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BBC Radio 1 - BBC Radio 1's Stories, 808s, 303s and 909s
An hour-long audio doc on how the Roland 808, 303 and 909 changed music.
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I have various kinds of information at my disposal. No doubt I have this information because of activity in my brain, but it doesn’t follow that my brain also has such information, still less microscopic bits of it. Why do we say that telephone lines convey information? Not because they are intrinsically informational, but because conscious subjects are at either end of them, exchanging information in the ordinary sense. Without the conscious subjects and their informational states, wires and neurons would not warrant being described in informational terms.Colin McGinn, in his clean takedown of Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind
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Audio Games
Digital gaming for the visually impaired:
Your average Call of Duty or Resident Evilfan has likely never heard of audio games, such as the simple versions of Pong,Monopoly, and hangman created by Jim Kitchen, a programmer who was diagnosed with the eye disease retinitis pigmentosa as a child, and completely lost his sight by the age of 31. Nor do they know of AudioQuake, a mod of the classic shooter Quake that makes it accessible for the blind. Terraformers, which won an Independent Game Festival award for sound design in 2003, constructed a space colony using the 3D sound technique known as binaural recordings. Recently, the iPhone audio game Papa Sangre used similar technology to plot the bowels of hell. When players pivot in a circle, they hear the snores of sleeping beasts rotate around them.
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Goodbye, old friends. You served me well.
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The famed John Cage anechoic chamber story. (via ldcf.org)
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Probably my single favorite thing of 2012. Solar wind colliding with the Earth’s magnetosphere, sonified, then visualized.
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Talking to myself through unsent emails
It’s a peculiar form of communication that I seem to have developed over my years as a grad student. I have an academic problem or question—it may be theoretical or practical in nature—and I decide to reach out to my advisor or a trusted friend through email. Initiating the email is almost automatic. I’m probably already on my computer when I encounter my conundrum and it takes only a few seconds to open Mail and fill in the “To:” and “Subject:” lines. However, things slow down considerably after the salutation.
I’m very conscious of the fact that my advisors and friends are busy. I don’t want to waste their time, so I formulate my question very carefully, striving for brevity and clarity. And that’s when things get peculiar, because very often I answer my own question in the process of its careful formulation. Or at least I feel I draw close enough to an answer. Or I realize that the stakes aren’t really as high as I thought. In any case, very often I don’t send the email at all. In effect, I have had a correspondance with myself.
In his lectures on “technologies of the self,” Foucault discussed the centrality of writing to ancient Socratic practices of self care and reflection:
Writing was also important in the culture of taking care of oneself. One of the main features of taking care involved taking notes on oneself to be reread, writing treatises and letters to friends to help them, and keeping notebooks in order to reactivate for oneself the truths one needed. Socrates’ letters are an example of this self-exercise.
There was a time, long ago, when I kept journals and wrote long paper letters to friends. Although I’m rather afraid to look at them now, I remember all the resonances and textures that these exercises drew out of me and my experience of the world. Things that would have remained latent, unexpressed in an almost genetic sense, without the catalyst-medium of paper and ink. Something similar seems to be happening with these unsent emails, as I see my questions and problems reflected back to me in the mirror of the screen.
What seems different is the speed, focus, and utilitarian nature of these email self-queries. They are more pragmatic and work related, more clearly embedded in regimes of discipline and economy. Then again, so am I. It also interests me that, while I think I always knew whether I was writing a letter or journal entry on paper, in this case I begin thinking I am writing the former and end up writing the latter. Perhaps this has something to do with the flexible, seemingly ephemeral nature of the digital. I wonder how many others write to this kind of imagined audience, never hitting “send.”
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Historical sound effects captured in Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’
An interesting and somewhat strange piece in the Washington Post details the Lincoln sound team’s careful cultivation of authenticity. For example, they went to the Kentucky Historical Society to record the ticking of a watch that actually belonged to the president.
The authenticity of the sounds adds to the movie’s drama. As the tension rises, Lincoln’s watch can be heard clearly ticking away history.
“I could have recorded a watch that belonged to my great-grandfather, and the audience would have accepted it,” [sound designer Ben] Burtt said. “But there is something sacred about working on a film about Lincoln.”
