../melody in chaos
Project:
This week’s project is inspired by an aside that occurs at the opening of chapter 17 of William Gibson’s classic cyberpunk novel Count Zero, originally published in 1986.
Process:
I returned to the Prospect Park, Brooklyn, waterfall (pictured, with Sterling) that I used for the prior junto challenge of remixing Lee Rosevere (Thereflectors – Waterfall-love) and made a new recording with the garageband app on my iPhone.…
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Wonderful appearance of the Disquiet0026: Compos(t)ing project on the Unconsumption blog, run by Rob Walker, who also mentions my track as a highlight. So cool…
…As noted here the other day, the most recent installment of music/sound/art site Disquiet.com‘s ongoing series of “assignments” for electronic musician/composers had an Unconsumption-y theme: “Record the music to a PSA using sounds sampled from your garbage bin.”
The theme of this week’s disquiet junto project was creative reuse — call it recycling, or unconsumption, or upcycling, or compos(t)ing. Four objects from garbage pails at work or home were developed into an original musical track that would be used as background music for a PSA about recycling.
We were allowed to transform the sounds of these elements, but only lightly, so as to respect their inherent sonic properties.…
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This was the first stab at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info project #0024, which involved creating alert tones for phones (ringtone, email, text and event). It became too orchestrated, however, and I had to rework it to create what I eventually posted to the group: Thereflectors – Call-pop-disquiet0024.
This kinda became a fictional 80s sitcom theme, though, and seemed fun enough to share if only for that.…
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PROJECT:
This week’s junto project was about “functional music.” We were charged with creating four individual sounds that serve as alerts for digital communications. They will be in these categories:
1) email arrival, 2) incoming phone call, 3) new IM received, 4) calendar event alert
The goal is that the four alerts will work together as a suite — that is, that they will complement each other, yet be distinct and recognizable from each other.…
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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.…
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The 20th disquiet.com junto project in May 2012 explored the inherent creative limits of a mobile app. All participants employed the same app to complete the project.
Everyone working on this project used two instruments. One of those instruments was NodeBeat, an app available for iOS (iPhone, Touch, iPad), for Android, for Blackberry, and as a cross-platform (Flash) implementation.…
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sound 1: field recording – downtown new york city subway 6 train weekend service disruption announcement and surrounding ambience. recorded with iphone garageband.
sound 2: constructed beat – iphone garageband drum samples
sound 3: synth – programmed iphone animoog
minute 1: the drum is primary, backed by stabs and swoops of the synth and cut up portions of the subway announcement.…
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My contribution to the 17th week of the disquiet.com junto. The challenge was to take 30 seconds of a field recording, and slowly and seamlessly transition it into 1 of 2 given pre-existing tracks. Sounds could be added and the source tracks manipulated in any way. The first five seconds of the field recording and the last 5 seconds of the pre-existing track, however, were to be left untouched, aside from fading in and out.…
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Sandpaper scratch led me to a funk break while the die roll kept rattling in my head. The main sounds are pretty much straight from the source wavs, with a little compression to even them up, and a couple loops got some reverb and/or resonance for flesh and liquidity. Everything’s cut up by hand, laid over a timeline the old-fashioned way.…
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For the 13th Disquiet Junto project, the Los Angeles classical chamber-music ensemble wild Up provided us individual stems from a live multi-track recording of the first movement of the Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a, by Dimitri Shostakovich. We were invited to make something new from this source material, but were asked to use only the source material — as few or as many of the source tracks as we desired.…
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The 11th disquiet.com Junto project in March 2012 required me to make an original field recording, and to then make something of it. It focused on rhythm. I captured audio of an N train (from inside the train) going over the Manhattan Bridge as well as sounds from the Canal Street and Atlantic/Pacific Street stations in Manhattan and Brooklyn, respectively.…
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Dowsabel (chris wells, Columbus, US) loves obsolete words, and he took his musical name from the Latin for sweet and beautiful. His music lives up to the promise in his name, and his remix of my remix of a collision of bird sounds and acoustic guitars provides exponential entertainment and purpose to my track (which is below his track notes).…
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a thrush and an acoustic guitar. like a supercalafragalistic cartoon on your shoulder.
The source material for the 9th disquiet.com Junto project from March 2012 was provided from these two samples:
guitar:
“Chord progression on mic’d acoustic guitar. A Major, c# minor, b minor, E Major.”
avian:
“Song thrush on a spring evening, 17th of march 2007 in a forest north of Cologne, Germany.”…
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my 2nd contribution to the disquiet junto. this one involved turn-of-the-20th-century edison cylinders, which i fed through resonance, delay and finished with a light flange. the drone reminds me of guitar picks gliding down piano strings, which is soothing to me (since home is a metallic-droning megatown).