, and the Cursed Child theatrical play) for how they use “music and sound in distinct ways, drawing on or extending the musical worlds of the films, or creating worlds of their own.” It includes this interesting chart about different types of experiences — as I understand it, originally from The Experience Economy, by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)
▰ CLOUD ATLAS: This project looks unlikely, at the moment, to get funded, but it’s an admirable attempt to translate the beauty, the presence, of clouds for those lacking sight. The creator hopes for funds to “build a working prototype of a handheld device called a cloud scanner which reads clouds and converts the signal into sound which is then converted to a haptic signals which can be felt.” (Thanks, Daniel Weir!)
▰ CAPTION CRUNCH: “Television today is better read than watched,” writes Matt Schimkowitz: “Huge scores and explosive sound effects overpower dialogue, with mixers having their hands tied by streamer specs and artist demands. There is very little viewers can do to solve the problem except turn on the subtitles.” (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)
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Favorite Recent Listens
▰ There’s a new Christina Vantzou album out, No. 5, and as always with her music it is willfully less than the sum of its parts: substantial classical instrumentation, ethereal vocals, and textural electronics all coaxed and trimmed, winnowed and collated, to a sublime, minimal state. (Thanks to A Closer Listen for the alert.)
▰ There are worse ways to end one’s day than with Madeleine Cocolas’ “And Then I Watch It Fall Apart,” off her album Spectral. It’s a somber solo piano heard against a range of background noises that eventually transform into a sonic tumult.
▰ Music I spent quite a bit of time working to: the soundtrack by Hania Rani to the documentary film Venice: Infinitely Avant-Garde. There’s a strong Philip Glass influence, but also far more to it than that: shifting layers of precise arrangements, strong emphasis on the slightest touches. Absolutely beautiful.
▰ When Music for Animals, by Nils Frahm, came out, its three-hour running time seemed daunting — but I’ve listened to it repeatedly, and it’s easily one of my favorite albums of the year. Quiet music to be played loud, so you can track the details. Also just to be played in the background. It fills the room while I read. It’s come to fill the void for me that Thursday Afternoon by Brian Eno long did, because I’ve come to know Thursday Afternoon so well through repeated listens that I struggle to not pay attention to it.
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Public Scratch Pad
I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating little comments I’ve made on social media during the preceding week. What follows is a subset of where my mind wandered this past week on Mastodon (I’m taking a Twitter pause), where I hang out at post.lurk.org/@disquiet. (If you’re dumbfounded by Mastodon but intrigued, lemme know and I can try to be of assistance.)
▰ Dante would have written a very different book had he experienced the hell that is losing one’s place in an audiobook
▰ I know I’m getting at least slightly better on guitar because my mistakes sound better
▰ Remember when it was not just possible but fairly straightforward to own every Morton Feldman recording? To check my memory, I looked at Discogs.com. There were roughly 15 between 1957 and 1990 (three years after his death). Then the dam broke, and these are loose numbers: 1991 (7), 1992 (6), 1993 (4), 1994 (11), and onward. We’re just over three years from the centenary of Feldman’s birth (January 12, 1926), and presumably there will be a full-on (and entirely welcome) overload.
▰ Love this place, the Oakland Museum of California:
▰ Apparently Wikipedia has had the month of Walter Murch’s birth incorrect for some time?
▰ I want to hear Janet Cardiff’s Forty‑Part Motet on these new Teenage Engineering wooden speaker tchotchkes:
▰ I marvel when the rev.com transcription service supplies these limited options. Fascinating what common accents aren’t mentioned (Spanish? Russian? German?), how Asian is one broad swath, and yet British (which is broad unto itself) and Australian (the entire country has 2/3rds of the population of the Tokyo metropolitan area) get separated. (And yes, there’s an option for “other.)
▰ Nostalgia is a hell of a drug
▰ Somehow I managed to put “.com” instead of “.org” when mentioning Lurk in my This Week in Sound email recently. I’m at post.lurk.org/@disquiet.
▰ Today in guitar class: more of “Someone to Watch Over Me,” options for the Dbmaj7 chord, using a single fret for the pentatonic (major and minor), and related topics.
▰ How to get multi-column Mastodon view in your browser
▰ My columns in the Mastodon browser app:
Notifications
Local Timeline
Home*
Hashtags**
Bookmarks
DMs
*home is people one follows
**currently:
#soundstudies
#fieldrecording
#machinelistening
#supercollider
#disquietjunto
▰ Rain to the left of me, dishwasher to the right, stuck in the middle with some old Nils Frahm on the laptop (which has remarkably good speakers).
▰ Sometimes the best moments at modern art museums is when you’re not sure if it’s an installation or just a corner where work is yet to be completed. These come more readily if a room or two away you’d just been staring at some Rauschenbergs.
▰ First visit to SFMOMA since the before times. Made sure to spend time in my favorite spot there — and in some ways my favorite spot in the entire city. Here are five (well, three plus two halves) of the seven walls of the Agnes Martin room.
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Making Music with Three Time Signatures
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members. They then have through Monday to upload a track in response. Here's the project that came to a close yesterday:
The Assignment: Make music in 5/8, 6/8, and 7/8 time signatures.
Step 1: The week this project is published, the Disquiet Junto will be doing its 567th consecutive weekly project. Think about those digits and how they relate to each other.
Step 2: Record a piece of music that moves between — and perhaps even overlays — 5/8, 6/8, and 7/8 time signatures.
Listen to the results in the project’s SoundCloud playlist. Project details at disquiet.com/0567. The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2, with “three rulers, colorful photograph” as the prompt. Thanks to Łukasz Langa (aka RPLKTR) for instigating this project.
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¹Footnotes (Sound Ledger)
Subtitles: avclub.com, preply.com.
Thailand: bangkokpost.com.
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Elsewhere
Online locations where I generally reflect on sound publicly or otherwise hang out. I tend to take weekends off(line).
disquiet.com
instagram.com/dsqt
post.lurk.org/@disquiet
soundcloud.com/disquiet
youtube.com/disquiet
bandcamp.com/disquiet