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.

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

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).

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.

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”

Before reading anything else, before reading any further, or clicking on a link, give this a listen. Just hit play and listen. And don’t dig in too deep. Hold off on listening for tone, or for dynamics, for narrative or processing. In essence, hold off on any of the kind of interpretive listening that this site is about on a daily basis. Instead, just listen and just focus on one task. The task is to try to identify the sound:

When you’ve got a solid guess, head over to the link below, where a consensus has built regarding its identification. The track is by Scanner, whose work deserves the sort of listening admonished against above. This track isn’t Scanner exploring sound. It is Scanner assisting others in exploring sound. It’s part of a broader project, which he explained when he posted the audio:

“Minute of Listening is a creative learning project through which Sound and Music hopes to enable every child in the country to gain access to a huge diversity of music and sound and, for sixty seconds each day, to focus on the richness and enjoyment of the act of listening. Children from the ages of 3 to 11 will be participating with their class teachers, testing a variety of approaches to engaging with Minute of Listening and exploring the act of listening.”

The project began on January 4 of this year and runs through March 30. Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/scanner. More on Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) at scannerdot.com. More on the project at soundandmusic.org:

And, yes, the image up top is of Scanner at age 6.

The photo up top was associated with the MP3 when it was posted by TouchRadio, which attributed the image to Mike Harding, who is half of the Touch label’s management (along with Jon Wozencroft). At the touchradio.org.uk website, there is little if any information, just this single line: “Recorded live at Passionskirche, Berlin @ Spire Live, closing CTM12.”

The recording captures an audience waiting together for an event to occur. The document now persists as something a second, asynchronous audience listens to, waiting for it to reveal its meaning.

Track originally posted at touchradio.org.uk. More on the festival at ctm-festival.de.

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.

The combination of performed and everyday sound is a many-splendored thing. Often as not, the former is provided a backdrop by the latter. The relative distinctions lend much of such a work’s tension. The performed music expresses the impact of the human mind and physicality on an instrument, while the everyday noises express the external chaos of life beyond our control. It’s a kind of after-and-before shot of the cooked and the raw of the noise of our lives: that which we make of sound, and the sounds that surround us. Different musicians handle the balance in different ways, sometimes leveling the playing field, making the distinction between these two sides less self-evident, perhaps by “playing” the everyday sounds through sampling and processing, or perhaps by bringing random or less formal elements into their own playing.

In the track “Scattered” by ioflow, the procedure was as follows: after improvising on an electric piano, he “then went out to the park to capture some sounds. it was a bitterly cold, intermittently rainy day. came back and combined the two recordings, slicing, processing, effecting, and sequencing.” It’s a lovely combination. Indeed, the processing of the “real” sounds and the electronic nature of the “played” sounds helps find a common ground. Perhaps the strongest association, though, is provided by the improvised nature of the piano playing, the loose correlation of melodic elements that engages the imagination rather than directing it as a formal composition might have.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/ioflow/scattered. More on ioflow, aka Josh Saddler, at museimpromptu.net and twitter.com/ioflow.

He explains his process on “Automatic Doors” as follows:

This v.experimental piece is a recording taken 5/3/2012 of the automatic doors of a supermarket in Addlestone, Surrey. It’s a really amazing sound yet I can’t think why they’ve chosen such noisy, if harmonic motors.

I’ve simply layered three versions of the recording, each warped a little in pitch, to thicken things, and slightly effected the overall mix with some eq and a little reverb.

I hear a sound that reminds me of childhood days playing in tower block lifts, with the sound of the wind whistling through the elevator shafts in which we travelled along with the clunks, clicks and the singing electrical motors.

The result is a quietly harrowing tour, the rattling of chains as if in some paraphysical prison. Often a fade-out can sound at a track’s end like an easy way out for the composer, the close of a piece of music just decreasing in volume until it hits silence. But here, it is as if some nightmare train is slowly pulling away from the station, going into the dark distance. And just as it’s almost out of earshot, there is one final primal whine.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/ambienteer. More on Ambienteer, aka James Fahy, at ambienteer.com and twitter.com/ambienteer. He’s based in Guildford, Britain.