Anti-Bias of Listening Deeply

Getting around cognitive biases (like “hindsight is 20/20” or a confirmation you expect) is akin to Listening Deeply. I don’t mean paying more attention gives better insight. I mean what matters is the entirety of your sonic awareness.

There is a composer / meditative approach to sound pioneered by Pauline Oliveros called Deep Listening. I have practiced it, all too briefly with her, but mostly with others taught by her. It is actually a discipline you can be certified to teach, which I am not, so here I refer to it as Listening Deeply.

It is something that has become an integral part of my life not only as a composer and improviser, but also in how I deal with my “monkey mind” working in technology: constantly replaying scenes from recent memory, kicking the big red “whatever you do don’t analyze this” button, attempting to deterministically predict the future based on my own excruciatingly limited knowledge of a continuously adaptive world, getting in my head while washing dishes, etc. Listening calms and centers, it leaves me more open to inspiration.

My psychological states notwithstanding, when in this mode of Listening Deeply I have noticed the ease at which I “hear sounds coming” and am not so surprised by them. I attribute it to how this kind of specialized listening can enhance the physical act of hearing complex sounds, which you may be surprised to learn is a serial activity.

record scrrrrratch…! amirite?!

Yes, difficult to fathom, but it’s (mostly) true. Of all our senses, only the sense of hearing is fundamentally serial because the anatomic structures we (and other non-human animals) evolved to survive are thanks to the nature of complex sound waves.

We may not realize that our consciousness is not called upon to immediately ascertain the streaming series of discrete pitches heard “one at a time” that lets us know it is a certain type of birdsong, breakfast frying in the skillet, or a bamboo glade. Those are all immediately recognizable mental models that we’ve learned to intuit through the experience of hearing them over and over.

So, I want to pull your focus away from the things we hear, the interpretation our brain implants about the world around us, what the confounding mystery of Cognition formulates as a ‘sound object’. Instead, consider the nature of sound as the vibration of a thing interacting with a surrounding medium through the promulgation of waves, ultimately picked up by tiny bones in our bodies.

Our ear canal is tuned finely to capture the most complete spectrum of sound allowed by the evolutionary phenotype of the human need to process sound waves. That is to say, nature selected the profile of our (quite good, but not best in the animal kingdom) hearing that pulled us along our evolutionary path to be the listeners we are today, one waveform cycle at a time.

This matches our instinct about Music. Our intuition is linked to our instincts, so even though we don’t know how to improvise jazz, we know it has a cool rhythm. Some folks nod to a hypnotic house beat, others to a hiphop groove, and the percentage of those who create all this music are as minuscule as the stapes of the middle-ear is to the rest of our skeleton.

Taking this one step further, any topic regarding sound is inextricably tied to the phenomenon of Time, and if there’s one thing Surprises in Complex Systems depend on (including jazz and networked software systems alike), it is that the Arrow of Time does not stop.

Now, back to the action of what it means to Listen Deeply. Without going into Fast Fourier Transforms and logarithmic graphs of resonance and frequency response, I ask that you trust a trained musician to tell you that our brains are REALLY GOOD at piecing together these ‘sound objects’ from the serial intake of frequencies by our (hopefully two good stereophonic) ears. For now, we’ll also ignore the fact that you hear yourself primarily through the bones in your head, and some modern amplification and hearing-aid technology exploits this in wonderful ways. Not the point.

The point is also not that I am somehow moving us abstractly “beyond” the objects our brains know about. No, the point is listening so that we preempt these thoughts. We are, in fact, expanding our mental model by experiencing the context of the complex (sonic) system in action. Sound familiar, Chaos Engineers? 😉

Try it.

Give yourself a time limit (it can be super-short, seconds or minutes), and only listen. If you are “thinking” that you’re listening, you are not listening. If you find yourself anticipating what will be heard next, you are not listening. Naming objects or recognizing things? Try not to (see “no thinking”). On the other hand, if you find yourself surprised that you could hear the fly coming long before it zips by your head, you’re on the right track.

Once I am in the zone with this (inspiration is another topic I will revisit soon), it feels like I am constantly inhaling, like I have to stop doing it because I need to exhale. It becomes so obviously visceral that it helps to link it to breathing so I don’t forget to actually inhale. You’ll hear often that a good way to calm yourself and get into a meditative attitude is to focus on your breathing, it’s a great way to ease into Listening Deeply as well.

