For a brief moment – OMG they’ve found an ancient portal on the Plimmerton farm development!!

It seems so well built!

Mystery solved!

I appreciate a lot of people hate their job & loathe Monday morning, so I always try to remind myself what a blessing it is to have freedom to pursue whatever I like on a Monday morning… Today was a first test recording in a Bird Hide at Pauatahanuia Inlet – I rigged mics on interior with MKH8040/8050/8040 across front, pair of MKH8020 at rear and pair of LOM Usi Pro up in roof mid way….

The bird hide has slotted windows with shutters, so I did a comparison recording with the shutters open and closed… I’m really aiming to record there when there is some wild weather as it is exposed to weather but provides shelter for mics.

I took a brolly with me & ocne I set the mcis recording I walked back out the access track & set a timelapse shooting… A very pleasant way to spend a Monday morning, getting some exercise & being outdoors!

its winter in NZ at the moment…

ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist

How the Cantareel works

Song Exploder: Little Simz – Free

funny Twitter thread of weird notices in street/park etc

Timeline of Music Notation

Arbrasson was invented by José Le Piez…. fascinating tonality

I was going through a box of CDs in my basement, finding some gems & this was one of them:
Keiichiro Shibuya – filmachine phonics

“While in general surround system the sound moves on the same plane(two-dimensional), in this CD the sound moves up and down, and even obliquely(three-dimensional). This work has reached a new stage to “compose motion of sounds”.

There are some audio excerpts from the album here
The CD is dual format & has a data section with 24bit/48k AIFs… and screensavers…
also an indepth PDF about the sound & art installation

Magnetic Resonator Piano – more examples at the designers site

DRUM MACHINE unplugged

great Low Light Mix of the always excellent Echospace label #dubtechno

Been sorting out my ‘archive’ (aka endless boxes in the basement) and now re-ripping/copying a bunch of CDs… plus found a few sample CDs – atom & echospace

Marcus Fischer Tape Loop Performance

Rival Consoles – Soft Gradient Beckons
(love the vid – making of starts at 3’28”)

Paul St. Hilaire & René Löwe – Faith

If you work in the film industry you will see comments like this online often, and with lots of people agreeing. While youtube influencers have made endless videos with claims that cannot be substantiated, the absolute worst is that somehow director “don’t care” or “don’t want the audience to hear the dialogue”. I can assure you, the writers, director, editor, actors, dialogue editor, and rerecording mixers would all disagree. And pointing to an edgy example such as Christopher Nolan is not the ‘hot take’ people might think it is – the guys only made 17 films in total. Its not COVID, it doesn’t spread by proximity.

Why the issue exists is not easily solved, because there are no standards in home listening…. But I do have a theory which could help narrow down the source of the problem for many and point them towards how to improve their own specific issues. A streaming company such as Netflix or Disney etc could easily choose to help their audience have a better sonic experience with one simple process:

Release a free app for iOS and Android. It could have a dumb populist name like:
MAKE MOVIES SOUND GREAT AGAIN

How it would work:

1. You put your phone down in the same spot you sit when watching a movie.
You launch the app and choose your setup: stereo, 5.1 etc
The app then starts listening

2. You view a short video (which has the same name) on the streaming platform.
The video has a short burst of noise at the start, which cues the app to start monitoring.
The video then plays pink noise and the app listens and indicates to the user if their TV is at a correct overall level.

3. The video then plays a sweep from 20Hz to 20kHz, while the app listens.

Some analysis then occurs and a result is shared, as to how close to accurate playback your system has.

A quick version of this process could be done in a few minutes.
If you have a 5.1 system and each speaker is tested individually it might take 5 minutes.

I’ve calibrated my own studio plenty of times following the same process, except using a hardware SPL meter.
Similarly I’ve calibrated my own Mac screens plenty of times following the same process, except using a Spyder X meter.

So for all of my learned pro audio people, where is this idea flawed?

– First would be that phone microphones are not calibration mics with perfectly flat response.
But how much of an issue is that, compared with the current option of most people doing nothing & complaining?
Lets say the mic is only 80% accurate. OK well lets get people 80% calibrated. Because 80% would be better than none at all.

– Second is that we might find out that some/many ‘sound bars’ are inaccurate sub par pieces of shit.

