Disquiet Junto: Join Weekly Communal Music Projects • Previous: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 etc. • Current: 21
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: software

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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Sonic Infrastructure (ArtPractical.com)

The imminent future of San Francisco's role in the global sonic arts

[ April 21, 2012 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]


I have written an essay about the growing prominence of San Francisco as a provider of sonic-arts infrastructure services. It appears, for free reading online, at the journal artpractical.com.

The essay is part of an issue devoted to sound, which includes an introduction by Tess Thackara (who invited me to contribute), an interview with Paul DeMarinis by Renny Pritikin, a discussion between artists Joshua Churchill and Chris Duncan, Matt Sussman on Infrasound, Liz Glass on the Tape Music Center, an interview with Jacqueline Gordon by Ellen Tani, a profile of Ethan Rose by Bean Gilsdorf, a discussion about the forthcoming Invisible Relics exhibit at Park Life (parklifestore.com, a gallery in the San Francisco neighborhood I have long called home: the Richmond District), and an essay by Aaron Harbour drawing from his experience as a curator and DJ.

For my piece, titled “Sonic Infrastructure,” I use three examples of individuals and organizations whose work in sound art involves providing technology to artists and institutions to realize their ideas. I interviewed Shane Myrbeck (shanemyrbeck.com) about his work at Arup (and his own art) and Barry Threw (barrythrew.com) about his work as a solo developer (which includes developing Oval‘s OvalDNA software, a screenshot of which appears up top) and at Obscura Digital. And I also touched on Scott Snibbe‘s substantial contributions (snibbe.com), such as his work on Björk‘s Biophilia apps.

Read the essay, “Sonic Infrastructure,” at artpractical.com.

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SoundCloud Primer on NewMusicBox.org

Social music is about participating not promoting.

[ April 13, 2012 / Department: field notes / Comment: 1 ]


The great website newmusicbox.org, for which I’ve done some writing in the past, invited me to put together a SoundCloud primer, and it was a welcome opportunity. Titled “The Procedural Hows and Theoretical Whys of SoundCloud.com,” the piece is as that suggests a mix of basic steps on employing SoundCloud to host one’s music, and some more contextual/philosophical considerations of why SoundCloud functions as it does. The how-to section is straightforward, and the opening section is a lengthy overview the history of failures and attendant anxieties in relation to music hosting. These next three graphs are the among more exploratory, and so I post them as a window into the piece, which I hope people will find useful. The main idea is to emphasize that social music is about participating not promoting:

Step 6: Dig in. There is far more you can do on SoundCloud. The coverage above is intended simply as an introduction. For example, you can create Sets of tracks that provide additional context. You can join Groups, which in addition to collating tracks by some semblance of shared cultural activity (field recordings, serialism, toy piano) provide for discussion beyond the confines of a single recording. There are Soundcloud apps that allow you to do additional things with and to your tracks. Everything described above is free, albeit with a space limit on data storage, but you can elect to pay for a premium account and access additional resources. (The limits to SoundCloud are worth noting. For one thing, this is all “fixed recordings.” If you specialize in algorithmic music, you’ll be posting finished recordings, not live generative sound. Also, SoundCloud is a business, and as such monitors what is posted; it is especially attentive to copyright violation, so if you tend toward the aggressively plunderphonic, be prepared to have your track removed—or your entire account for that matter.)

Step 7: Make it new. The structure of SoundCloud suggests itself as a neutral space. In many ways, it has defined itself as the anti-MySpace. Where MySpace became overloaded with design elements, SoundCloud keeps it simple. This simplicity suggests SoundCloud less as a place and more as a form of infrastructure—if MySpace was a city that never slept, SoundCloud is the Department of Public Works. Its elegant tool sets provide structure but don’t define or fully constrain activity. For the more adventurous participants, SoundCloud is itself a form to be played with. Some musicians have used the “timed comments,” for example, to annotate their work as it proceeds. Others have fun with the images associated with their tracks, posting sheet music or workspace images. Some create multiple accounts for different personas or projects. Others have used the limited personalization options to colorize the embeddable player and make it look seamless within their own websites and blogs.

It’s arguable that the most productive users of SoundCloud recognize the fluid nature of the service and post not only completed works, but works in progress. They upload sketches and rough drafts and rehearsals: this keeps their timeline freshly updated, helps excuse the relatively low fidelity of streaming sound, and further invites communication with listeners—many of who are fellow musicians themselves.

