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Projects: Instagr/am/bient • LX(RMX): Lisbon Remixed • Key Topics: #sound-art, #classical
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Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Tag Archives: remix

Classical Rashomon (MP3s)

Listening to wild Up's Shostakovich source material for the 13th Disquiet Junto

[ March 30, 2012 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]


When considering the 13th Disquiet Junto project, it’s helpful to remember that the subject material is itself a remix. The Disquiet Junto is a Soundcloud.com-based group in which musicians respond each week to a proposed compositional project. The 13th such project involves reworking a recording of the first movement of the Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a, by Dimitri Shostakovich. The source audio was recorded live by the ensemble wild Up. The project was announced on Thursday, March 29, and is due by 11:59pm on Monday, April 2.

I usually wait until the end of a Junto project to comment on it, but this one is special, so I want to get some thinking out while it is still in progress. It is is worth thinking of the Chamber Symphony as a remix unto itself, because the symphony is an arrangement by another man, Rudolph Barshai. With Shostakovich’s blessing, Barshai took the contours of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 and expanded them into something orchestral. Likeiwse, with the full permission of the Los Angeles chamber ensemble wild Up, the Junto participants are extrapolating from the wild Up recording of the Barshai’s symphonic version of Shostakovich’s quartet. If that sounds meta, then I am accomplishing at least part of my goal.

This 13th Junto project is a particularly special one, because it’s only the second time we are working from not only a commercial release, but from constituent parts of a track on that release. (The previous time was when Marcus Fischer, for the fourth Junto, provided stems — that is the music-production terms for individual subparts — of a song off his Collected Dust recording.) This is an essential distinction. Much “remixing” these days means working with the commercially released version of a piece of music, a single track: cutting it up, moving pieces around, transforming it, adding to it, subtracting from it. But in the case of both the Fischer project and, now, the Shostakovich project, the Junto participants were provided the pieces from which the commercial track was constructed. The wild Up recording of Shostakovich was done live, so the “parts” are in fact 10 simultaneous recordings of the symphony, recorded on variously placed microphones. The folder containing these parts looks like this:

For the time being, those recordings are freely available for download, and even if you are not participating in the project as a musician, I highly recommend giving them a listen. They’re available at each of the following URLs:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2293299/WildupForRemix.zip
http://junto.havesomemusic.com/WildupForRemix.zip
http://lownote.net/audio/WildupForRemix.zip
http://vuzhmusic.com/junto/WildupForRemix.zip

To hear the performance 10 times from different vantages is to get a Rashomon version of the piece. In part, it is simply an opportunity to hear it akin to how the performers hear it: if you listen to the woodwinds, then you’re hearing it sort of how a member of the woodwind portion of the ensemble heard it while it was being performed. But more importantly, to listen to it is to hear different parts of it come to the fore. Because it was recorded live, there is no clear “isolation” between parts. In each of the tracks you hear the entire work, just with different sections given different relative prominence.

Listen to the original recording, also streaming below, at: wildup.bandcamp.com

And for comparison’s sake, here is a performance of the String Quartet No. 8 by the Kopelman Quartet, via youtube.com:

The remixes are unfolding at this very moment at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto.

More on wild Up at wildup.la and wildup.tumblr.com.

(Stencil of Dimitri Shostakovich up top generously provided by Chris Hutson, of chrishutsonart.com. He is based in Peoria, Illinois.)

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Disquiet Junto Project 0008: “Giving Voice”

The Assignment: Rework a spoken-word recording of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography.

[ March 4, 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 eighth project in the Junto series was the first to actively employ voices. Voices had appeared in some of the earlier projects, but entirely at the decision of an individual musician. Here, words were the subject.

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, February 23, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, February 27, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0008-voice. As of this writing, there are 51 tracks associated with the tag.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0008: Giving Voice

Instructions:

Deadline: Monday, February 27, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Plan: The eighth Junto project is the first to focus on the human voice. It is a shared-sample project. Everyone will work from roughly the same source material, though there are choices to be made. You will select a single sentence (or extended, self-contained clause) from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. It is Franklin’s own Junto Society that provided the name for our association. You will either extract the single sentence/clause from this public-domain recording of Chapter 11 from the book:

archive.org

Or you will record your own version of a sentence/clause of your choice (again, as long as it is from Chapter 11). The free text of the autobiography is available here — the link goes directly to the 11th chapter:

gutenberg.org

Whether you use the provided MP3 or you elect to record a section yourself, you will use that recording as the sole audio source material in your work. You can do with it as you wish — cut it up, slow it down, process it, otherwise transform it — so long as at some point, the sentence/clause is comprehensible to the listener. You will not add any other sounds.

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 “disquiet0008-voice” 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 if you use the MP3:

The underlying vocal sample is from this public-domain recording of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, from LibriVox:

archive.org

And use this information if you record your own sentence from Franklin’s book:

Text made possible thanks to:

gutenberg.org

And either way, please include this:

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Many of the participants opted to use the MP3 from the public domain recording of the autobiography, while some did employ an original recording of the text, and at least one participant uses a text-to-speech software approach. Particularly effective were tracks in which the musicians emphasized the meaning of the spoken text, and several singled out sentences in which the word “Junto” appears (Franklin’s Junto is the society from which our Junto takes its name).

As an additional side benefit of the project, many of the participants saw fit to rework portraits of old Franklin, with particular attention paid to his various likenesses that have adorned the $100 bill. The images up top are just four examples. They originate in tracks by, clockwise, from upper left: Matt Nix, Naotko, Stringbot, and DJ Kaboodle.