In this fugue-like state, sounds simply… become. They are not anticipated, but emerge out of an indeterminate landscape. All sounds begin to be equalized; not in volume or strength, but with importance. They build their own relevance to each other, resonant or not, and soon an entire aural ecosystem emerges in your ears. It is an action that slows the world down and brings your brain into wonderfully abstract, unfamiliar territory where discoveries are there to accident, to where resilience be.

Making discoveries leads to building new mental models and more dimensional understanding. Having an intuition about the sequence of sounds that make up the courting pendulum of a hummingbird means it doesn’t seem as harsh than if you were surprised by its sound when not listening to all of the sounds.

The bias of what may have happened and what could occur is not as beneficial as deeper learning from all of the complex system, not just trying to interpret the loud bangs when its disturbances surprise us.

Feels a bit like an ode to carpe diem, but in perspective also shouting for discovery in experiment!

For more on Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening, visit https://www.deeplistening.org.

Meander Sonor Ode

(a listening deeply gift from the urban inside)

A speaker faced down the bench
where we sat, directly
adjacent to the Duet.

Their aging laptops looping maybe scooping
the sound from their devices,
strung and hung in air plus wired,
synth sound supple and rounded
towards their combined long-tone sculpting.

As the bench began to resonate,
this pool of glacial tones clustering
and extended found the grains
of smooth planked architecture,
drawing the room in sound.

Such sand-dune-shaped sonority
left a freedom in long form structures.

The minor clink following crunch or crinkle,
shuffle and creak leak from wooden blocked chairs
like hexahedron slid mid string.

Instead then
a bowed extent
alongside a weaker vibration wood,
shifting underneath the wound six.

Swimming hands proximate
and glanced through
inflating resonances,
a subtle but driving mix
in the center
of feed loop backs,
underneath the bridge.

Careful by-finger tilted wrist
slight and steady,
each formant-mans emitted
layered in oscillation,
breeding combinations where the space itself
breathed against its moorings.

Then the building hummed
some hidden motor, vent, or rotor sung.

Crick the other colored side
in delicately high frequencies
that appeared in the sonic atmosphere
like fireflies drifting into dusk.

Complexity relationships
distilled into parallel,
submerging the fragile bubble
into silence.

(September, Nashville, 2019
Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel @ Proper Sake)

Music for WorkCats

I have a few Slacks (as in chats, not pants) with #music and #jams channels where I feel obligated to post music I find good. I love sharing music. It’s why I got involved and loved my years on WUVT and WMUC DJ’ing, why I have always had a side-‘job’ as a DJ, why I made mixtapes in high school and recordings of my sets to share.

This was going to be a tweet thread but turned into something longer. So as a peek behind the scenes, here’s how’s my workday sonic rotation works!

The Sonic Atmosphere

There are a lot of times I have nothing playing, but I am listening to what’s around me, inside and out. Often I go on listening walks for both meditation and exercise. I might even pick up an instrument in my studio and play a bit.

Do I have it on vinyl?

If I think of something, like a style or a specific artist, I will first check the stax of wax. It could be anything from Zappa to John Cage or Autechre to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

Is it easily accessible vinyl?

This is actually a requirement of the previous item, except that it will depend entirely on the artist or piece in question. If I have a hankering for an original UK release of an early ’70s Jethro Tull album, I’m gonna have to hit the big shelves.

Do I want random play?

Then it’s to iTunes, hit random, ~2600 albums worth of tracks can show up in any order the pseudo-random (it plays repeats a LOT) algorithm chooses. The fun part here, of course, is family members experiencing the avant-garde nature of a huge swath of my collection (e.g. Merzbow’s 13 Japanese Birds: Karasu just came on random followed by a track from Funky Desert Breaks).

Do I want a specific artist or style not on vinyl?

Self-explanatory I think. If I have the artist on vinyl, that wins. If I don’t have it, I check my digital collection. Very rarely I will come across something I know I have somewhere in 500+ CDs but not on-disk and I’ll take that chance to rip it.

Do I want a specific artist I don’t have or want more of?

The first place I check is <them>.bandcamp.com, then a Discogs search. YouTube helps with more obscure stuff, too. Pro tip: if you’re sharing music, check if it’s on Bandcamp first! Tracks are all embeddable.