In response to a subsequent comment on the article, I realized that the first time I ever employed the SoundCloud embedded player was February 17, 2009. That was a big step for me, because I had been wary of embeddable players, as is the commenter on my post. My hesitance remains, but I have, clearly, been more actively engaged with them. My general sense is that anxiety about whether those embeds might some day go down are rooted in a pre–digital era concern about fixed recordings. The thing that makes SoundCloud tick — and tick more loudly, I’d argue, than Bandcamp, a peer service — is that it jettisons the album model, or certainly subsumes it dramatically, in favor of a largely chronological feed of audio. The interface comes close to acknowledging that the tracks are in many ways closer to ephemera than, say, to a compact disc. I’m not saying that is the end of the story, or even a good thing. I am saying that it is closer to how people consume music these days, in a digital era, than most other tools allow, and that proximity between interface and habit is a subtle cause of SoundCloud’s success.

The main reason I was grateful for the opportunity is that the readership at SoundCloud is comprised primarily of musicians, notably of composer-musicians, and the means by which musicians communicate, and use music to communicate, has been an increasingly important focus for me.

Another reason was that part of the purpose of the piece was to provide tools to participants in the site’s new “Sound Ideas” projects, which are not disimilar to the Disquiet Junto series I have been running on SoundCloud. This is what newmusicbox.org’s Molly Sheridan had to say about “Sound Ideas” when it first launched:

The concept is this: We’re going to ask you—yes you, sitting there, reading this post—to create music and share it. And the “we” isn’t just anyone, either. It’s John Luther Adams, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Sxip Shirey, and Ken Ueno.

Once a week we’ll post a prompt from each of these four composers which they’ve crafted to inspire sonic creation. If the idea resonates with you, write, record, invent or otherwise draft something new using any method that suits your style and skills, then share it in comments. You can embed a SoundCloud player, a YouTube video, a link to a score file—whatever works.

Here at NewMusicBox, we talk about music a lot. This project is our way of shifting focus and actually making some music, too. We can’t wait to hear what everyone creates.

That shift that Sheridan describes registers with me, in light of the Disquiet-commissioned projects I’ve been working at here.

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The Data of the Buddha (MP3)

The first edition of the drone box gets a late-model remake.

[ February 24, 2012 / Department: downstream / Comments: 3 ]

Early on in “Pure Buddha Data,” a recent piece of music by Stephen Stamper, a four-note riff comes briefly into sonic view. The fourth of the notes is so subdued that it might not even exist. That final note trails off into the lush ringing field that is the majority of the work, a thick lawn amid which the riff occasionally blooms. The brief melody is not dissimilar to the theme from the Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, those Morse-like tones with which aliens and humans find a common if rudimentary language by employing math transformed into music. In the movie, the music is harmonically sound, which lends the meeting the air of good will.

The notes in Stamper’s piece will be familiar to anyone who has turned on the first of the Buddha Machines. It is a rare melodic moment from the device, designed by the duo FM3 to emit swaying drones and drone-like effluence until its batteries run out. In the brief note appended to the track, Stamper mentions that the sounds we’re hearing are “A first generation FM3 Buddha Machine left to run through my Pure Data performance patch.” (Pure Data is the name of a graphic programming environment.) That patch appears to be the same software process that he employed in the production of a recent contribution he made to the Disquiet Junto project, when the collective remixed a track off the recent Marcus Fischer album, Collected Dust:

Listening to both tracks is to let the mind slowly reverse engineer what it is, exactly — well, more to the point, inexactly — Stamper’s patch is doing. It isn’t a destructo approach. It’s more of a thickening and quickening agent. It speeds up the material in a manner that it loops back on itself, accruing layers into a sonorous denseness that, somehow, doesn’t fully lose the gentle qualities of the original source material.

Both tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/bitsnibblesbytes. More on Stamper, who is based in London, at bitsnibblesbytes.wordpress.com and
twitter.com/bitnibblebyte.

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The Disquiet Junto

Association for communal music/sound-making on Soundcloud.com. [Update: May 25, 2012]

[ January 27, 2012 / Department: projects / Comments: 2 ]

The Disquiet Junto is a group I founded on Soundcloud.com. The purpose of the group is to use constraints to stoke creativity. Each Thursday evening I post a clearly defined compositional assignment, and members of the Junto are to complete the assignment by 11:59pm the following Monday. The initial Junto assignment was made on January 5, 2012, the first Thursday of the new year.

The inspirations for the group’s existence are numerous. There are the weekly Beat Battles sponsored by Stonesthrow, and also hosted at Soundcloud.com, in which dozens if not hundreds of participants craft instrumental hip-hop beats from a shared sample. There is the tradition of Oulipo, whose embrace of creative constraints is personified by one of its co-founders, the author Raymond Queneau. Several comics artists with whom I have worked, including Matt Madden, have bonded under the banner of Oubapo, and there is, in fact, a related musical tradition, which goes by Oumupo. (I was reminded that the Iron Chef of Music projects at kracfive.com were also an influence on my thinking. They were for many years a big part of the Downstream department here.)

