Recent interview with me at freemusicarchive.org on Creative Commons, Disquiet Junto, and more • Projects: Instagr/am/bient + LX(RMX): Lisbon Remixed • Key Topics: #sound-art, #classical, #generative • How to Submit for Review • Elsewhere: Twitter (Disquiet + Junto), SoundCloud (Disquiet + Junto).

Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

tag: junto

Disquiet Junto F.A.Q.

Frequently asked questions about the communal music-making group

[ April 25, 2013 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

This was last updated on 2013.04.25. New and edited information is marked with a delta symbol (Δ).

Q: What is the Disquiet Junto?
A: The Disquiet Junto is a group based on Soundcloud.com where musicians respond to weekly, fast-turnaround assignments to compose, record, and share new music. The idea is to use restraints as a springboard for creativity.

ΔQ: How long has the group been around?
A: The first Junto project began on the first Thursday of January 2012, and the series has continued weekly since then.

ΔQ: Is there a list of all the projects?
A: Yes. Here: “Disquiet Junto Project List.”

ΔQ: Is there an email list for announcements?
A: Yes. To subscribe and unsubscribe, go to: tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto.

ΔQ: How does the group work?
A: A project is announced each Thursday — usually in the afternoon or early evening, California time — and it is due the following Monday by 11:59pm (that’s 11:59pm wherever you happen to be). You upload your track to your Soundcloud account. Then you associate it with the Junto group. And you include the appropriate tag with the track, as delineated in the project’s instructions, and include that tag in the name of the track (the tag is the word “Disquiet” followed by a four-digit number followed by a hyphen followed by a keyword, such as “Disquiet0003-glass” — again, the number and keyword are provided as part of the assignment). Be sure to click the “Add to group” button below your track’s waveform, and select the Disquiet Junto group.

ΔQ: Why isn’t my track showing up in the Junto group?
A: Read the previous question and follow those directions. If that doesn’t work, get in touch with the group’s founder and moderator, Marc Weidenbaum, at marc@disquiet.com.

Q: Should I provide any additional information?
A: Yes, please. Please include with your uploaded track some description of both (1) the compositional approach you had undertaken, as well as (2) the equipment and process you employed to achieve it.

Q: Do I need to participate every week?
A: Gosh no. There is no intent to pressure anyone to do any more than they have time for.

Q: Do I need to do this alone?
A: These can be group projects, certainly. You needn’t work by yourself, though that appears to be the most common approach by Junto members. (And there will be some projects in which collaboration is actively required.)

Q: What is a “junto”?
A: The word comes from the name of a society that Benjamin Franklin formed in Philadelphia during the early 1700s as “a structured forum of mutual improvement.”

Q: What is “electronic music”?
A: Anything you want it to be. Drones, beats, drones with beats, abstract, melodic, tuneful, discordant, phonographic, synthesized. Go for it.

Q: Does my track have to be “ambient”?
A: No, not by any means. That mode, broadly defined, will likely be a not uncommon approach for participants, but it won’t be the only one.

Q: Is there any restriction on length?
A: Not necessarily. It depends on the project. Some will stipulate length. Others won’t.

Q: Do I have to set my track to be downloadable?
A: You don’t have to, but it would be appreciated. Also, some assignments may involve remixing previous project entries, and if your track isn’t downloadable, it won’t be easily remix-able.

Q: Can I post more than one track for a project?
A: No, please. Just focus your efforts on one track. (That said, there may be occasional Junto projects for which you will be asked to do more than one track, but that will be part of a specific assignment.)

ΔQ: How can I communicate with other Junto people off of Soundcloud?
There’s a lot of Junto activity on Twitter. There is also a discussion tab at the group’s Soundcloud page. There will likely be a forum added to Disquiet.com in the near future.

Q: Are those really the only questions?
A: So far.

Q: What if I have more questions?
A: Get in touch with Disquiet Junto founder Marc Weidenbaum, at marc@disquiet.com.

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Disquiet Junto Project 0068: deriv.deriv.cc

The Assignment: Combine three songs from the first release of the new deriv.cc netlabel.

[ April 18, 2013 / Department: downstream / Comment: 1 ]

20130418-derivcc

Each Thursday 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 in the Junto is open: just join and participate.