Currently, listening to TV or a movie via streaming is not a closed loop.
Currently there is only an unreliable human in the open loop and their data can’t be trusted.
Thats not their fault. The fault lies with the companies who take the $$$ and dont help with delivery.
Its a bit like FedEx saying ‘well, we delivered the package somewhere near your house… so good luck with that’

Actually it doesn’t need to be Netflix or Disney who make the app, but having their branding on it would add to legitimacy and also would show they care about the issue… Do they care? Or is it all care & no responsibility. Maybe an indie dev could make it. Put AI in the title and access some VC?

I did a quick search & a Reddit thread turned up a few paid phone app options from musicians wanting to calibrate their studio speakers.

But I think such an app needs to be free, so there is no friction to using it.

“We rescued this little bird and fed him for a couple of days. Now he is learning to fly and visited us in the studio! Watch it chirping like the filter…”

interesting project: Phil Peters – Volcanic Drift

“We tested our cockroach leg stimulus protocol on the squid’s chromatophores…”
Insane in the Chromatophores
Thanks Kirk!

“One of my all-time favorite type of videos is pre-fame bands playing their extremely famous songs to a tiny room of people, because they’re not yet known. A thread of some examples…

Musician uses moths’ flight data to compose piece about their decline

Thought the design on this guitar pedal looked familiar…
Magnetic Effects Solar Bender

An #nz design classic… For any non-kiwis, Edmonds who make baking powder and had an awesome garden at 357 Ferry Road, Waltham in Christchurch which was established when the factory was built in 1923! “The City Council acquired a major portion of the original Edmonds Factory Garden in 1991 after the building had been demolished and the property sub-divided. Since then, a rose garden and an oval garden have been added” – Edmonds also released an iconic cookbook, which includes the factory on the cover:

wow – brillaint scratch film work by Bennet Pimpinella on instagram

Distortion Audio Effects: Learning How to Recover the Clean Signal

Making of Sahari Orin – Buddhist Bells
(love the turntable at 0’39”)
Process X is a great youtube channel eg there is an episode showing how Taiko drums are made.

the cost of “progress”
via Puck news

now I want to watch Tetsuo again!

appropriate response

seems zeitgesity

Amplified Gesture was first released in 2009, within the deluxe edition of David Sylvian’s groundbreaking album, Manafon. The film explores the journeys and philosophies of a select group of experimental musicians including Keith Rowe, Evan Parker, Eddie Prevost, Otomo Yoshihide, Toshimaru Nakamura and Christian Fennesz. Intimately and eloquently, these exceptional artists reveal themselves through their ideas and working practices, creating a captivating document of a thriving and endlessly renewable music scene.

Night Route – Dirtywave M8 headless on the R36S

Herbert & Momoko – Clay

Four Tet – Into Dust (Still Falling)

Surface Access – Basic User Chargre

more recently:

1975: MUSIC, MUSAK and your MIND | Horizon: The Three Chord Trick

LaborBerlin: State-of-the-Art 16mm Projector

lol

visualizing environmental costs of war in Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Adam Curtis on “Shifty”, Self-Interest and Why We’re All “Scunnered”

“deeping it” manifesto – on memes, mimetic desire, and why it’s always really that deep. Thinking critically about something is somehow synonymous with a moral condemnation of that thing

a long read for Aphex Twin nerdlingers

“We don’t make twee stuff,” Martin adds “It’s not Brian Eno ambient. I quite like Brian, but I’ve always found his stuff quite saccharine, or like a utopia. Where we come from, council estates, that’s not what life sounds like.” And it’s also not music that subscribes to Eno’s definition of the ambient genre as being “as ignorable as it is interesting.” Martin counters that, saying, “You shouldn’t be ignoring it, fuck off! I spent months making that! No chance! If we’re ambient, then we’re more on the same bus as Coil.”

wow love these pinhole cameras made from watch mechanisms by Korean artist Kwanghun Hyun

wow – a SUB GREAT BASS recorder!

A minor!

focus!

It’s interesting to hear McCahon’s voice in this short interview:

Colin McCahon: I Am (2004) Documentary
by Paul Swadel (RIP)

at Museum Tower Kyobashi, Tokyo until August 31

I’ve walked that track once before & it is vertigo-inducing!! Not fun!!
Check the scale:

Canon 5D3 with EF100-400L lens with 1.2 extender

This meme made me laugh, as it exactly describes me back in 2020, when I bought a piano.

I’d been slowly searching for the right piano – an upright, not too expensive incase I want to modify it (highly likely) and in good condition. One eventually came up for auction from a deceased estate sale, a 1930s Kemble piano. I checked it out – it played well & sounded lovely. The wood was also beautiful matched-grain, which I interpreted as meaning this particular piano had been made with care and not generically mass produced.