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Disquiet Helps Inaugurate New Soundcloud Podcast

In which we discuss community organization as a form of curatorial practice

[ March 2, 2012 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]


Yesterday, the great sound-hosting service Soundcloud.com posted a 15-minute podcast in which Jami Welch interviewed me about various Disquiet-related projects, in particular the Instagr/am/bient collection, and the ongoing Disquiet Junto projects.

As of now, the podcast has had over 4,000 listens, which is a rewarding experience. It is helping to get word out about all the amazing work that the contributors to these projects have produced — and, perhaps, expanding the participatory base for the Junto:

Welch is himself a musician. He records as Seams, and he participated in the sixth Junto project, in which people were asked to remix the sound of three archival Edison cylinders (in his case yielding the track “Ebb”). He brought this personal experience to the conversation. (He also tweeted about the production process of the podcast audio, including at one point linking to a screenshot of his efforts.)

It turns out, our conversation was the first in a new podcast from the service, called SoundCloud Speaks. Welch asked great questions. Perhaps the most intriguing thing he said, though, came in the form not of a question but an observation, when he mentioned how there was a “narrative” to the Disquiet Junto. He’s quite right about that. For all the extent to which the individual projects are intended to stand alone, there are various threads connecting them. One of the enjoyable challenges of organizing the series is sorting out what sequence of projects will be most rewarding for the participants and a broader range of listeners.

The podcast is housed on two pages: on the company’s blog.soundcloud.com page, and on its soundcloud.com/community-team page.

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So Percussion Remixes So Percussion (MP3)

Free download of the ensemble turning its drone into an electronic stomp

[ March 1, 2012 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

There is much to enjoy and appreciate in So Percussion‘s freely released remix project, Amid the Noise Remixes, a collection of reworkings of their album Amid the Noise enacted by three of the four members of the group: Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, and Jason Treuting (only member Adam Sliwinski isn’t credited on the collection’s dozen remixes). The first remix on the record makes for helpful comparison with the original, because the original is also available for free download, from cantaloupemusic.com, the website of the releasing record label. The original record came out toward the end of 2006. The remix collection came out in December 2011.

The original, “June,” is a percussion (but not percussive) exploration of tone, thick ringing globules of tone that announced Amid the Noise as something other than So Percussion’s listeners had come to expect. To upend expectations, they opened the album on a track essentially lacking in plosives: in verbal terms, it’s all extended vowels, virtually absent of consonants (MP3). Even at a narrative level, it is willfully remote, a stretch of concentrated stasis in place of thematic development. It is splendid.

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The remix, by So Percussion member Quillen, upends the upending. It takes the original and gives it the jitters, and then once the jitters have set in but good, it adds a heavy thud of a beat that builds over time. If the original version refuted development, this one welcomes it, altering as it proceeds, transforming at a swaggering and geometric pace. Like the original “June” on the original album, the “June” remix announces the remix album’s intentions. In this case, that would be a fun night out.

Get the full set for free at sopercussion.bandcamp.com. More on So Percussion at sopercussion.com.

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Disquiet Junto Project 0007: “Subtraction and Sculpting”

The Assignment: Create a new track by removing from an existing track.

[ February 25, 2012 / Department: downstream / Comments: 3 ]

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 seventh Junto was by far the most restrictive. Everyone shared a track, and the restriction wasn’t merely a matter of not being able to work in additional sounds. The goal was that everyone would create a new track only through the process of removing material from the existing track. Hence the name: “Subtraction and Sculpting.”

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, February 16, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, February 20, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0007-subtract. As of this writing, there are 72 tracks associated with the tag.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0007: “Subtraction and Sculpting”

Instructions:

Deadline: Monday, February 20, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Plan: The seventh Junto project is a shared-sample project. Everyone will work from the same source audio, which is provided below. You will take the provided sound sample and from it make an original work. You will do this only by subtracting sound from the sample. You won’t add anything to it. You won’t slow it down. You won’t speed it up. You won’t cut it up, and you won’t otherwise reorganize its contents. You won’t play it backwards. You will only “remove.” The word “remove” is up for interpretation — but generally speaking, I’d say that it means various acts of lowering the volume of a narrow or wide band of the audio spectrum for either a short or long period of time. And, of course, “lowering the volume” can mean be interpreted to mean “muting.” The act here of “removing” is the sonic equivalent of sculpting something from a marble block.

Please use the WAV file at the following URL:

http://www.freesound.org/people/Luftrum/sounds/48412

Length: Your piece will, due to the nature of the assignment, be the exact same length as the original recording on which it is based: two minutes (02:00).

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0007-subtract” 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:

The source audio for this composition is a recording by Luftrum of waves crashing on the shore of Kalundborg Fjord at Røsnæs, Denmark:

http://www.freesound.org/people/Luftrum/sounds/48412

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

The results were interesting — not just the sounds, but the context in which those sounds arrived. On the one hand, it was by far the most active of the projects thus far, at least in terms of number of tracks. Within 24 hours there were as many tracks, and it was almost the case again after 48 hours. Some contributors of tracks noted that there may have been less comments for this project than previously, and it appears that the individual tracks were listened to less than in the past. That is all quite possible, and not contradictory.

I probably listen to too much of the more arid regions of the catalogs of musicians such as Ryoji Ikeda and Alva Noto to be a fair judge of such things, but I found the minor variations between tracks to be very interesting to observe, especially as they proceeded in sequence in sets of ten down the search-return pages of Soundcloud. A contributor named High Tunnels managed to get a groove in his (“Erosion”), and the contributor jet jaguar (in “Tide’s Out”) managed to get beats by shaping, as it was put in the track’s liner note, the volume.

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