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.” In Franklin’s honor, the third Disquiet Junto project explored the glass harp, an instrument he experimented with in the development of what he christened the armonica.

The idea for the Junto arose after the completion of a Disquiet project at the end of December 2011. That project, Instagr/am/bient, was more loosely curated than other such projects I had commissioned, beginning in 2006 with Our Lives in the Bush of Diquiet. Instagr/am/bient proved quite popular, with over 20,000 listens and almost 4,000 downloads in its first month, and this success suggested to me that I experiment with an even looser format — the irony being that this “looser” format is, in fact, dedicated to constraint. Much to my surprise, the very first Junto project resulted, in four days, in 56 original pieces of music by as many musicians. The assignment was to record the sound of ice cubes in a glass and to make something musical of that recording.

If for the musicians involved, the Disquiet Junto is an experiment in creative constraints, for me it is as much an experiment in what I would describe as “community organizing as a form of curation.”

Visit the group — and, better yet, sign up and participate — at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto. There’s also an email announcement list for the group. If you would like to be added to the suscription list, you can join up here: tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto.

This page serves as an index of the assignments. They are listed here in reverse chronological order. The tag for each assignment links to either a post on Disquiet.com about the project, or to a search return on Soundcloud that yields the tracks in that project:

21: Disquiet0021-4seasons
Create a piece with one field recording representing each of the four seasons.
Start: 2012.05.24 … End: 2012.05.28

20: Disquiet0020-nodebeat
Make a piece of music with the NodeBeat app and one other instrument.
Start: 2012.05.17 … End: 2012.05.21

19: Disquiet0019-rojiura
Treat the provided photograph as a graphically notated score.
Start: 2012.05.10 … End: 2012.05.14

18: Disquiet0018-3×3
Make a three minute track from three sounds, alternating their relative prominence.
Start: 2012.05.03 … End: 2012.05.07

17: Disquiet0017-transition
Make a seamless transition between an original field recording and a provided, preexisting track.
Start: 2012.04.26 … End: 2012.04.30

16: Disquiet0016-backforeground
Take samples of sandpaper and dice. Make a track with one as foreground and other as background.
Start: 2012.04.19 … End: 2012.04.23

15: Disquiet0015-rgbinteract
Create sounds from colors, and make them interact with each other.
Start: 2012.04.12 … End: 2012.04.16

14: Disquiet0014-oumupo
Do a sonic-narrative version of Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story.
Start: 2012.04.05 … End: 2012.04.09

13: Disquiet0013-wildup
Make new music from a multitrack recording of a Shostakovich symphony.
Start: 2012.03.29 … End: 2012.04.02

12: Disquiet0012-cutpaste
Use “cut and paste” to combine two 1928 recordings of rural music.
Start: 2012.03.22 … End: 2012.03.26

11: Disquiet0011-motoring
Record an everyday mechanical rhythm, and make something of it.
Start: 2012.03.15 … End: 2012.03.19

10: Disquiet0010-reflect
Remix one of the previous Junto project tracks.
Start: 2012.03.08 … End: 2012.03.12

09: Disquiet0009-avian
Create a cross-species collaboration between bird song and acoustic guitar.
Start: 2012.03.01 … End: 2012.03.05

08: Disquiet0008-voice
Rework a spoken-word recording of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography.
Start: 2012.02.23 … End: 2012.02.27

07: Disquiet0007-subtract
Create by removing material from an existing field recording.
Start: 2012.02.16 … End: 2012.02.20

06: Disquiet0006-cylinder
Remix three archival Edison cylinder recordings.
Start: 2012.02.09 … End: 2012.02.13

05: Disquiet0005-layer
Add sounds to a pre-existing field recording of everyday life.
Start: 2012.02.02 … End: 2012.02.06

04: Disquiet0004-mfischer
Remix the Marcus Fischer piece “Nearly There.”
Start: 2012.01.26 … End: 2012.01.30

03: Disquiet0003-glass
Record a live performance for “expanded glass harp.”
Start: 2012.01.19 … End: 2012.01.23

02: Disquiet0002-duet
Duet for fog horn and train whistle — using only those two provided samples.
Start: 2012.01.12 … End: 2012.01.16

01: Disquiet0001-ice
Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it.
Start: 2012.01.05 … End: 2012.01.09

And this is the initial post I made on Disquiet.com, announcing the project on January 7, 2012: “Sneek Peek.”

As of January 31, 2012, this is a Twitter list of Disquiet Junto participants: twitter.com/nofi/disquiet-junto.

As of May 21, 2012, there is a dedicated Twitter account for the Disquiet Junto: twitter.com/djunto.

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