Disquiet Junto: Join Weekly Communal Music Projects • Previous: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 etc. • Current: 21
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Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Tag Archives: field-recording

Disquiet Junto Project 0021: 4 Seasons

The Assignment: Create a piece with one field recording representing each of the four seasons.

[ May 24, 2012 / Department: field notes / Comment: 1 ]

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.

Disquiet Junto activity really took off in advance of the mid-April concert in Chicago, and as a result I’ve fallen behind in two particular aspects: one is getting instructions to translators in advance of the projects’ start date; the other is post-project summaries. Instead of doing these summaries after the projects are complete, I’m going to experiment with creating a post here coincident with the launch of a new project, and occasionally update it throughout the project’s development. A new project launched today, this being a Thursday, and it will run through 11:59pm this coming Monday.


There’s a number of interesting projects coming up in the Disquiet Junto series: music + 1, animation, the blues, recycling, water, instrument construction, storytelling, and the 100th anniversaries of the births of both John Cage and Conlon Nancarrow are among the forthcoming themes. But before moving forward, it’s good to take a glance in the rearview mirror. For the 21st project we’re revisiting several distinct previous themes, this time in combination; among them are original field recordings, sonic transitions, and shared samples.

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, May 24, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, May 28, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0011-4seasons. (They will take a little while to populate.)

These are the instructions that went to the participants. To receive them via email each Thursday, sign up at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto:

Disquiet Junto Project 0021: 4 Seasons

Instructions:

Deadline: Monday, May 28, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

For this project you will employ four distinct samples. Each sample will individually represent one of the four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter. You will either construct your own field recordings to represent these seasons, or you will use the following provided samples:

Spring: Birdsong

http://www.freesound.org/people/HerbertBoland/sounds/28312/

Summer: Thunder

http://www.freesound.org/people/Erdie/sounds/23222/

Autumn: Walking in dry leaves

http://www.freesound.org/people/HerbertBoland/sounds/33207/

Winter: Walking in the snow

http://www.freesound.org/people/Spandau/sounds/30833/

Once you have collected your four samples, you will construct one single track from them. The track will be between two and four minutes in length. Each of the four seasonal samples will be highlighted in sequence for one quarter the length of your track, and there should be discernible transitions between the four segments — that is to say, each sample/season should slowly transform into the next. The underlying sonic bed should be constructed only from the four samples in combination — and in that role, they can be transformed as much as you desire. There should be no additional sounds. While a given sample is in the foreground (that is, during its prominent quarter of the overall track) it should remain at least somewhat recognizable.

Length: Please keep the length of your piece to between two and four minutes.

Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0021-4seasons” 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:

If you use any of the four provided samples, please include the source link as reference (per the Creative Commons agreement).

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

The image up top shows Vivaldi, composer of the original The Four Seasons.

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Everyday Bird Song (MP3)

Phillip Wilkerson's ongoing Floridian sound journal

[ May 20, 2012 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The recent slew of tracks uploaded by Phillip Wilkerson to his soundcloud.com/phillipwilkerson account have titles like something out of an ancient haiku practice, albeit one situated in modern Florida. There’s “Osprey at Pine Island FL” and “Midnight Rain at Naples FL” and “Thunder in the Ebb at N Ft Myers,” not to mention the more explicitly contemporary “My Afternoon Commute at Naples Florida.” Most recent is “Sunday Morning Sounds at Palm Island, FL,” which is simply a steady combination of whole-earth white nose and occasional bird song. That’s “simply” as in “elegantly,” not “simply” as in “This is all you have to offer?” It isn’t so much bird song as bird speak, not the full-on melodic enchantment of birds, but the quotidian calls of birds going about their business, which the more melodic bird song is likely as well, but here it is the truly mundane bird call, the one that settles in the background — which Wilkerson has teased into the foreground by recording two solid minutes of it, and making it available separate from its natural environment. The ending of his recording is quite sudden, a file trimmed so immediately it almost recommends the fade out by comparison, but the hard cut is the right approach; it’s a wake-up call from the reverie.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/phillipwilkerson. More on Wilkerson at phillipwilkerson.com.

