Track originally posted for free download and streaming at soundcloud.com/radius-9 and theradius.tumblr.com. More on Public Domain at its facebook.com page.

The ninth project in the Junto series was another “shared sample” project, though there were some variables at work. The musicians were given the same samples to work from, but they had a choice. Two choices, in fact. There were two guitar samples, both acoustic, though one employed a slide, and there were two bird-song samples.

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, March 1, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, March 5, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0009-avian. As of this writing, there are 78 tracks associated with the tag.

Here are the instructions that were presented to members of the Disquiet Junto:

Disquiet Junto Project 0009: Cross-Species Collaboration

Instructions:

Deadline: Monday, March 5, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Plan: The ninth Junto project is a shared-sample project, though participants have some choice in the source material. Each participant will produce a single track that combines a source recording of bird song and a source recording of acoustic guitar. Four samples are provided: two guitar, two bird song. You will select one of the two guitar samples and one of the two bird-song samples. You will employ only those two samples in the production of your track. You can do whatever you want with those two samples (process, contort, edit, etc.). The goal is to explore the very different origins of these sounds: one human, one avian.

These are the two options for the guitar sample:

http://www.freesound.org/people/UncleSigmund/sounds/30266/

http://www.freesound.org/people/UncleSigmund/sounds/40866/

These are the two options for the bird-song sample:

http://www.freesound.org/people/reinsamba/sounds/14909/

http://www.freesound.org/people/reinsamba/sounds/32480/

Length: Please keep your piece to between two and five minutes in length.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0009-avian” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: As always, you don’t have to set your track for download, but it would be preferable.

Linking: When you post your track, please include this information:

The source material for this track was provided from these two samples:

[and then include the two appropriate freesound.org links]

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

The biggest surprise for me was that the slide guitar sample was far less popular among remixes than the other acoustic guitar sample. Someone at some stage commented along the lines that if they never again heard the latter chord progression it would be too soon, though many people re-used it to transformative effect, and as always slight variations were, to my ears, as illuminating as drastic ones. One possible reason the acoustic guitar was more popular was it provided a more clear contrast to the bird song than the slide guitar did.

One thing I learned was: have backups available of source material. The great freesound.org site was the location of the four samples, and it is not the most stable environment. It went down during the project, perhaps as a result of Junto participants’ downloading. Numerous Junto members answered the call to make the source tracks available, and in the end everyone benefited from the assistance of Larry Johnson, DJ_Kaboodle, Matt Kane, and Elst Pizarro

The image up top is a still of a kinetic sculpture by Keith Newstead (more info at keithnewsteadautomata.com). His work is tremendous, and I was unaware of it until Junto participant Schrödinger’s Dog employed an image from it as the “cover” to his entry in the ninth project: soundcloud.com/schrodingers-dog.

Each Thursday evening at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership to the Junto is open: just join and participate.

The sixth Junto project was another shared-sample situation, but not all shared-sample situations are the same. They each use the shared sample, or samples, to different ends. In some cases, the musician is left to his or her own devices, so to speak, as to what they elect to do with the sample. In others, not only are the musicians restricted to specific pre-existing sounds, they are restricted in regard to what they can do with them. (This is especially true of the project that followed 0006, project “0007-subtract,” more on which when it is complete.)

In this sixth Junto project, the musicians were provided three public-domain recordings and told they could only use them — and, furthermore, they were to select just one element from each of the tracks and combine them. The audio comes from if not the dawn of recording, then certainly when it was still early morning: the sound is all from Edison cylinders from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, February 9, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, February 13, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0006-cylinder. As of this writing, there are 58 tracks associated with the tag.

Here are the instructions that were presented to members of the Disquiet Junto:

Disquiet Junto Project 0006: “Spinning Cylinders”

Plan: The sixth Junto project is a shared-samples project, in which the participants all work from the same exact sonic resources. Select one distinct element from each of the three following recordings and construct something new from them. (Do not add any other sounds, though certainly use any sorts of processing that you might choose.) All three tracks are archival songs originally released on antique Edison cylinders in the late 1800s and very early 1900s. Their rich surface noise is arguably as much a part of the recordings as is the music they contain.

http://www.archive.org/details/colnyp-15132

http://www.archive.org/details/edba-3871

http://www.archive.org/details/ind-986

Length: Keep your finished piece to between two and five minutes.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0006-cylinder” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: As always, you don’t have to set your track for download, but it would be preferable.

