Monthnotes March 2025
Hello friends. My name is Duncan and you're reading "Hello From Duncan" - a newsletter that rounds up my creative input and output every month. You're getting it because you signed up for it, and you can unsubscribe at any time with the link in the footer.
I'm sort of in a weird headspace with this newsletter because "my creative input and output" doesn't feel of great relevance in the world right now. But there's definitely enough of the internet dedicated to "the world right now", so perhaps there is some value in writing stuff that isn't about that.
Definitely during my trip to the UK last month, I found it really hard to have any conversation that didn't involve "the world right now" in some form or other. Mostly along the lines of "this is terrible, what can any individual do about this?"
I think where I've landed is that the most useful place where I can contribute is in my local community. So instead of spending my time on social media posting about how terrible everything is in the world, I'm going to try to put that energy into making things better here in Malmö instead. That position is largely informed by the thing I shared a couple of years back around being a person of place, and by this more recent Oliver Burkeman newsletter. Best bit of the latter:
Step back for one moment and consider the absolute outrageousness of the idea that focusing on the concretely real in this way – on looking people in the eye or walking in the woods, on building organisations or solving problems, on bringing creative works into the world or paying attention to your kids – that any of this somehow automatically constitutes “retreating” or “disengaging” or “looking away” from reality! Only someone who had completely taken up residence inside the news could possibly believe that.
If you're having trouble dealing with "the world right now" right now, that might be an approach you might find useful, too. And for the foreseeable future of this newsletter, that's going to be my focus. I'll try to stick to it.
In Malmö, we're lucky to have a small Degrowth group that meets on a fairly regular basis. I've been attending for the last six months or so, trying to figure out ways in which we can bend the arc of the moral universe away from a growth-at-all-costs mindset.
One of the things we'd like to do is work with the city library to curate a small display / shelf that features some good, accessible readings about the degrowth movement for people who are interested. So over the weekend we went to the library, and got a feel for what was already in their collection and what we might need to order in.
Next step will be to try to actually get a meeting with the library folks to see if they'd be up for this, and if so, how it would actually work. Then it'll just be a case of assembling the list of books, writing some recommendation text around them, and promoting the fact it exists.
On 1 March, I played two 30-minute performances in the concert hall in the arts centre of my former hometown of Helsingborg. I played an On Standby set, using pieces of the original sound artwork, mixed live so slightly different each time.
I really like this way of working - compose out of the box, but perform within it. Basically like DJing your own music. It delivers a predictably-good experience with low risk of technical failure, while still allowing for quite a lot of control and response in the moment. The big downside is that it's not so visually interesting for someone who wants to watch the musician. It basically just looks like I'm checking my email. But for shows where I'm sat at the back of the room and/or not the centre of attention it works great.
It was a funny feeling being back in Helsingborg. Living in Malmö has allowed me to develop the (a) connections, and (b) creative confidence in my musical work to both get and confidently deliver performances like this. I probably wouldn't have been able to do it if I was still living there. Anyway. First gigs of 2025 done.
May there be more.
Speaking of gigs, a couple of people said to me in the UK how much they enjoyed the YouTube version of my "Skyward" performance at Inkonst in September 2024. So I've released a recording on Bandcamp.
pappasan
Nerdy details: The piece, performed on two Norns, an OP-1 and three Chase Bliss pedals, is about what’s happening above our heads. The first part uses my ufo script, which modulates a supersaw drone composed by Jonathan Snyder with the current position of the International Space Station. The second part uses my gridofpoints script for generative sequencing, with heavy use of the Chase Bliss Onward pedal. The third part uses data on how many objects we’ve sent into space over the years to drive my loudnumbers script, which is sending MIDI to the OP-1. It was mixed and recorded live through the TX-6, and then lightly mastered in Logic Pro X.
I’m really interested in what can be done with data and sound in a live context. Last year I performed a solar storm from 1859, and at the moment I’m looking into what could be done with this live earthquake API. I’m also trying to figure how much “explanation” to do around the data. Do people want to get a detailed explanation of what they’re hearing? If so, should that be before, or after, the performance? Or during it, in some way?
Thoughts are welcome!
I responded to a little survey recently about sonification, and I thought the answers might be of interest to a wider audience.
What do you love about data sonification, and why?
I love the way that it helps people to feel things about data. The dominant style of visualisation is to strip back anything remotely emotive from a dataset and have it supposedly "speak for itself". That's a fool's errand - any dataset inherits the biases and feelings of the people who brought it into the world. Sonification doesn't allow for this fiction - and as a result it's a powerful and effective tool for data storytelling.
What is your favorite data sonification tool, resource, and/or workflow?
I'm really proud of the work that I did with Jamie Perera and Jordan Wirfs-Brock on Open Sonifications. It's partly a method for doing sonification work without a computer, and partly a manifesto for thinking about data and sound in new ways. You can check it out at opensonifications.net.
Also, please feel free to include a link to one of your sonification works that you’d want me to include with your name!
On Standby is a 10-hour sonification work designed to be listened to overnight while sleeping. It lives on the Loud Numbers website, right here: https://www.loudnumbers.net/onstandby
Update on project "make a small physical device that plays ambient sonifications of local API data. Weather data, air quality, ISS position, earthquakes, etc".
The broad goal here is to make a little box that gathers live data from the internet and plays music from it. Ideally it'll be standalone, so you plug it in and it starts. I'm starting out with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, and an Adafruit Speaker Bonnet with two lil 3W 4ohm speakers.
Progress so far:
- I installed Raspbian and got sound playing out of the speakers.
- I tried to run Sonic Pi but the hardware was struggling a lot. I think I'm going to have to run something simpler.
- I tried to run Pure Data and had much more success, but I've never used Pure Data before so it took me a while to figure out how it works.
- Eventually I got there, and I figured out how to make a PD patch start automatically from the command line (which means I can get it to start when the device boots).
Gaps so far:
- I'm gonna need to source reliable data feeds.
- I'm gonna need to figure out what that data should sound like under different conditions.
- I'm gonna need to figure out a way to install a physical knob so I can turn the volume up and down.
I think the next step will be to get more comfortable with Pure Data, get it pulling data from the web and making sound from it. Then I can work on making that data sound nice.
Update on project "a choose-your-own-adventure way to navigate through poetry on the web, where it's possible to get stuck in, and to escape, narrative loops" (I'm really going to need better codenames for these.)
We've got a prototype together in code (my bit), and V1 of the poem has been done (not my bit). It all seems to work on a technical level. Need to fold in some WebGL shaders (not my bit) and see what we want to do with the typography (my bit).
Feel pretty confident that we'll be able to get somewhere good with this, but the poem's in Swedish and I don't know if we'll do a translated version. Let's see...
OK. That's enough for this month. Be well. See you in April.
Duncan