This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, April 18, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, April 22, 2013, as the deadline.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0068: deriv.deriv.cc

This is a shared-sample project. Create a single new piece of music by employing the selected material (see below) of each the following three tracks. All three were initially released on the new netlabel deriv.cc, and were posted to the Internet with a Creative Commons license encouraging derivative reworking. In fact, the impetus for the label, which was founded by C. Reider, was to draw attention to the intrinsic benefits of allowing for derivative works. Like deriv.cc, this project — one in an ongoing series of netlabel remixes undertaken by the Disquiet Junto — is intended to address the unfortunate popularity of “ND” (i.e., “no derivatives”) licenses among netlabels. Please only use the following material in your piece; you can transform in any way you choose, but do not introduce any new source material.

1: The final 20 seconds of “The Find Beauty, Even in the Mundane”:

http://deriv.cc/stream/d1/02.ogg

2: The first 20 seconds of “Immaterial Girl”:

http://deriv.cc/stream/d1/04.ogg

3: The portion of “Libertarian Entertainment Automaton” that runs from 1:10 to 1:30:

http://deriv.cc/stream/d1/06.ogg

Deadline: Monday, April 22, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your track should have a duration of between two minutes and five minutes.

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

Title/Tag: Include the term “disquiet0068-deriv” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: Per the spirit of a Creative Commons license allowing derivative work, set your track in a manner that allows for attributed, commerce-free remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:

More on this 68th Disquiet Junto project, the intent of which is to draw attention to the benefits of a Creative Commons license allowing for derivative works, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/04/18/disquiet0068-deriv/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

This track is composed from material extracted from three pre-existing tracks (“The Find Beauty, Even in the Mundane,” “Immaterial Girl,” “Libertarian Entertainment Automaton”) by C. Reider, all of which were released on the album The Conjuncts on the deriv.cc netlabel, and were themselves derived from the following: “Garden City” and “Ventilation” from Tulse Hill by Hannah Marshall; “LichenWall” from Gardening by Steve Moyes; “Eighteen Events” from Not One Nor by Daniel Barbiero; “Awkward Customer” from [m2012/30-09] by Restive; “cues two three” and “cue six” from Cue Sheet by Sighup; “Sending Dreams to She Downstream” from Pocket Suite by He Can Jog; “The Palsgraf Scale” from Weights and Measures by Gurdonark; “Bonus Track” from Pale by Leo Bettinelli and Pol Nieva; “Haunted Grace” from Haunted Grace on SoundCloud by Jess Lemont a.k.a. Be A Waterwolf; “Ochiita” from Gently Annoying by Xesús Valle; and “Once More With Intellect” from [m2012/30-09] by Restive.

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Disquiet Junto Project 0067: Odyssey Machine

The Assignment: Compose music for a phrase from Homer's The Odyssey.

[ April 11, 2013 / Department: downstream / Comment: 1 ]

20130411-homer

Each Thursday 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 in the Junto is open: just join and participate.

This assignment was made in the mid-afternoon, California time, on Thursday, April 11, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, April 15, 2013, as the deadline.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0067: Odyssey Machine

This week’s project is an adaptation of the ongoing National Poetry Month project at SoundCloud. The Junto will, collectively, produce new fragments of The Odyssey of Homer. A die and access to text-to-speech software are required. There are seven steps.

These are the steps:

Step 1: Roll a die twice (or two dice once) and add the results. This number will tell you which of the first dozen books of The Odyssey by Homer you will be working from.

Step 2: Roll a die three times (or three dice once) and multiply the results (i.e., if you get a 3, a 5, and a 6, then 3 x 5 x 6 = 90). This will tell you which line of the book from Homer’s Odyssey you will be working with.

Step 3: Locate that line in the version of The Odyssey at this URL:

http://archive.org/stream/theodysseyofhome24269gut/24269-0.txt

Step 4: Select the phrase that begins at your assigned line and ends with the next full stop (that is, with the next period) in the text.

Step 5: Record the selected text as audio using an automated text-to-speech tool. You can alter this text in any way you choose, but make certain that it remains inteligble.

Step 6: Record a new piece of background music for the spoken text. The sole source material for this background music should be the audio that resulted from step 5. You can transform the source audio in any way you choose. You can add up to three full seconds at the beginning and end of the spoken audio to allow for the music to build up and to fade out.

Step 7: This is the final step. Combine the audio from steps 5 and step 6 into one track, adjusting the relative volume levels as necessary.

Deadline: Monday, April 15, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work will be the length of or a few seconds longer than the track that resulted from step 5 above.