I won the auction, fending off two other vaguely interested people… and I still only paid NZ$250 for it! Thats US$149 – less than the price of some plugins lol. Anyway, I knew I had to move the piano on the day of the auction, so I rented a small furniture-moving truck which had a hydraulic lift on the back of it. At the auction house, the guys there helped me carefully wheel the piano out of the shop, and onto the trucks rear tray, lifted it up & rolled it into the rear of the truck, tied it down, all good!

Now the real challenge: my house is up a steep drive, so I tied the piano down very well, with ratchet cargo strops. But I was still thinking about how I was going to get the piano safely off the truck. And then up the zig zag path and into my lounge. From A to B, with a vertical height of one story of my house, maybe 3m/12foot at a gentle incline. But uphill all the way, with four turns.

How would you do it?

Anyone I knew locally who might help was away at work, so I either had to wait until that evening. Or find a way to do it by myself. I became determined to find a way, but with the weight of it & the angled path I couldn’t ‘wing’ it like the guy in the meme above as the piano weighed too much.

First problem to solve was getting it off the truck, so I could go return the truck to the rental company. I rolled the piano on to the lift, and lowered it slowly, and then carefully rolled it off and on to flat ground by the garage. I used a tie down to secure it the piano to the garage & returned the truck.

By the time I got back I had an idea in mind. A simple reality check: could I lift one end of the piano & move it, at all? Like even just an inch? I placed blocks of wood behind the wheels, so it couldn’t roll backward at all. And I bent my knees, grabbed one end of the piano & lifted it. I put the piano down. Phew! OK. That was doable.

Next I got a sack-barrow and slid it under one end of the piano. I slowly lifted the other end and with gentle forward motion the piano moved in the direction I was pushing a little bit, like 6 inches! The sack barrow protected the bottom of the piano from friction at the uphill end. And as long as I put the piano down again gently, there was no shock or sudden movement invovled at all. Phew! OK. I stretched & walked around a bit. And then I did it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. Each time fully resting between lifts, taking breaks and doing something else for ten minutes etc…

All up, it took me about three hours to move the piano from the garage into my lounge.
At no time did I move it more than six inches in one go. And weirdly I wasn’t particularly tired or sore afterwards. I definitely could not sustain ‘carrying’ the piano at all. Even two people would really have to exert themselves, to lift & carry the full weight of the piano up the path. My method was not more efficient, but it did work!

By going very slowly and steadily over what might seem like an unreasonable amount of time, I essentially broke a seemingly impossible task down into such small steps they were feasible. And the entire larger project could be achieved. Sustainable progress. That’s the metaphor!

The reason for reminiscing about pianos?

Don’t worry, its not my Kemble piano… It was donated, thanks Mel!

Now the fun begins…

Happy Matariki aka Maori New Year

ASUNA: 100 Keyboards

ASUNA: 100 Keyboards (100 Rock)
(all keyboards with built in drums playing “Rock” preset)

Black Hole Horizon by Thom Kubli

skeumorphism is back, apparently?

The Illusion of Thinking” — Thoughts on That AI Paper

What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works

The first big AI disaster is yet to happen

AI is not human. Anthropomorphization has been bad for AI, LLMs, and Chat. Clippy walked so today’s AI could run.
https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/233-the-illusion-of-thinking-thoughts

Story of Sosumi & the Mac Startup Sound

Strange radio pulses detected coming from ice in Antarctica
Have penguins discovered techno? the photo in the article looks like a huge soundsystem suspended above a frozen plain…

Melodically speaking we find the juxtaposition of short lyrical phrases of great tenderness with ostinatos of extreme and deliberate bareness – guess who?

UDU solo – “Pintando o Seis”

(took me a moment to get it!)

watch on instagram – Ruby the Labrador

also via insta – percussion Toshi Makihara
(love this performance, stumbled across it & for a brief moment thought he was having a seizure)

Of course its not actually called FFT Beach…
explanation:

shot lots of XPAN here!

Conducting interviews with the hoi polloi

at Ngawi

caught a shooting star!

lol The Chook Tree #nz

For those outside NZ, our current fckng useless Government have set up a ‘hotline’ for reporting excess road cone usage..
Not reporting this one – its living its best life!

