This week’s disquiet.com junto project was about drones, and we were charged with composing a piece of drone music using five of twenty provided source tracks. The source tracks (link below) were a series of drones made by Mystified (aka Thomas Park: @mystifiedthomas) from kazoo, bottle, slide whistle, and didgeridoo. We were not allowed to add any new sounds, but we could transform our selections any which way we wanted.
The drone, in turn, was to take the form of a palindrome. Once the track reached its midpoint, its structure was then to continue to unfold as a mirror, or reverse, of its first half.
So, for better or worse, after a lifetime of writing and recording all sorts of music and sounds, my first “drone.”
I used: bottle 1, didgeridoo 2, bottle 4, kazoo 2 and slidewhistle 2.
Vibrato and sine waves struck me as palindromic, so I applied these two effects in varying degrees to 4 of the samples, as well as resonant filters, reverb and distortion. I won’t go into every example here, but I did attempt to program all the effect parameters as palindromes (e.g., vibrato flips between 12 and -.21 semitones, resonance filters at 151hz w/ 77.7% resonance and 99.9% wet output, reverb decays of 2.2 secs., etc… you get the drift).
The piece runs 2:12, and is split into twelve 11 second intervals, with the midpoint happening at 66 seconds.
The didgeridoo in vibrato runs the length of the piece and has the forward track in the left channel and the reverse in the right, and the slide whistle does the same thing across the center 44 seconds. The other three tracks fade in and out at various multiples of 11 seconds, and each is run in reverse in the track’s latter half, mirroring whatever it did in the front.
In the end, i just felt like making some noise, nothing too melodic. The screaming thing in the middle is the slidewhistle run through a tube-amp distortion simulator and reverb. In fact, I never realized how much I have needed to run a slide whistle through a distortion pedal until this assignment. :^D
Looking at the waveform, it seems this is not a perfect sonic palindrome, but i’ll takekat whatahw i canac geteg with this one.
Peace,
Westy
—————————————————————————————–
Samples courtesy of Mystified, aka frequent Disquiet Junto participant Thomas Park:
archive.org/details/Junto_23_Samples
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info