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 it, send me an email at marc@disquiet.com with “Disquiet Junto List” as the subject line.

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:

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

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

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

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.

An Introduction to Instagr/am/bient:

Photos shared with the popular software Instagram are usually square in format, not unlike the cover to a record album. The format leads inevitably to a question: if a given image were the cover to a record album, what would the album’s music sound like?

Instagr/am/bient is a response to that question. The project involves 25 musicians with ambient inclinations. Each of the musicians contributed an Instagram photo, and in turn each of the musicians recorded an original track in response to one of the photos contributed by another of the project’s participants. The tracks are sonic postcards. They are pieces of music whose relative brevity—all are between one and three minutes in length—is designed to correlate with the economical, ephemeral nature of an Instagram photo.

The result of the 25 musicians’ collective efforts is an investigation into the intersection of technology, aesthetics, and artistic process. What parallels exist, for example, between the visual filters that Instagram provides users to transform their photos and the sound-processing tools employed by electronic musicians?

In many cases here, the musicians employ sonic field recordings as source material for their music. In the case of both their photos and their compositions (photography in one case, phonography in the other), documents are altered to emphasize their atmospheric qualities: to eke a modest art out of the everyday.

Thumbnails of the 25 Images:

The full collection is also streaming at soundcloud.com/disquiet.

The 25 MP3s are downloadable for free individually and as a Zip file at archive.org.

Download a 58-page PDF with full-page reproductions of the images and additional information on all the participating musicians: PDF.

A Disquiet.com Project
Commissioned by Marc Weidenbaum

Design/Boondesign.com
Cover Photo/Brian Scott

This project in no way intends to imply any formal association with Instagram.

It’s clearly more of an experiment than a completed piece of music, but that’s sort of the point. Biggs regularly posts things he’s working on, and to listen to this is to get your ears prepared for what he’ll do next. Here, by the way, is a screenshot of Automaton, showing the classic pixel Petri dish formations of Conway’s Game:

The track, titled “Buffshuffmaton,” was originally posted for streaming and download at soundcloud.com/dance-robot-dance. More on Biggs at dancerobotdance.com.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/radius-7 and theradius.tumblr.com. More on Hart at entropyandenergy.com.

Audio Flaneur: The excellent soundscrapers.blogspot.com by Nick Sowers is three deep in a new series of “Lunchwalks.” What’s a lunchwalk? Explains Sowers, “Got an hour? Take a walk. Inside of a thirty-minute radius, an infinitely detailed (though finitely bound) landscape is within reach.” On each walk, he records the sounds he encounters. He maps the walks, and takes photos, which tend to feature his microphone, which in turn takes on the appearance of Sowers’ fuzzy walking buddy (see above). His descriptions are splendid (“The gear boxes and cable junctures add a constant hum to the background static of the city”), and he also posts samples of the audio, such as this from his third walk:

Read them, as his walking progresses, at soundscrapers.blogspot.com.

Banner Music: I don’t look too deeply into the statistics for this site. When you write about free music and about galleries that require no entry fee, as well as commercial music that often sells in the under-500-unit zone, the whole notion of pageviews can be an exercise in misdirection, if not futility. I do take note, because the dashboard in WordPress (the publishing tool that is this site’s backend) puts the information front and center, that this site seems to get a lot more visitors via Facebook than Twitter, even though I dedicate more time to Twitter than to Facebook. (Perhaps the automated posting of Disquiet’s RSS feed to Facebook that currently occurs is something I should do more of on Twitter? Somehow that doesn’t seem right. My approach to Twitter is conversational.) Anyhow, in the mix of sites sending somewhat significant traffic to this one is a service that was previously unfamiliar: shuffler.fm. The site is an aggregator of blog-filtered music (it bills itself as an “audio magazine made by music blogs”). You can search and sort by artist, genre, blog, and so forth. And, niftily enough, you can end up navigating this very site with a top bar that lets you listen to the music on a given page and navigate the site that way. The following link, unlike the previous one in this entry, will take you to an example: shuffler.fm. For the time being, the shuffler.fm service doesn’t seem to be infringing on this site’s non-commercial Creative Commons license, though there is a page on the site that talks about advertising.

Outside Man: Perhaps the craziest thing about the movie Bunraku isn’t its surreal set (part Kill Bill, part Sin City), its peculiar cast (Demi Moore and Ron Perlman and Woody Harrelson and Josh Hartnett), or the voice of its narrator (Mike Patton, of Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Fantômas, etc.), but that the score is by trumpeter Terence Blanchard, best known for his numerous Spike Lee films. (The New York Times called the movie “a potpourri of genres that ends up a morass of clichés”) Back in reality, Blanchard is also tied to Red Tails, about the African American Tuskegee Airmen.