Max for LIVE library – free + paid
https://maxforlive.com/library

Mutable Instruments GRIDS eurorack module is a topographic drum machine, which contains a huge library of beats created via analysis of classic beats. There are a few M4L versions of Grids – free & paid (which have additional features)

Grids – free
https://maxforlive.com/library/device/2518/grids-for-max-for-live

Voct.Grids 1.1 – paid
https://maxforlive.com/library/device/9401/voct-grids

Mutable Instruments PLAITS – free/OSX only
https://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/7693/poly-plaits
Based on open source code from the eurorack module, this polyphonic version contains 16 deep synthesis models

Fors Opal – paid
https://fors.fm/opal
Opal is a 4 voice rhythm machine/instrument made for intricate pattern creation. With parameter locks, probability, conditionals, ratcheting, independent track length, time division and traversal.

TechnoGAN sampler – paid
https://mischmeisterm.gumroad.com/l/TechnoGAN_sampler
TechnoGAN is an AI Neural Network, trained to generate looping quarter-note techno-like samples.

Hocket II – free
https://maxforlive.com/library/device/7934/hocket-2
Distributes a melody across multiple instruments, one note at a time,
consists of a sender & multiple receiver plugins

Tintinnabulator 1.4 – free
https://maxforlive.com/library/device/7569/tintinnabulator
The Tintinnabulator puts Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabulation technique into real-time MIDI processing. Super simple and fun. It features 4 T-voice ‘inversions’, mirroring as well as free and synced delays

K-Devices – paid
https://k-devices.com/product-category/m4l/
all of their work is very interesting! I love ESQ for non-linear beats + HEXO

Stepic for LIVE – paid
https://devicemeister.com/stepic-for-live/Classic step sequencer

Divisions by Dillon Bastan – paid
https://dillonbastan.com/store/maxforlive/index.php?product=divisions
All his work is excellent. Divisions remidns me of my Tenori On with bouncing balls emitting notes

VideoSync – paid
https://videosync.showsync.com/
Play video likes it audio in LIVE!!

MIDI Fibonacci Note Echo – paid
https://plugins.steinkamp.us/m4l-FibonacciNoteEcho
a MIDI note echo effect where the echoes follow the pattern of the Fibonacci Sequence

Puremagnetik – free + paid
https://puremagnetik.com/collections/devices

Skip – free
https://maxforlive.com/library/device/8253/skip
Turn every sound into blissfull clicks and cuts with this device, carefully crafted to simulate the skipping and glitching of prepared cds used by artists like Oval, Yasunao Tone and Nicolas Collins.

HISSandaROAR SD076 Giant Balloons is now released!
Giant Balloons recorded 32/192 with a pair of Sanken CUX100K mics plus a LOM UsiPro inside each balloon
Serious bass from friction plus sub boom hits & plucks!

Cabaret Voltaire interview 1985

love this: Kebab symphonie on insta

John Cage nails exactly why we love #sounddesign

from Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words

so Timbaland makes an announcement of his new AI girlfriend Artist and the comments from his fans are relentlessly negative
It feels a bit like when an artist you admire turns out to be a rapist or serial offender, and they suddenly & irrevocably wreck their reputation… You can never experience their work again without thinking about that thing…

“It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation,
and only one bad one to lose it.”
Benjamin Franklin #notAI

“Fail we may, sail we must” – origin story

Added to my Must Visit list: The Fukutake Foundation has opened the Tadao Ando-designed Naoshima New Museum of Art in Japan. The museum is the latest addition to the Benesse Art Site Naoshima

10 of the World’s Most Alluring Hidden Bars (And How to Find Them)

wild!! by destiny-plus

theres something kind of therapeutic about construction vids like this one
building something similar out in my garden is on my slow-to-do list

Amon Tobin – Deep Freda

Ryuichi Sakamoto – Grief (Amon Tobin remix)

Amon Tobin – Like Regular Chickens

This “documentary” by Peter Jackson & Costa Botes screened in NZ in 1995 and caused quite an uproar at the time…

No spoilers but I must watch it again to see if I can remember at what point it started to smell fishy.
I seem to remember something about him using egg whites to develop film…

If you think back through your memory,
what is a sound that you noticed as strange?

What does strange mean in this context?
Does strange mean weird? Unexpected? Unidentifiable?

‘Maybe’ is the only answer I can offer, as it might be one or all of those things.

I heard a weird sound the other day, its why I’m writing this. I’ll explain it below…
But ‘strange sounds’ is also a great search term when accessing an archive.
In New Zealand there are a few publicly accessible archives.
One of them is PAPERS PAST which is a searchable archive of Newspaper papers in NZ dating back to 1839. Particularly interesting is that this archive includes many small town newspapers.
It’s part of the New Zealand National Library which includes another excellent archive, the Alexander Turnball Library

Some of my ‘strange sound’ search hits?