On the BBQ porch with only an internet-connected streaming device?

That’s easy: Somafm. My go-to is Cliqhop or Groove Salad(s). Drone Zone is always great too, and some of the loungey stuff is great dinner music. I also never miss Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.

What I don’t do?

I don’t buy streaming services. I donate to Somafm, I use my own collection. I won’t bother listing them, but there are some I won’t even use embedded. I’m pretty firmly on the David Crosby and Marc Ribot side of this argument.

That’s it!

Easy enough, but I do have a huge collection to my advantage. I understand that streaming services are very easy for a large majority of people to be exposed to new music, but this is why I share. Hit me up on twitter if you want some more music suggestions!

MusiCirTechUs

Plenty of people who work in technology are musicians. Plenty of humans are musicians, and all of us are listening, even those who cannot hear. In my travels through datacenters and software, I have come across musicians like myself who have not only done double-duty with their computer science and creative lives but also relate and interweave them. If they’re like me, they cannot break them apart. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of us. We all have different stories, came into the worlds of music and of technology from different angles and different backgrounds.

I’ll hazard a guess that when you think about the words music and technology together, it’s likely you’re thinking about music technology. This isn’t surprising, a great deal of music technology surrounds the production, performance, and recording of music. Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), studio recording, guitar pedals, analog control voltage synthesizers, DJ decks, Ableton Live, Max/MSP, Joe Armstrong running Erlang on Sonic Pi… the list goes on and gets fractally esoteric. All great examples of technology facilitating the art of music, but I’m interested in what’s happening the other way around.

The original impetus for this post was a comment someone made that raised an eyebrow… it made me briefly question the ideas I have about the field of resilience in distributed systems somehow relating to music. But humans share such an indisputably organic relationship with music and musical training that I knew I wasn’t just some crazy person, the connection was there and it was real. How else do I have the job I have now? This pushed me to want to find others that share my views on the close relationship music has with software and operational reliability.

Take Chloe Condon (Dev Advocate at Microsoft), a self-described recovering musical theatre actress. Now, my musical theatre training and tastes are preeetty specific, but I can relate. She pulls her theatre training into her work unforgivingly, and that is awesome because I fear that. Inspiringly passionate about the connections between her performing arts expertise and working in tech.

Recently chatting with her at SCaLE, Chloe clued me in about someone close to my wheelhouse: “Opera Singer turned Software Engineer” Catherine Meyers. Her Mozart could’ve been an Engineer talk correlates music theory and counterpoint to building software. She emphasizes the similarities of pattern recognition between the two disciplines, especially as it relates to learning. Preparing a new piece or constructing a score interpretation is 100% relatable to the software engineer learning a new language or building in a new framework. I especially love how she emphasizes the importance of having different types of minds together in one group, in other words, don’t be afraid to hire a music major.

These folks that are trained in synchronizing common ground through the experience of playing in musical ensembles carry a distinct advantage. Diversity and communication are the trademarks of both successful musical groups and software teams. Establishing common ground through shared learning is crucial to the modern team building and operating distributed software. It is obvious to me that ensemble music not only relates to complex systems but also to highly coordinated teamwork, to wit:

I’ve conducted marching bands, wind ensembles, and jazz bands... They are complex, highly interdependent systems.

Tanner Lund (SRE at Azure)

This couldn’t be more true! I have been in an experimental vocal trio, a free improv quintet, a blues band, a jazz group, an early music ensemble, a 330 piece marching band, uncountable operas with full orchestra and cast, chorales of few to many, piano accompanists by the dozen. There is nothing in any of these situations that doesn’t require common ground and shared experience.

In her blog post, The Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming, Jessica Kerr (Lead Engineer at Atomist) introduces the concept of symmathesy, a state of collaboration that is integrated with learning, all as part of the system (even the tools are team members). She does so by taking us back to the foundations of modern opera in Italy, adeptly adopting the term ‘camerata‘ from the Florentine Camerata example she uses, applying it next to social circles of painters and artists in later centuries, and then to teams creating software. She considers how our mental models evolve and how common ground is reached through the shared experience of a varicolored team from all sorts of different backgrounds, ultimately making the team more powerful. “We are developing whole new ways of being human together” she states, and to me, that’s nowhere more clear than with multi-disciplinary collaboration.

