Marc Weidenbaum

@disquiet.bsky.social

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Disquiet.com since 1996: ambient/electronic music, field recordings, sound studies. I moderate the Disquiet Junto community of weekly music projects. I've written for The Wire, Pitchfork and Nature. I publish ThisWeekInSound.substack.com. Offline weekends.

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First passing siren of the week

One last note before going quasi-offline for the weekend: I finally found utility in the Obsidian feature called "graph view," which is that I put a ton of my recent #soundstudies news items in and I tagged 'em, and that helped me locate clusters of related information by visualizing connections.

There will be a new This Week in Sound issue today. I've been under the weather, and also fiddling with the newsletter's format so that its information is more thematically clustered. The lead topic: the use of digital voices in the new Rashida Jones TV series, Sunny. thisweekinsound.disquiet.com

This Week in Sound | Marc Weidenbaum | Substackthisweekinsound.disquiet.com A newsletter for fellow listeners interested in the role sound plays in culture, technology, politics, science, ecology, storytelling, warfare, art, and society. Click to read This Week in Sound, by M...

Obsidian-heads: I've begun using the inter-file linking, which is quite remarkable (like how files names update within docs). However, I worry that if I use that, I'm locking myself into Obsidian (which runs contrary to its plain-text appeal). Are such links more "portable" than I think they are?

Happiness is waking up to a photo in your email inbox of a sneak peek of a CD insert featuring liner notes you wrote

How many videos are in your YouTube "watch later" playlist? I've got 2,070.

Who ruled that YouTube videos need to be lit like they were filmed on a Virgin Airlines flight?

The YouTube video recommendation algorithm generally has my number (or numbers: synthesizers, guitar tutorials, non-comedic TV/movie previews, comics/scifi/literary author interviews, gadget news), except it persistently exhibits an impression that I'm interested in Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa

In the Disquiet Junto music community this week: Interpret a graphic score by Franziska Baumann. Full instructions at disquiet.com/0654. Tracks due Monday, July 15, at 11:59pm (your local time). Another project in collaboration with Musikfestival Bern. #DisquietJunto

Jedi field recording expedition

A new #DisquietJunto music community project will appear at 12:10am Pacific tomorrow (July 11) at disquiet.com/0654, and go out at the same time to the email list (juntoletter.disquiet.com). The theme involves graphic scores and it is a collaboration with Franziska Baumann and Musikfestival Bern.

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i pre-ordered the forthcoming Murakami.

Not sure when I became a person who pre-orders books fairly frequently but I'm a person who now pre-orders books fairly frequently. Recently: the new Robin Sloan, the imminent China Miéville/Keanu Reeves, and the later-this-year Neal Stephenson.

I love that “fun” is a font category on my computer’s OS. Somewhere there’s a typographer thinking: “My font’s friggin’ fun. Why the heck isn’t it on that list?!”

Vehicular polyrhythm of a car alarm going off and then the owner causing it to emit additional bleeps during ongoing failed attempts to sort out which button sequence turns off the car alarm

Afternoon trio from grumbling tummy, squawking crows, and the distant rumbling of internal combustion vehicles

These two sizable, nearly 6’ tall, cement posts frame the space that will soon enough hold, presumably, a brand new sign identifying this spot on the San Francisco coast as China Beach. For the time being it frames the view as you approach.

The Rhymes with Orange comic strip has my number (July 7, 2024). #fieldrecording

And another Obsidian thing: tables. The recent(ish?) upgrade makes them so simple to use, and now I find myself using them all the time: for little to-do lists, to organize key points, to correlate related information. The ability to move rows and columns manually on a whim is fantastic.

I didn't expect, when I started using Obsidian, that I'd use its native daily notes, since I'd already been compiling my own into monthly docs. But I've switched. And it's great. One tip: add the abbreviated day of the week (YYYY-MM-DD-ddd) to the file name so they're more easily identifiable.

I didn't have a ton of interest in the new movie Twisters, but the sound design of the trailers makes a compelling argument that it will, in fact, be a breakout hit in civic-alarm-system fandom, of which I'm a card-carrying member. www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZbE...

Twisters - Official Close of Sale Trailer - Warner Bros. UK & Irelandwww.youtube.com Hold onto your hats! Twisters is in cinemas July 17.This summer, the epic studio disaster movie returns with an adrenaline-pumping, seat-gripping, big-screen...

My daily life is evidence that this sound cue can be factually accurate yet say nothing meaningful about what is actually occurring

The foghorns this morning certainly seem to be glad to have yesterday's fireworks behind them — which I now realize is also a joke, 'cause the fireworks were literally behind the fog yesterday, as is pretty much always the case here on the 4th of July

Disquiet Junto Project 0653: Break a Rule The Assignment: Stop doing something you always do. Details: disquiet.com/0653 DisquietJunto

A new #DisquietJunto music community project should appear at 12:10am Pacific time tomorrow (Thursday, July 4) at disquiet.com/0653, and go out at the same time to the email list (juntoletter.disquiet.com). The theme involves rules.

Title of a panel discussion for music educators in 1970

How many minutes before a late meeting finally starts before Fugazi's "Waiting Room" starts playing in your head?

Felt like a solid one

Articles rarely carry titles written by their authors. My longtime favorite assigned to me was "About Face," about Emigre. Then came "The Man Who Fell for Earth," an interview I did with Kim Stanley Robinson. The crown has been passed to "Parable of the Mower," on David Lynch's The Straight Story.

It's that time of year when one finds oneself explaining, "Being interested in fireworks isn't the same as enjoying them." #soundstudiesproblems