Funny to find one in the Ashburton Guardian – that’s where I grew up, although 1927 is a bit before my time…

Some of my own strange sounds?

I’ll add to these as I remember other occurrences.

Porirua Supermarket Carpark – last week

Location is an open carpark area outside a suburban shopping mall and supermarket.
I shop there once every week or two. Not often but its totally familiar to me.
I park my car, and walk the 100m towards to the mall and I hear this sound.
Its kind of high & whiney/narrow frequency, but it sounds weird.
Like I can’t place where its coming from, amongst the traffic & pedestrians
The acoustic/tonality is strange too & its frequency shifts around, but it doesn’t sound like a car stereo.
Then as I walk towards the supermarket it gets louder and closer…
And I start to hear the melody & I walk past a car, with its side window open
Two young women are sitting in the front seats, singing along to this Chappell Roan song.
Adorable. But it completely threw me for a minute – the tonality was so strange it felt like I was imagining it!

It reminded me of the brilliant diegetic music video for Leftfield – Swords, and how cars are third places – its like we drive around in mini lounges.

Unidentified Creature Vocal – Shodoshima, Japan

This strange sound occurred while I was doing my Artist Residency on Shodoshima, Japan. I’d been shooting a timelapse up in the mountains and set my mcis up to record some ambience as it was dusk… And while sitting quietly I heard this strange sound in the distance. I’d spent many weeks on Shodoshima by then so I was used to the gangs of macaques/monkeys that live on the island, and the sounds they make. But I had zero idea what created this sound. It didn’t freak me out but I wanted to know what it was… Can you ID it? The answer is in the comments of the original post

Collapsing New Buildings

This is from 20+ years ago – I’ll search the archive as it will have been reported.

Back in 2001 I moved my studio from Auckland to commercial space in Jessie Street, Wellington. The move was motivated by work – me & my little team (Polly & Matt) were starting work on the Street Legal TV Series and I also had a great feature film, Stickmen lined up… I think this sound occurred on a Thursday as I would get up & walk down to a combini on Courtenay Place to buy a copy of the Trade & Exchange, which was eBay/TradeMe before the Internet existed.

Just a block from the studio was a building site with lots of scaffolding & trucks & noise… I was walking on the other side of Tory St, across the street from the action. And suddenly there is this sound… It grows really rapidly & violently, such that for a moment I feared for my safety. They were pouring concrete into the second story of the site and the whole structure collapsed! As it collapsed it was very loud but afterwards there was a weird moment of quiet, as everyone & all vehicles stopped.. the dust settled & then… much shouting, alarms etc… There was nothing I could do, so I stood & watched for a while & then carried on my way… Was relieved to learn via the news that day that no one died.

Exploding New Volcano

If someone told me they heard this sound, I would look at them like they were completely fckng bonkers! Like there is no physical way you could hear this sound. But I did! reblogging from my original post here

2022-01-16:
Yesterday evening when I was out in the garden messing around with the bath, I heard some distant booms. They sounded like large scale fireworks or munitions, distant enough to have that pahrump sound to them, but carrying enough sub bass that you could feel the scale. I thought to myself why would anyone have a fireworks display during daylight? And I should do a search to see what caused it… Soon after a friend on Twitter messaged me: did I hear it? Yes, but what was it?
The eruption in Tonga, 2500km away!

At first I thought he was joking.
But checking official Twitter accounts:

NZ MetService:

There were comments on that tweet from people all over NZ who heard it.
I would not call what I heard “a rumble” – it was definitely discrete booms!

But even more amazing: people heard it in Alaska 6000km away!!

WOW!!
Check the shockwave captured from Himawari Satellite

“Japanese Geostationary Satellite ‘Himawari-8’ captured an eruption of a volcano near Tonga. Not only the eruption but also the shock wave can be seen. On the other hand, the terminator between daylight and night caught up with the shock wave. This means the terminator runs faster than the speed of sound, that is, the surface speed of the Earth’s rotation exceeds the speed of sound, and we are rotating at supersonic speeds!”

Good info here with regards to scale of eruption

LOL you got to love Facebook commenters:

“Are you sure? On the 6pm news it had already erupted and they had initial video of the early tsunami waves”

me: speed of sound in dry air at 20 deg C = 343 m / s, Plimmerton is 2317km (or 2317000metres) from Tonga… By my maths that = 6,755 seconds or 112 minutes of travel time. Of course speed of sound would vary a bit with humidity & temperature…

Them:

A recording from Fiji, 800km away!!!