The CS / Math / Music crossover is clearly one I have encountered a lot, from early on. While I was studying voice and music technology in undergrad, I vividly remember walking with a good friend in downtown Blacksburg, and her saying to me “I could never major in music, there’s too much math.” I used to laugh at this because there’s really only as much math as that you wish to encounter. Want to dive into tempered tuning and Kepler’s mathematical ratios for perfect fifths? Go for it. But you know, these days I look at that statement through different lenses. Yes, there is just enough math! And if you study music, you may run the risk of studying computer sciences. * Please be aware that some practitioners of both have reported sudden bouts of inspiration and lightheadedness due to euphoric discoveries that cross disciplines.

On the subject of cross-discipline study…

I find a lot of what of I learned in music performance transfers directly to public speaking.

Amy Tobey (SRE at GitHub)

As a student of opera, I couldn’t agree more. Long ago I had a theatre teacher tell me “you will never be happy not onstage.” I didn’t know what she meant until I myself experienced exactly the same kinds of challenges and rewards with giving talks and public speaking as I did singing Mozart or Fauré in front of large audiences. I discovered that my experiences onstage presenting music are exactly the same headspace as when I’m talking in front of a room of computer people about distributed systems.

When I gave my talk Measuring Distributed Databases Across the Globe at Southern California Linux Expo 13x (2015), a very enthusiastic artiste-cum-techie approached me afterward. They had decided to move into software engineering after art school and said my talk, which combines theories and ideas in music with those of observing and operating huge distributed databases, was inspiring. They had been trying to reconcile their internal ‘artistic identity and self’ with their passion for coding, and I had opened their eyes to a new way of considering it.

I will never forget this. It was exactly like having someone come up after one of my experimental music performances (which are also heavy with technology) being blown away and asking how things worked. Even if one mind out of a thousand is influenced by what I’m doing, whether it’s music or technology, I’m building the camerata through sharing.

Eureka! The audience contributes to symmathesy, too. There are tons of examples; the feedback of a crowd during a DJ set, participants of David Tudor’s Rainforest, someone opening a candy wrapper at the symphony. There’s no getting away from the audience, however small. John Cage preached throughout his career as an avant-garde composer: listeners are participants. Every performance is something new because there are different people in different places every single time. The title of this piece is a play on Cage’s Musicircus, an amalgamation of disciplines and performers occupying the same large space together with the audience.

So consider the sheer experience of music and how it feels oddly in-step with how we think about technology, and take it one step further. Many of us trained in the practice of music consider it so much a part of our bones that it seeps into our work, we don’t have a choice, the pattern recognition pathways seem to match up. They fit into our psyches in a comfortable way, share the same affinity for abstractions, incorporate complex and overlapping systems that stretch the human capacity for comprehension.

Do I have an aptitude for music because I’m successful in understanding the practical application of complex things? Or do I have an aptitude in technical operations because I have been trained in music and theatre arts? Doesn’t it make sense that the diversity of music is a human quality, not a disciplinary one? Why should our work as computer scientists, software engineers, database operators, and network gurus be any different?

Temple Grandin talks about the world needing all kinds of minds. In her view, different people fall amongst three “categories” of thought: Picture (common on the autistic spectrum), Pattern (code, math, music), and Verbal (writers). It resonates with me a great deal because I always feel like I’m thinking in ways others are not. More specifically, though, it underlines how different styles of thinking can bring entirely new perspectives on a particular question, and how crucial diversity is to human endeavor, if not evolution itself.

This post started out as me being passionate about a subject and wanting to search for others who were. I had some bullet points of my own to insert, but as I searched and connected with others in the field, I learned new things and this blog transformed from a list of Twitter handles to real human relationships. I have grown to understand what Kerr means when she says that ideas are for sharing and collaboration, not hoarding and heroism. I for one am claiming my spot in the camerata that pushes us forward through a New Renaissance.

Living 4’33”

I haven’t experienced Mute’s STUMM433 release yet, it’s not due out until May. The proceeds from its sale go to charities, so that’s a big huge plus for it already. Pulling big names like Depeche Mode and Moby will hopefully make for good sales.

This is also not the first time 4’33” has been “recorded” for the purpose of a record release and not as part of a live performance. Frank Zappa has done it, Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening Band plus others, and some even got sued for it. However, this tweet from the John Cage Trust, of all places, put me on guard:

Immediately, I think… “cover”? How? What is this photo?