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Savaran’s “Dubelectrons” (MP3)

A mix of iPad software and everyday field recordings

[ April 23, 2012 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]


It’s like listening to a digital aquarium, not the lovely image suggested by such an idea, of hyperreal CGI aquatic life rendering in slow motion, but the aquarium itself, the machine of rhythmic pumping and cycling fluids that provides a foundation for life. This is one way of registering the track “Dubelectrons” by Savaran, who produced the piece as a mix of digital and analog, of iOS software (the Animoog, specifically) and everyday noise. It is less a song than a slice of activity, a roil of texture-as-rhythm, of electronic burbling as an end unto itself. As Savaran describes his process:

So I was messing about with Animoog on the iPad and thought I would combine some live noodling with some field recordings of household gadgets. The recordings used an induction coil pickup to capture the normally unheard electromagnetic signals in a Sony portable CD player, iPad, laptop and mobile phone. Animoog is probably the best synth app currently available and has a superb level of tactile control using the buchla style keys which allow a huge range of expression when combined with the modulation routing. Anyway, done in one take, warts and all – Dubelectrons…

Savaran is Wales-based musician Mark Walters, more on whom at twitter.com/savaran_music and savaranmusic.wordpress.com. Track originally posted for free download and streaming at soundcloud.com/savaran. Image above is of the Animoog iPad app interface (moogmusic.com).

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Disquiet Junto Project 0011: “Daily Rhythm”

The Assignment: Record an everyday mechanical rhythm, and make something of it.

[ March 28, 2012 / Department: downstream / Comments: 2 ]

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 11th weekly assignment had been on my mind since early in the development of this series: to take an existing everyday sound and to make something of it. We’d explored that idea previously from various different approaches. The very first project involved an especially mundane source audio: ice cubes in a glass. The fifth, a personal favorite, required participants to add sounds to an unedited recorded document of real life. Many other projects employed source audio from the real world. This time, though, the source audio was intended to serve a very specific role: a rhythmic undergirding to the track. In one way, this was an unusual proposal, because by requiring a rhythm, it was perhaps the first project that suggested aesthetic context. Previous projects had left it up entirely to the participant whether or not there would be an inherent rhythm to their track. As I said at the time of its unfolding, if any Disquiet Junto project could be collected into a standalone album, I’d say this is the one.

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, March 15, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, March 19, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0011-motoring. As of this writing, there are 42 tracks associated with the tag.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0011: Daily Rhythm

Instructions:

Deadline: Monday, March 19, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Plan: The eleventh Junto project requires you to make an original field recording, and to then make something of it. This project focuses on rhythm. The field recording should be of some rhythmic mechanical sound from everyday life: a dishwasher, a car’s turn signal, a hard drive, a bicycle, whatever you choose. That recording should serve as the main rhythmic element of your track. You can edit the recording, certainly, but it should remain recognizable; you should only edit it to whittle it down to a core rhythmic section. To it you can add whatever sounds you like, but the rhythm should be central and prominent in the finished track.

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 “disquiet0011-motoring” 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:

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

The projects ranged widely in their source audio, including a door, car fan control, clothes dryer, potato slicer, multiple hard drives, and microwave beep, among many others. One highlight was a track built around a bicycle wheel, which included a video, shown up top. The track, posted at soundcloud.com/emremeydan, is by M. Emre Meydan, who has been providing the Turkish translations to the weekly projects.

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When the Rain Comes, We Run and Record a Sound Bed (MP3)

Marcus Fischer turns nature into a generative instrument

[ March 20, 2012 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]


Generative music has that name because of the manner in which the results follow patterns that resemble natural systems. From Conway’s Game of Life rules to Brian Eno’s Bloom app, real-world environmental activity serves as both model and metaphor. Marcus Fischer recognizes the natural environment as not only a precursor to generative sound, but as a source of generative sound as well. He has an ongoing series of experiments in which precipitation serves as the instrumentalist. In the latest, he captures the sound of hail “striking the tines and soundboard” of a kalimba. The result is lovely even as it approaches wild rhythmic discordance. The familiarity of the sounds and the percussive nature thereof provide such a comfortable context that the randomness of the striking never veers too far from something one might imagine to be a composed or human-improvised performance. Which, of course, it is, in a broad sense: Fischer may not have played the notes himself, but by recognizing a particular force as having musical quality, and by harnessing that force, he serves a meta-compositional role.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/mapmap. More on Portland-based Fischer’s activities at unrecnow.com. The image above accompanies the post, and shows the setup that yielded the music.

Update: Via Twitter, Fischer clarified that contrary to appearances, that isn’t a kalimba: “@disquiet thanks marc. Quick note: not a kalimba, those are the exposed guts of a toy piano. Looks/sounds kind of like one though.” So, I changed the title of this entry. It had been: “The Rain in Portland Falls Mainly on the Kalimba”

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