Your turn?

If you think back through your memory,
what is a sound that you noticed as strange?

 
Note: sorry but I have comments set to requiring approval the first time. So there may be a delay before I see it, but once you’ve commented non-spam & its been approved, you’re good from then on!

Continuity – Drifting

Ladi6 – Le Vā

Little Simz – Lotus

Philipp Priebe – Drift Deeper Guest Mix 081 #dubtechno

David Van Tieghem

How to thrive in obscurity

How those photos inside instruments were made

I feel seen

Hollywood Has Left L.A. For years, studios found it cheaper to shoot elsewhere.
Post-industry-collapse, elsewhere is the only place they’ll shoot.

Antipodean Adventures with Joe Cornish

Nature presents us with 80 “octaves” of light, of which humans can see exactly 1.
Bringing the other 79 octaves into view has taken two centuries of effort, but it has transformed our ability to sense our place in the cosmic order.

interesting podcast episode: Lost & Sound with Cristobal Tapia de Veer

Inside Ukraine’s Killer-Drone Startup Industry

1975: MUSIC, MUSAK and your MIND | Horizon: The Three Chord Trick | Science and Nature | BBC Archive = samples galore!

The Rise of the Japanese Toilet

(related, ages ago when in Japan I researched & found a hotel designed by Tadao Ando on Awajishima, so we went & stayed there… photos here It turned out the hotel had been commissioned by toilet company Toto, and each hotel suite had one of their high-end toilets, like more hi tech than any I’d seen in Japan before. But one feature made me laugh – it would ‘sense’ you when you walked into the toilet, and automatically its lid would rise up. Next thing was me acting like a little kid, trying to surprise the toilet by sneaking up & jumping into the bathroom lol… It didn’t change its behaviour, but.. imagine when toilets have AI and it starts giving you attitude!?

(Scottish accents are adorable, yes even Groundskeeper Willie)

The Echoman

Steve Jobs

recorder, not flute

loscil – Lake Fire

GoGo Penguin – Forgive the Damages (feat. Daudi Matsiko)

Tomoaki Baba – Prime
great animated music video – more at Colossal

Eminem – LOSE YOURSELF (Sung by 331 Movies!)

lol – “No public soup drinking”
What an insecure little man…

A Billion Streams and No Fans? Inside a $10 Million AI Music Fraud Case

Jan Jelinek interview
I can still remember the feeling of hearing Loop Finding Jazz the first time

fascianting: David Lynch’s estate auction includes cameras, clothes, books, memorabilia, megaphones, scripts, vinyl, musical instruments, etc.

Flabba Holt on writing basslines for some of the classics – part 3
Flabba Holt part 2
Flabba Holt part 1

“Bio Baby” – WTF?

The only use for white bread!

Why is Japan’s earthquake alert chime scary? Composer shares sound’s science

#notreal

Sonic Youth mini doco from 1989

lol

HISSandaROAR SD075 AIR TOOLS is now released!
15.26GB as 625 x 24bit 192kHz WAV files. 9.44GB Download
This new library captures a dozen different workshop air tools.
Each tool was operated handheld – revs, short runs, sustained – at a range of speeds as the compressor’s air tank slowly emptied. 
Classic whirrs were performed with high pressure while some uniquely idiosyncratic sounds were to be had with very low pressure.
Two resonators were also used – wood & metal – to both scale the sound via a LOM Geofon, and to provide a surface for grinds & moves.
AIR TOOLS include: 
Ratchet Wrench x2, Die Grinder, Impact Wrench x2, Angle Impact Wrench, Air Hammer x2, Grinder, Sander, Drill, Saw
Recording 32bit 192kHz with a MixPre10-II using six mics:
Sanken CUX100K x2 + Sennheiser MKH8040x2 + Sennheiser MKH8050 + LOM Geofon

Spent some time with the Milky Way last night…
looking out across Breaker Bay to Baring Head Lighthouse

Jim Jarmusch on black and white

Full interview here – cued to some great Nicholas Ray advice

AI slop: Amazon/Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks

This news does not surprise me. If you use Audible and care about ethics, perhaps have a read of why Cory Doctorow does not allow his work to be published on Audible.

interesting auto sampler: Dataset Generator for Musical Devices

Might want to clean your drone after this: Industrial Waste in Russia

love this RC car SUMO!

