HarSMedia

SB Tweet Digest #8 (september 2010)

october 01, 2010.

This September _90_ SoundBlog tweets twittie went out to a modest (but slowly & steadily increasing) number of SB Twitter followers.

No-one's being followed back (at least not via the soundblog twitter account). So followers have to be interested & willing :-) This of course is not very 'social' and sort of counter the prevailing Twittiquette, but I will stubbornly persist in treating the SB's Twitter as a dynamic replacement of what used to be the blog's 'Heard/Read/Seen' link list. As a link- and information aggregator and an online memory bank, for me it works like a spell.

[25191375621] A new free web service called paper.li is taking the use that is being made of Twitter accounts for link sharing to a next level, by automatically generating a daily digest in newspaper format from links posted by a Twitter user and his/her followers.

Being all about link sharing, paper.li works like a charm for SB's Twitter. Here, as an example, is what the September 28th edition of The SoundBlog Tweets Daily looked like:

sbtd

I think this is a wonderful way to present (and follow) some sub-streams of potentially useful information within Twitter's avalanche of chatter and babble. I'm curious to find where paper.li will be taking this in the future. At the moment there is little (or rather: no) possibility for interference with the precise content and presentation of the daily digests. Also, there's no archives yet, so no turning back to previous editions. Personally, given the daily volume of SoundBlog Tweets, I would prefer a less frequent update. I'd keep the name, but gladly settle for a weekly edition of The SoundBlog Tweets Daily. If it were moreover possible to somehow indicate what and what not to include, it would be near to perfect. Also the possibility to add a couple of non-Twitter generated lines and/or links would be useful.

On the other hand, all of these, evident, user wishes for personalization of course would ask for a more sophisticated set-up that gives users access to some sort of a controlling interface and what else, which might just spoil much of the 'one script, one output' simplicity and elegance of paper.li as it is now.

[You can subscribe to The SoundBlog Tweets Daily by clicking the 'alert me' link in the header and providing an email address for receiving daily one-line alerts of its updates.]

Here's a selection of September's SB-tweets, extracted them from the SB-Twitter's timeline in xml-format ( * ):

It's a curious task that a group of 2nd year tech studs at Twente University saw themselves assigned: build a real musical instrument of microscopic scale. 'Real' meaning that the thing should have vibrating parts that produce audible (via amplification) tones (unlike, for example, the even smaller nano guitar that was created at the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility in the late 1990s). They managed to come up with a functioning structure. It has strings which have a fraction of the thickness of a human hair and that are plucked with microscopic weights. They called it the micronium. At the end of the article there's a video of the micronium's presentation, at a conference on micromechanics. I thought that was just too silly and had trouble sitting through it (even considering the fact that of course these were tech guys trying to be cool and 'funny' at their tech-presentation). It made me wonder though whether one could think of something sonically interesting to do with a micronium, something that would justify its micro-size. And that, I guess, explains this tweet ... :-)

I was very pleased to hear Matthew Herbert's 're-composition' of Mahler's last completed orchestral movement, the Adagio of his Xth, unfinished, Symphony. Rather than going for herbertmahler a simpleminded mix, mash and end with classical crossover bullshit, Herbert came up with a personal annotation of the 'original text', for which he took the Adagio's recording to a number of Mahler and death-related places, where he played (parts of) it back, in different ways (like through car speakers sealed into a cardboard coffin) & re-recorded, added a viola solo played at Mahler’s grave (somewhat in the spirit of the curious Art of the Funerary Violin, which I should remember to come back to some time later), carefully mixed in some of the environmental sounds ... The result makes for truly worthwhile listening, which to me felt like I sat reading (maybe dreaming) the score, outside underneath a big tree on a very hot summer afternoon. Lots of space & quiet. Almost silent.

Five and a half years ago at De Appel I stopped my reading at 977,443 B.C. Alexander Mayhew, on August 27th at the Amsterdam Stedelijk, stopped his at 930,599 B.C. ... That's the progress the reading of On Kawara's 'One Million Years' has been making over that period of time: some 47.000 years. That makes for an average of 8.545 On Kawara years read yearly. So, somewhat more than a century still to go... :)

Also - but not only - because of this.

American composer R. Luke Dubois reports in this New York Times Opinionator blog article (including a selection of sounding examples) on the coming to an end of his creating a piece of music daily for the period of one year (september 2009-2010). It reminded me of an intention I expressed at the end of the report that I wrote in april 2004 on the fine the My2k music/sound diary project, for which a group of musicians each recorded 10 seconds of sound/music on every of the 366 days of the year 2000. At the end of that long post I wrote: "I will keep a sonic diary, by making ten second long recordings every single day of the year, in all the remaining years of my life whose number is prime."
How time passes! ... Within but few months it'll be 2011. Which, indeed, will be the first year whose number is prime after I made my promise.
I might have forgotten all about it.

Thanks R. Luke hattip, for reminding me :-)

After seeing soccer fans being forbidden to blow the wonderful but alien Vuvuzela during the matches of the Dutch and other national competitions, the UEFA banned the instrument also from European competition matches. Because the sonic volume produced by the plastic tweeters could be harmful to the ear. But also because of some abject sort of cultural protectionism. An absolutely ridiculous as well as highly questionable, patronizing, measure. The UEFA's announcement coincided with the Dutch cultural web daily Hard/Hoofd re-publishing my Final Soundtrack. Hard/Hoofd also uploaded the full file to SoundCloud. I'm glad they did. For indeed, it might be a while before the Vuvuzela once again will sound as majestically & grandiose as it did in the South African stadiums this summer ...


Harold Schellinx - Finale: The Final Soundtrack by hardhoofdaudio

...

Next SB Tweet Digest in November.

! Follow @soundblog _( twittie )_ iokoo@ wolloF !

notes __ ::
(*) For a Twitter account with TWITTERNAME one may access this xml-file (add a page variable to limit the size of the output if there's a lot of tweets) at http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/TWITTERNAME.xml?page=1. [ ^ ]

tags: twitter, digest

# .391.

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