Linking: When you post the track, please include this information:

All audio selected from these antique cylinder recordings:

http://www.archive.org/details/colnyp-15132

http://www.archive.org/details/edba-3871

http://www.archive.org/details/ind-986

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

The results varied widely, which is not only natural, but the point. For some participants, the sounds of the cylinders were subsumed into a drone haze of their own imagination. In others, the selected sounds were given the spotlight — but even then, variety meant that some musicians focused on the more self-evidently musical material in the original cylinders, while others embraced the rough noises inherent in the ancient technology.

One particularly great thing that occurred this week was that the Discussion section got more active, thanks to a query, by Brian Biggs, about what exactly constitutes a “remix.”

(Photo via Creative Commons from flickr.com.)

Tracks posted at freemusicarchive.org.

The Soundcloud.com platform has many strengths. Key among them is how the fluid nature of postings on the service leads to a specific situation that few if any other music-hosting services have approached. It’s one in which a truly fluid sensibility is easily associated with the postings. In other words: a musical sketch — a rough draft or a work-in-progress — makes sense on Soundcloud in a way it does less so, say, on cdbaby.com or in iTunes. Those latter two systems emulate the tradition of the recording as document, as self-enclosed entity. Soundcloud allows for such a thing, with its “sets” feature, but the default mode on Soundcloud is a reverse chronological list. It’s just a thread of whatever the musician uploaded most recently (the majority of Soundcloud accounts appear to be associated with individuals, though bands and organizations house there efforts there, too). Which is why it makes all the more sense that Dustmotes, the ace turntable-textured beatmaker, has launched a new podcast series hosted on Soundcloud. The six-minute inaugural entry is a suite, a medley, of found and homemade bits, filtered through Dustmotes’ trademark old-school-yet-of-the-moment, veering-toward-ambient approach to what could be broadly described as instrumental hip-hop. Which is to say, it’s downtempo, and it’s promising. Looking forward to the sophomore effort.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/dustmotes. More on Dustmotes, aka Paul Croker, at dustmotes.net.

Here’s how it works: on Friday, which is to say yesterday, January 8, I posted an assignment, an “idea” for a piece of music. A deadline was set for this coming Monday, January 9, at midnight, by which time anyone who wanted to participate would post their own original track that acted on the assignment. The first assignment is:

“Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.”

It’s only Saturday evening as I type this, and there are already 51 members of the group, and as of three hours ago a total of 18 completed tracks have been posted, many though not all available for free download. I didn’t know if I’d ever write this post, because I didn’t know if anyone would participate. But participating they are — not only responding in sound to the assignment, but listening to and commenting on each other’s tracks. Collectively, the 18 tracks have been listened to almost 600 times in barely 24 hours, and there are over 70 comments, most from one contributing musician to another. Here’s a stark contrast: the recent Disquiet.com music project Instagr/am/bient has been listened to almost 17,000 times since its launch a week and a half ago, and there have been a total of 31 comments.

The variety of responses to “Disquiet Junto 0001″ is just as thrilling as the number of responses is. The idea of making music from the sound of ice in a glass has yielded a very short story from Mark Rushton, some detailed phonography from Mike Bullock, a lovely mix of buggy whirring and gentle melodic phases from My Fun, and subdued funk from Open Heart Sound, just to point out a few.

I have many ideas for things to do as part of Disquiet Junto, and will roll them out in coming weeks. I also have much more to say about where the project comes from, culturally and sonically and socially, but for the moment, let’s let the assembled musicians’ excellent contributions speak for themselves.

Check out the Disquiet Junto page at soundcloud.com.

PS: The word “junto” comes from the name of a society that Benjamin Franklin formed in Philadelphia during the early 1700s as “a structured forum of mutual improvement.” I learned of it while reading, recently, the Franklin biography by Walter Isaacson, who penned the recent Steve Jobs bio. I highly recommend the Franklin book, and Isaacson’s book on Albert Einstein. I have not yet read the Jobs one.

Update: With a little under 40 hours to go before deadline, there were already 24 entries by as many musicians.

The polar extremes of the holiday season are remarkable for their seeming incongruity, perhaps most notably in terms of psychic ambience: on the one hand, a manic consumerism; on the other, a sense of reflection and hushed anticipation. Guy Birkin ponders the latter by taking existing seasonal recordings, a pair of them, and forming from them something new, something singular.