weirdly retro PSA: How to disable a robot attack dog

Great to see Fugue Machine Rubato
has been released for Mac, not just iOS.
Love the idea of a sequencer/timeline with multiple playheads…
Demo available via TestFlight, with a 15min timeout
Indepth review at CDM is worth checking out

The Instruments Makers – Hans Tschiritsch
Love that drone at 9’07”

Hackers 1 Kanye 0:
“Fuck Nazis. 50-year-old loser promoting fascism and hate speech. All proceeds from this group buy were donated to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,”

Artist Talk: Tadao Ando
love the bit at 46.06 about Minamidera

beautiful Michael Kenna medium format photos of Japan

Barker with some good advice

On social media, every time some new bit of crappy AI gen video is released there is a crowd of commenters/bots/hype bros all chanting ‘Hollywood is over’ etc and it would be funny if it wasn’t so wilfully, woefully misguided.

The latest was a Google vid of a synthetic character sitting in a row boat reciting poetry, with none of it looking remotely real… But one interesting aspect was how wrong the ambiences sounded. Which in itself is revealing of such low discernment or even awareness of quality & appropriateness, by the hype bros. But it made think…. And it reminded me of something a producer once said to me.

We were doing the first temp mix of 30 Days of Night, and as you may or may not know, temp mixes are a major PITA. You get a few days to throw sound at a new turnover of the film & then have to mix the entire film in a day or two, so it can be used for test screenings. It is literally like trying to sprint a marathon. One of the sound editors had gone a bit overboard with vampire vocals which meant we had to spend time removing lots of them. Not ideal, but not really a problem… Anyway the producer came up to me & goes “Specificity. This is not the last time you will hear me say this word.” I looked at him, a bit puzzled, since this was a fckng temp mix…. But guess what? He never said that word ever again. Not once in the following six months of work did he say that word.

The thing with film making is that absolutely everything is specific.
Every single frame of that film, and every film, has had literally hundreds of people work on it, in every possible way.
The total years of practical professional lived experience of all of those people would be in the thousands.
Absolutely everything is specific.

So when Google released that new video it really is both amusing & revealing of how little they know or even have basic awareness of… They are 100% blind spot.

The audio for that vid was also AI gen, and even listening to a low rez stream, the ocean ambience sounded weird and over the length of the video just one single wave crested & breaks past the boat… and the sound of it was like a kid splashing their friend in the shallow end of a swimming pool. One listen by a human soundie & it would be laughed at & deleted. But this is what they went with to promote their AI thing. Very. very. very unspecific. lol.

So that got me to thinking about how & why it doesn’t work & how they might (not be able to) improve it.

I read a bit last week of a sound library company who are big on legit data-set licensing and how important the ‘human metadata’ is for the supposed use by these AI companies they license to. And I thought to myself: when have I ever searched SoundMiner & chosen a sound based purely on its metadata and filename? That would be close to zero. It doesn’t matter how good the metadata is, one listen and it might very well be entirely inappropriate. Not because the metadata or filename is wrong, but because it does not match the intent & direction of the desired sounds, based completely in the lived reality of the sound editor. Taste. Specificity. Intent. The filename & metadata get you in the ballpark, but not into the specific use.

Google have helped themselves, without permission, to some of my HISSandaROAR videos on youtube for AI training. But even that won’t really help them because their data set is poisoned. Not by me, but by the extremely variable quality of youtube videos. I mentioned in a post previously of how an AI gen company made a demo video with some ocean shots in it & the gen audio had wind on mic rumble on it. LLMs are not weighted against ‘bad audio’ as perceived & defined by human perceptions. Sure, a pro sound library wont have those unwanted artefacts but similarly for all that there are some videos on youtube with ‘nice sound’ of the ocean or a beach or whatever, think about how many are really bad, shot on phone with diffuse bad sound & wind on mic etc…. or many, many others with the right name & metadata but which are entirely inappropriate.

I have no doubt that AI gen trained on all Youtube videos ever uploaded will be able to create amazing AI slop, I simply do not see how it will ever generate specificity. Because most of the data set is low grade crud. Garbage in, garbage out.

