In being silent, voiceless, the land itself is often left out of politics and economics.

That is from Soren Callo’s “A Quiet That Cannot Defend Itself” at the website of the Sierra Club.

. . .

▰ Top Score

I thought about the stockings that Willy buys for the other woman, and I thought, If those stockings had a sound, what would it be? Or when Willy talks about his admiration for an older salesman who settles down in the evening with his green velvet slippers: If those green velvet slippers had a theme of their own, what would that be?

That is composer Caroline Shaw speaking in New York magazine with Justin Davidson about her score for the revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

. . .

▰ Chasing Waterfalls

Trump’s phone could be heard ringing during a recent press conference in which he discussed a proposed 50 percent tariff on Apple. The familiar sound of the default “Reflection” ringtone—you know the one, the synthesized waterfall of xylophone tones—was a reminder that the tariffs targeted the company that makes his beloved device.

That is Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer (with additional reporting from Jonathan Lemire) in The Atlantic on the sitting president’s phone, security concerns, and the history of White House inhabitants’ affection for making and taking calls.

▰ Keeping Tine: “In order to document bird songs, Mathews hiked through the thickets of the heavily forested White Mountains with a tuning fork and a notebook. Some contemporaries toted a stopwatch, too. He would have had to listen for birds calling repeatedly and long enough to decipher them. He might have tapped the tuning fork with a mallet to determine the key of the bird’s song. Then it was penciling each note onto the staff. Ironically, he called his notations ‘recordings’—not recordings in the analog or digital form, but a handwritten record of each song.” (From the always excellent newsletter This Week in Birding, by Bob Dolgan.)

▰ Round the Bend: The sound of a Siemens automotive called the Taurus makes when getting going is something to behold: “The power converters have to adapt the current from the overhead line to convert it to the three-phase motors of the locomotive, and that generates a rising tone. The engineers decided to change the logic to increment the tone in precise few steps resembling a musical scale, rather than allowing it to rise continuously.” (From Marchin Wichary’s Unsung.)

▰ Volume Control: “Now we can add a new gripe [about data centers] to the list: in addition to just being noisy, a sustainability nonprofit called the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) is claiming that data centers are emitting ultra-low frequencies [or “infrasound”] — think the powerful sub-bass at an EDM festival — that, while not picked up by a conventional decibel meter, cause an unsettling rumble for nearby residents.” (From Krystle Vermes at futurism.com.)

▰ Button Mash: The new video game controller from Steam has some tricks up its plastic and metal sleeve: “[A user] recently discovered that one of those easter eggs is how the controller literally screams when you drop it. More specifically, it will recreate the Wilhelm scream, which originated in a 1950s Western and is now considered the ‘most famous scream of all time.’”

▰ GRACE NOTES: (1) Lip Service: Tips on controlling your phone with your voice (Wired). ▰ (2) Wave Form: Why not build yourself a radio wave detector with aluminum foil? (Wired). ▰ (3) Sound Art: Jeff Koons’ iconic “balloon dog” sculpture is now a speaker. ▰ (4) Smoking Jacket: “Experimental clothing brand Vollebak has created the prototype Sonic Jacket, which is fitted with 180 inward-facing speakers.” ▰ (5) Dynamic Duo: A pair of pristine WWII-era radio transmitters “survived the war in brand new condition in their original shipping crates.” ▰ (6) Public Venture: Industrial-music legend JG Thirwell (Foetus) has a Tumblr and apparently he sees music performances all the time and posts clips of them, among other things.

▰ Citation Credits: Thanks, Lowell Goss (WWII)!

60: “The 60-60 rule asserts that you shouldn’t listen to music at a volume louder than 60% of maximum for more than 60 minutes at a time.”

70: The percent slower that sound moves on Mars than on Earth.

Sources: UK (pipedown.org), 60-60 (zdnet.com), Mars (nature.com)

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the llllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0751: Gastropod Meter
The Assignment: Go slow for an imagined nature documentary.

Imagine you’ve been invited to compose music for a nature documentary about slugs. Record a track for one of the film’s slower scenes.

Note: Cover photo shot at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, California.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0751” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0751-gastropod-meter/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Maybe 3 to 5 minutes?

Deadline: Monday, May 25, 2026, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 751th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Gastropod Meter — The Assignment: Go slow for an imagined nature documentary — disquiet.com/0751.

This went out, second week in a row. Feels good. A little shorter than I’d intended, but I’m getting back on track, so to speak.