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

Title/Tag: The title of your track should be formatted as “National Poetry Month: [Your Name] (disquiet0067-odysseymachine)” — with, needless to say, your name in place of Your Name. Dispense with the brackets, too. Also, please additionally tag your track with the “oneliner” tag, which is part of National Poetry Month project.

Download: Please consider setting your track in a manner that allows for attributed, commerce-free remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Also: Please consider doing this as well: Join the group at https://soundcloud.com/groups/national-poetry-month-collaborations and share the track there.

Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:

More on this 67th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/04/11/disquiet0067-odysseymachine/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

This project was inspired by the National Poetry Month event at SoundCloud, more details on which here:

https://soundcloud.com/groups/national-poetry-month-collaborations

The source text for this project is William Cowper’s translation of The Odyssey of Homer, available here:

http://archive.org/stream/theodysseyofhome24269gut/24269-0.txt

Image of Homer up top from wikipedia.org.

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Junto x Brickman, Together Again

The 55 parts of the 65th Disquiet Junto, pieced back into a whole

[ April 8, 2013 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The project that is currently underway, the project that ends this evening, is the 66th in the Disquiet Junto, a series of weekly communal music projects that explore restraint as an engine for creativity and productivity. It’s a tribute to, to my knowledge, the first regular Junto participant, Jeffrey Melton (aka Nofi), to pass since the group was formed back in the first week of January 2012. The project from the week prior, the 65th, was a less bittersweet, if no less reflective, communal activity. For the 65th project, we broke a single, hour-long composition of “ambient piano” by Jared Brickman into pieces, and then randomly assigned each piece to a different participant, ending up with 55 different parts. After the project was complete, Brickman generously offered to then stitch those 55 parts back into one long piece, which can be heard here:

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/jaredbrickman. More on the original project at disquiet.com

The browser-based tool that segmented the Brickman track for this project was coded by Disquiet Junto member Ken Mistove, more from whom at kenzak.com. More on Brickman’s source audio at soundcloud.com/one_hello_world.

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Disquiet Junto Project 0066: Communing with Nofi

The Assignment: Collaborate posthumously with the late Jeffrey (Nofi) Melton.

[ April 4, 2013 / Department: downstream / Comment: 1 ]

20130404-nofi

Each Thursday 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 in the Junto is open: just join and participate.

This assignment was made in the mid-afternoon, California time, on Thursday, April 4, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, April 8, 2013, as the deadline.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0066: Communing with Nofi

This week’s project is a tribute to the late Jeffrey Melton, the talented musician, best known on SoundCloud and Twitter as @nofi. Melton passed away a few days ago, on March 30, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he lived with his wife and seven-year-old son. He was 42. Melton had been involved with the Disquiet Junto since the very first Junto project, back in January 2012, and he early on volunteered to create a Twitter list of the handles of participating Junto members.

The theme of this project, the 66th in the weekly Disquiet Junto series, is “posthumous collaboration”: communing through music.

These are the steps:

Step 1: Download the following live session of Jeffrey Melton performing. It was recorded in June of last year. Warning: it’s fairly sizable, at over 350 MBs:

http://nofi.org/media/2012-06-15-Unwind-live-session.mp3

Step 2: The track is quite long, so select a segment of between 2 and 5 minutes. The best way to go about this might be to do it at random (just put the needle down, as it were), but of course feel free to listen at length and select a favorite section.

Step 3: Once you have your extracted segment, set the opening of the track to fade in.

Step 4: Set the ending of the track to cut out suddenly.

Step 5: Listen to it several times, to get to know it.

Step 6: Record yourself performing live along with the segment you have selected. Any instrumentation is fine. Just no voice. Be sure to play alone for approximately 10 seconds after Melton’s performance cuts off.

Deadline: Monday, April 8, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work should be the length determined in steps 2 and 6 above.

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

Title/Tag: Include the term “disquiet0066-nonofi” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: Please set your track in a manner that allows for attributed, commerce-free remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution). I’d like to potentially combine all the pieces into a single composition, and this license would allow me to do so easily.

Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:

This track is a posthumous collaboration with Jeffrey Melton, aka Nofi, who passed away on March 30, 2013. It was recorded live in April 2013 atop a June 2012 Melton live recording.

More on this 66th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/04/04/disquiet0066-nonofi/

More of Melton/Nofi’s music at:

http://www.nofi.org/

Read Melton’s obituary here:

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/fortwayne/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=163988588

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

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