So once I start looking into this, I learn about the accompanying videos. The Laibach one featured on the Mute website (which cleverly includes a shot of the Cramps Caged/Uncaged homage from 2000) is a kind of short silent film. I imagine many (if not all) of the other videos will be similar. So it’s telling that they refer to it as a “cover” and use words like “interpolation” to describe this collection.

The terminology now makes sense to me. These are not performances of the original score, but takes on Cage’s own expansion of the idea that it could be performed as anything, at any time, for any duration (like the versions of 0’00” from Song Books). Presenting an alternative action during the “silence” of a representative version of 4’33” is not so much a reading of the score as it is an interpenetration of events. Which is fine, even enjoyable. Nevertheless, the very idea of 4’33” in the popular eye is surrounded in jokes and doubt, so it is ironically funny to think that a recording imparts the same sort of wonder that a live experience of it does.

Spoiler: it doesn’t.

In addition to witnessing it several times, I performed 4’33” at my undergraduate recital (on classical guitar!). Let me tell you… it is much more than just the sounds around you and what leaks in. It is a visceral experience that isn’t captured in a recording, where the very best of intentions can only pay tribute to the surreal actuality of sitting there, enduring the seconds as nothing happens. The tension in the audience is very VERY real. Sometimes funny, sometimes raucous, but regardless the performer must stay focussed. There is simply nothing that gives the work the heft that Mute describes without experiencing it firsthand.

As a kind of funny postscript… when I was near the end of my time in grad school, where I rigorously studied voice and Cage’s music, I was asked to participate in a production of Theater Piece, a work of simultaneous but unrelated events. Somehow, CF Peters (the sole publishers of Cage’s scores) heard of this production, that I was involved, and assuming me responsible tracked me down to demand royalties be paid for staging the piece. Except – for once – I wasn’t staging it, I was merely performing, and explained as much. I wonder… had I said we weren’t performing Theater Piece, only doing a cover of it, if they would have left us alone. 😉

Finally, I recommend No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage’s 4’33” by Kyle Gann if you’re curious about the mythology around this composition. It is far from my “favorite” piece of Cage’s but is assuredly the most important in American musical culture.

So You Want 10 Albums?

Ok Bob. You asked for it. With one caveat.

In no particular order, post 10 of your favorite albums, one per day, which made an impact on you. Post cover, no explanation, nominate someone each day to do the challenge.

I think these games are fascinating windows into peoples’ aesthetic, but because of FB’s sorting and selection criteria, I see maybe TWO of a particular friend’s ten-albums-once-per-day series. So, if I am taking the time to compile, I want to make sure you see them all. Plus I’m all into the cross-platform sharing thing and doing this on my blog helps me spread the word of good music (and keeps me writing). And being a DJ there are plenty of previously posted lists, check out previous blogs for more of my listening habits and recommendations.

One final note: this was fucking hard, and I had to mostly stick with certain genres (I can’t even begin to describe the numbers of vocal music recordings that have influenced me, for example). To cull influential albums down to 10 is worth the challenge alone… indeed, mine goes to 11. It could be an entirely different list tomorrow. Nevertheless, every one of these has a story (and not necessarily musical ones), but in keeping with the guidelines of the challenge, they will remain untold… for now. 🙂

Pink Floyd ::: The Dark Side of the Moon
Jethro Tull ::: Stand Up
Sound Track ::: The Cooler
Miles Davis ::: Kind of Blue
Naked City ::: Grand Guignol
Autechre ::: LP5
Shpongle ::: Are You Shpongled?
Peter Gabriel ::: Us
Squarepusher ::: Selection Sixteen
Lusine ::: Serial Hodgepodge
John Cage ::: Sonatas & Interludes for Prepared Piano (Joshua Pierce, piano)

Fullerton Art Walk Menagerie

Here’s my own collection of aural glass animals for you to enjoy… a mix of groovy and beaty dreamscapes (3:38 @ 256K cbr mp3), recorded live for the Fullerton Art Walk on Friday (April 6), accompanying tattoo artist Jon Kelly (known for Olde Tyme Tattoo) as he applies his latest in biomechanical fashion.

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…by the way a vinyl mix…