Both of his chosen source documents are explicitly seasonal. There’s a church choir and there’s a brass band. The congregation sings “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and the band plays “Once in Royal David’s City.” The choir is accompanied by a pipe organ. The brass band, on the other hand, is accompanied by various externalities: that recording was made from a distance and is infused with everyday noise. The resulting work, which Birkin titled “Christmas Ambience,” is very much an extended take on the latter approach to sound, in which context seems to submerge text, yet where the result is an aura with more meaning, more feeling, than the text might have ever had on its lonesome. It’s a slow, solemn piece, yet it seems to glisten in its seeming stasis:

Bikrin also provided some explanation for how he accomplished his piece:

The recordings were pitch-shifted and stretched with FFT, then layered together and the process repeated. The original version of this track was over 18 minutes long, but the most interesting section was its beginning in which the choral and brass sounds are barely audible above the background noise. It took quite a lot of work to simplify the track and concentrate only on the most ambiguous sounds.

Track originally posted for free streaming and download at soundcloud.com/notl. More on Birkin at twitter.com/guybirkin and aestheticcomplexity.wordpress.com.

Start Up/Shut Down is a set of short iterations, remixes, and refinements of Window and Macintosh operating system event sounds. This project features remixed material sourced from Microsoft Windows (3.1, 4.0, NT, 95, 98, Me, XP, Vista, 7, 8) and Macintosh OS (10.0 Cheetah, 10.1 Puma, 10.2 Jaguar, 10.3 Panther) operating systems.

He has plumbed the less than recent history of the major two major operating systems for his noises. The result is an abstract play on sounds at once familiar and remote. It’s a bracing listen, and leaves one eagerly awaiting the Linux B-side.

Kolar is one of the people behind the grew Radius podcast and pirate broadcast, a frequent subject of this site’s Downstream department. He corresponded with Disquiet earlier this year about another kind of “start up” sound that serves as the opening theme of the Radius broadcast (see “Entering and Exiting the Electromagnetic Spectrum”).

Both of the set’s tracks are available for free download and streaming at soundcloud.com/jeffkolar and at the netlabel notype.com. More on Kolar at jeffkolar.us.

Ambienteer, aka James Fahy, sums up what he’s up to as well as anyone might aspire to: “Another experiment scanning the shortwave bands,” he writes of a recent track (MP3). He continues: “Seeking out some odd melodic interlude and once captured, adding reverb and a few other effects and tricks to transform it into a sleepy, filtered soundscape.” He’s describing “A Song From 7.30 MHz.” The song is a brief escape into ethereal nostalgia that he recently posted on his website, ambienteer.com.

His description doesn’t end there. The soundscape, he explains, is intended to be “reminiscent of the imperfect signal, bandwidth and output of my little 1970′s transistor radio.” In other words, the sounds he was seeking out, as he puts it, were intended to begin with to be tweaked, transformed. So he wasn’t so much seeking out an odd melodic interlude as he was a specific sort of odd melodic interlude that would allow him to contort it into this depiction of his aural past. Which means as he was scanning the airwaves, his imagination was already performing a kind of mental filter on what he was hearing. Having located and captured that sound, he then warped it to his desired end. The result is a refreshing wash of sound, neither maudlin nor treacly.

It’s worth noting that Fahy is also the creator of the excellent website rothkoeverywhere.com, where everyday images — of roadsides, threadbare walls, and rust-stained concrete — are shown to resemble the swaths of contrasting colors that comprised the most famous works of painter Mark Rothko. (The one shown up top is titled “French Graffiti II.”) Fahy’s Rothko site is subtitled “The joy of finding his work hidden in the everyday world,” a phrase that could just as well apply to Fahy’s sonic efforts.

Track originally posted for free download and streaming at ambienteer.com. More from Fahy as well at twitter.com/ambienteer.

Each piece is accompanied by an illustration or photograph, itself made available thanks to the Commons (in the case of my article, it is a flickr.com-hosted photo by Ed Yourdon).

I originally published the list-as-essay here, on Disquiet.com, on April 11 of this year. The next month it was translated into Italian, unbeknownst to me, at indieriviera.it. In mid-June it was reprinted at netlabelism.com, as it has been at other sites, including angeldustrecords.com. And earlier this month it was translated into Japanese. And that’s not counting the various discussion sites where it has appeared.

It’s exciting to see it in a new context at Nemeth’s uncertainform.com site. The context is new because it’s a site about “Creative Commons music” that isn’t putting the music front and center (as I tend to here, and as Nemeth does at both actsofsilence.com and theeasypace.com). It is putting the Creative Commons front and center.