The festival will run in Bern, Switzerland, from September 2 – 6, and we’ll be doing four projects in advance, playing in various ways — direct and indirect — with the theme for this year’s events, which is «Blitz» (or “Lightning”), and we’ll be responding, as well, to concepts introduced by various composers and musicians involved this coming season. Some of the music we create over the course of these projects may also end up being part of one of the festival’s many sound installations. The first of these Junto x Bern projects will likely occur next week, for Disquiet Junto project 0752, which will begin on May 28.

Read more about the festival at musikfestivalbern.ch. This will be the eighth year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern. It’s always a pleasure and a privilege, and precisely the sort of creative connection-making I love to happen for the Junto community.

I call this one: The tin wall reflecting light from the stage while one of my favorite bands from the 1990s plays, having magically appeared in my neighborhood movie theater.

Also, it’s probably not tin. It’s probably Lincrusta.

Souled American was one of the first three acts I interviewed professionally, way back in 1989 (maybe late 1988?) — that was in Manhattan, for Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine, before I moved to Sacramento to work for Pulse! full time — and tonight, May 18, 2026, I got to see them live at the 4 Star, mere blocks from where I live in San Francisco. I was stoked beyond belief, and the audience was treated to two sets, followed by two encores. They didn’t do “Soldier’s Joy,” and I wasn’t in the mood to call out for it, even the one time they (half-jokingly?) asked for requests; I just wanted to sit back and enjoy musical trip they took us on. The band, once a quartet, at this point is guitarist/singer Chris Grigoroff (center) and bassist/singer Joe Adducci (right), with guest guitarist Brian Smith, whose sonic beds reminded me of original member Scott Tuma. For a night, I was 22 again.

▰ Solo ambient cello, heavy on the texture, from Ukrainian musician Fedir Tkachov:

▰ On July 17, Kate Carr will release Vertical London (New Year’s Day), a collection of field recordings that aim to collate the sounds of London from minus 20 metres below sea level to 240 metres above, hence the album’s title. As of this writing, four of the set’s 22 tracks are online:

• “Early birds and planes in Loughborough Junction”
• “I am not sure which tube station is the furthest below sea level, but I am visiting quite a few”
• “Under the Thames with cyclists, joggers and echoes in the Greenwich Foot Tunnel”
• “Popping up at Island Gardens.”

▰ The two-track EP Graceless is driving industrial noise, made with no-input feedback loops, from Chia-Chun Xu, based in Taipei City, Taiwan.

My friend Łukasz Langa, who went with me, took this shot of the interior after the performance we attended:

Founded by Stan Shaff and Doug McEachern, the Audium’s first dedicated physical space, with a quarter as many speakers, was in my longtime neighborhood, the Richmond District, in what is now a small office between a day spa and a hair salon. That was back in 1967.

By 1969, the Richmond District space had expanded to 61 speakers. Then in 1975, following an NEA grant and substantial construction work, the Audium moved to its current location, a former donut shop on Bush Street, not far from the major thoroughfare of Van Ness Avenue. Here’s a shot of my hand holding a photograph of the current space when it was still under construction, in the context of the space as it appears today. That’s Shaff’s son, David Shaff, in the baseball hat on the right.

There’s a lot to be said about any Audium show, and in addition to hearing everyday sounds and synthesized fragments move in three dimensions, I’ve had the pleasure of listening to a live jazz band perform, also in the dark. Something new-to-me always is happening at the Audium, and this time what struck me in particular was a thoughtful little design touch.

The lobby of the Audium serves as a gallery for an ever-changing series of sound art installations, and the current one plays through wall-mounted speakers. The exhibit is an audio-visual collaboration between Alex Abalos and Roco Cordova. What I noticed as I walked around wasn’t just the sounds or the projected images. It was how the sounds were being emitted: Each of the speakers is inside a cloth bag, which is pulled tight.

The carefulness of the speaker presence at the Audium reminded me of the snaking cables that caught my eye at a Marina Rosenfeld sound art exhibit back in 2021. In that case, rather than the bulky black cables being casually arranged out of necessity, they were artfully, even playfully, placed, and thus they became, in essence, part of the work, rather than a necessary byproduct.

In the Audium’s lobby, it was, frankly, nice not to be surrounded by a bunch of hard plastic and metal commercial objects, which is the standard mode for sound art. I also couldn’t help but connect the hand-tied cloth bags with the handcrafted nature of the space itself. It’s a simple touch, and one I’m surprised, in retrospect, that I don’t see more often in sound art exhibitions.

This article originally appeared in the May 13, 2026, issue of my Disquiet.com email newsletter, This Week in Sound.