I can also imagine how specificity could be achieved. For example, every single sound I have ever recorded for HISSandaROAR, I have also taken photos and I have also shot sync video. When you watch a HISSandaROAR promo video that is eg 60 seconds long, it has usually been cut from anywhere up to ten hours of video, all of which has sync high quality audio. Its the first thing I do when I import media after a recording session. Load the video, load the audio. Sync the audio to the video & output sync reference audio for editing use. So maybe one day in the future, I could have my own little cupboard full of Mac servers chugging away, farting out high quality “specificity…”
But it still begs the question as to why? What is the problem being solved?

There has to be a higher purpose than AI slop.
There has to be a higher purpose than just hyping the AI hype bros.
There has to be a higher purpose than raising venture capital.
There has to be a higher purpose than burning a planet thats already on fire.

Erewhon Station, Hakatere #nz

He wasn’t looking at me…

So thats how they make that sound!?!

Need a new version of THEM, except with mutant Weta instead of ants

GoGo Penguin – What We Are and What We Are Meant to Be

Little Simz – Free

Rufige Kru – Sandcastles

Gale force NorWest Winds recorded gusting around a dome covered radar station, surrounded by concrete walls & a chain link fence.
Two transmission aerials sitting out, exposed to the wind were also recorded, along with two sets of power wires on the access road.
Recorded 32bit 192kHz with Sennheiser MKH8040, MKH8020 and MKH8050 mics
Now released 24bit 96kHz with full UCS metadata and photos.
4.67GB as 24 x 24bit 96kHz .WAV files • 3.1GB download
– 33% Discount expires May 25th

weirdly they demolished & replaced it, soon after I recorded it!

Cornell Lab’s 21 Favorite Bird Videos from 2024
But I wish to mute the music…
Although that solitary snipe at 2.06 needs a beat!

“Your phone isn’t secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing” sounds like a clickbait headline. They tested smartphones eavesdropping by playing audio/dialogue about cat food for days on end and yet got no cat food ads. But they did discover howmany apps send screenshots of user data! And it is very many!! Worth a read re surveillance capitalism
(I suspect the eavesdropping thing is maybe more that the person maybe googled the topic without remembering they did. And THAT will definitely get you cat food ads)

This is funny & tragic at the same time. Local pop hero Lorde released a new song and David Farrier documented the Men Commenting on Lorde including their head shots…
And guess what?

The Seven-Year Rule

Avoiding Skill Atrophy in the Age of AI by avoiding AI?

wise words from a local legend:
Nicky Hager: Investigative journalism in times of trouble

The Hottest AI Job of 2023 Is Already Obsolete​

The history of album art

Zuckerberg explaining how Meta is creating personalized AI friends to supplement your real ones: “The average American has 3 friends, but has demand for 15.”

The ancient psychedelics myth: ‘People tell tourists the stories they think are interesting for them’

How to live an intellectually rich life

You Could Just Choose Optimism

Stockhausen: Sounds in Space

Anukari – 3D Physics Synthesizer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9plUiy-JZY
new GRM Tools!

Korg Phase 8 progress

The Lost Art of Finding Our Way – John Edward Huth
thanks for tip Nathan!

Picton on a Friday night #nz
Canon 5D3 with Zeiss 21mm ZE lens

pä – de quelques mots

Lnefpd and his B1047 filters

Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke – Tall Tales

It is an incredibly dramatic landscape with a narrow winding road leading out to DOC campsite, with lots of scenic walks & access for hang gliding, rock climbing etc…

While on a recent road trip down South, I planned to stay in the DOC campsite. But after checking the overnight temperatures I booked the Lighthouse Cottage, which is a historic building also maintained and operated by DOC. Bookings & info here

It originally held the generator for the lighthouse, before the lighthouse was moved further down the cliff and more visible for boats entering Lyttle Harbour. The cottage had some great historic photos:

The cottage contains a bed plus some bunks, a kitchen & thats it. Toilets are available in the campground. But it did have heaters, which I very much appreciated.

There are old military bunkers on the site, and when I was a youth there were tunnels inside the cliffs, with viewing portals… Sadly these were destroyed during the 2011 earthquake.
The gun emplacements are accessible, after major work to deal with asbestos contaomination.

My motive for the stay was primarily to do some night shoots and it was really fantastic to wander around the area, late at night…

Magic being outside with the moon & the silver sea…

The road back out again the next morning involved a lot of stopping for photos too!

An excellent experience!

“increased creativity”

this was windmap yesterday!
https://earth.nullschool.net/
#nz

According to wikipedia maybe late 2001/early 2002

Eric Sloane’s Weather book (1974)

Its available at the archive here

I love this collection of old weather wisdom thats included in it:

map link:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/HQKhCgZredTyNUT87