As much as the sounds themselves, I’m interested in the role of this newspaper article. The claim that “the authenticity of the sounds adds to the movie’s drama” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, it can only be true as prophecy, for without such publicity, no one would know that the ticking came from Lincoln’s watch. The claim of authenticity is also odd because, as is usually the case with quotidian sounds in mainstream film, the watch was recorded at a different time and place from the scene in which it was heard, then added in postproduction. In other words, there was no ticking in the room as Daniel Day-Lewis performed the scene. One could argue that this is, in fact, less authentic. Certainly, it added nothing to the movie’s drama as the actor performed.
That said, I love the fact that Burtt sent audio producer/American University film prof Greg Smith to record the watch. The sound is a sort of index of Lincoln’s audition, a retrieved fragment of his soundscape that ever so slightly connects us to him.
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The Status of Sound: Writing Histories of Sonic Art: an interdisciplinary conference to be held at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, on November 30th, 2012, 9am-6pm; free and open to the public.
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We thought turntables were for playing records until rappers began to use them as instruments, and we thought airplanes were for carrying passengers until terrorists realized they could be used as missiles. My big thing is to look at existing technologies and try to see other ways they can be used, which happens in music all the time and happens to be what terrorists are incredibly good at.Steely Dan/Doobie Brothers guitarist turned missile defense consultant, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter
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I have low-level hallucinations all the while. I see geometrical patterns and proto-letters everywhere. For example, looking up at the ceiling, as I’m doing now, I see angled forms which look like letters or words. They form and re-form very rapidly. Gradually it’s got more pronounced. But I can and do ignore it, just as I ignore my tinnitus, which goes with my deafness.Oliver Sacks, in a Slate interview. With a lack of sensory input (Sacks has vision and hearing impairment) the “brain may take off on its own and utilize memory and imagination to give one hallucinations.”
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Really happy that today Pitchfork ran Jessica Hopper’s long and detailed overview of Joni Mitchell’s first 10 albums. I can’t shake the feeling that she is an artist a lot of younger people know but don’t really know and I think this piece is a terrific introduction to what she was all about during this amazing run. I’ve wanted to write something longer about her for a while but a lot of what I wanted to talk about Jessica addressed here more eloquently. Here’s a live version of Blue’s “Case of You” from 1974.
P.S., if you have a turntable, collecting Joni Mitchell albums is a lot of fun. They are common and often inexpensive and sometimes you can’t believe what a great album you can get for $5.
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We have a section in this book , where we talk about the myths and lies told about poor people. One is poor people have character flaws and make bad decisions. I know a lot of oligarchs and plutocrats that have character flaws , made bad decisions and still get bailed out, still have access to welfare, still have socialism (for them). Brother O’Reilly falls in to the right wing trap in that regard. He talks about income redistribution, what we’ve seen is the most massive income distribution from poor and working people to the ‘well to do’. So he is not against income distribution, just when it’s top-down he is against it. When it’s bottom-up he is all for it, in fact he sees as a natural process of the free market.Cornel West (via the-left-is-right)
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I can’t stop listening to this song. Musically, it’s a classic Fagen groove: tight, dry, and locked in. Somehow airless and airy at the same time. How the guy makes such neck-popping deodorized funk is one of the great mysteries of American industrial production. Lyrically, we’re in the “Hey Nineteen” zone, but 32 years later the potentials for absurdity, pathos, and transcendence are all deeper:
Today we were strolling/By the reptile cage/I thinkin’ that she needs somebody/Who’s closer to her own age/Try not to worry/What tomorrow may bring/I’m just gonna do my best to/Hold onto that slinky thing/Theres a sun in my sky/Thats my power supply/She stayed with me/I know heaven is right here on earth
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OCTOBER 19, 2012: PUBLIC SYMPOSION IN MILAN: SOUND DESIGN AND ACOUSTIC ECOLOGY
I’d really like to see this section:
Part II: Auditory Design for the Public Sphere
06:30 pm: Peppino Ortoleva – Sound, habitus and semi-conscious perception. Thoughts on television-centered soundscape
07:00 pm: Karin Bijsterveld – Keep Moving: Car Sound Design, In-Car Audio and the Dream of the Magic Carpet
Author
Mack Hagood