Dark Portal: The second and third freely downloadable volumes of the score to the excellent video game Portal 2 are available at thinkwithportals.com. The first volume was covered here in late June, in the Downstream department. (Via joystiq.com and nobuooo.com.)

Polluting Noise: Noise pollution is a subject that gives noise a bad name. A story in a local news site in my area, the San Francisco baycitizen.org, touched on how emotions color perception of noise: “On Sept. 12, 2001, no flights took off at San Francisco International, but complaints were lodged nevertheless.” The science-and-scifi site i09.com has been noting how birds and dolphins have shown adverse effects of human-made sound.

The Listener: Author Warren Ellis has launched a new podcast. Second episode came out the 5th of this month, at warrenellis.com, featuring such Disquiet.com favorites as Daphne Oram and Scott Tuma. Episode one had Moondog and Tangerine Dream.

Start Up/Shut Down is a set of short iterations, remixes, and refinements of Window and Macintosh operating system event sounds. This project features remixed material sourced from Microsoft Windows (3.1, 4.0, NT, 95, 98, Me, XP, Vista, 7, 8) and Macintosh OS (10.0 Cheetah, 10.1 Puma, 10.2 Jaguar, 10.3 Panther) operating systems.

He has plumbed the less than recent history of the major two major operating systems for his noises. The result is an abstract play on sounds at once familiar and remote. It’s a bracing listen, and leaves one eagerly awaiting the Linux B-side.

Kolar is one of the people behind the grew Radius podcast and pirate broadcast, a frequent subject of this site’s Downstream department. He corresponded with Disquiet earlier this year about another kind of “start up” sound that serves as the opening theme of the Radius broadcast (see “Entering and Exiting the Electromagnetic Spectrum”).

Both of the set’s tracks are available for free download and streaming at soundcloud.com/jeffkolar and at the netlabel notype.com. More on Kolar at jeffkolar.us.

Disquiet.com was founded 15 years ago tomorrow, December 13. The alpha version of this site was a port of some materials I’d housed under generic addresses in the years prior to December 13, 1996, when I purchased this URL.

From 1996 through the summer of 2007, the site was built in hand-coded HTML. The following is the earliest record of Disquiet.com in the Wayback machine at archive.org:

From 2007 until today, December 12, 2011, the site was managed in WordPress in a theme produced by with elegance and professionalism by Nathan Swartz of clicknathan.com. Swartz’s theme was a refinement of the original Disquiet.com design.

And as of today it is still managed in WordPress, but in a new theme produced by the great futureprüf.com. This new theme further refines the longstanding Disquiet.com design. Among the changes:

¶ the number of categories has been significantly reduced (much of the site has been consolidated under “field notes”), though all the posts remain

¶ one new category (“projects”) has been added

¶ the side navigation is now on the left side throughout the site (previously it was on the left side on the main page, and the right side in the rest of the site)

¶ a visual link has been added to the above-the-logo top bar section of prioritized posts

¶ the size of the page has been expanded horizontally — it’s still slim by most standards

¶ there’s a new motto: “Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.”

I’ll have more about the 15th anniversary of this site tomorrow. Now, it’s time to get to bug-checking.

Small software, small experiments, small files. Mike Rotondo recently tweeted a new recording, and it turned out to be 35 seconds of beat bliss. Arguably shorter than that, given its loop-based construction — and arguably longer, given its inherent temptation to be set on loop for an extended period of time.

Titled “Flip Throw In,” it has the feel of a hip-hop production waiting for vocalists, but one secretly more than happy to keep the pace all by itself. There’s a robot heartbeat of a pulse, and what appears to be a sample of piano. Not only does the looseness of the analog piano recording align at best roughly, and therefore rewardingly, with the tensile routine of the tiny beat — so, too, does the lush low fidelity of the recording, a kind of muslin filter, pair against the beat’s pixel precision. The result is promising: a little of J Dilla’s underkey metrics, a little of Kanye West’s alchemical ability to turn sloppy into louche, a little of DJ Premier’s fetish for imperfect ivories. “Flip Throw In” was recorded in an inexpensive iOS app called iMaschine that its developer describes as a “beat sketchpad,” pictured up top. From little things, lovely little things grow.

Track originally posted at Rotondo’s soundcloud.com/treehouses account. More on iMaschine at native-instruments.com.

Note: There’s updated information in the comments section to this post.

Amazon.com earlier this week announced four additional items in its Kindle line of ebook readers.

One caveat for potential consumers, and for software developers: The new flagship Kindle device, named Fire, has no microphone.

The Fire is, of course, more than an ebook reader. While the three other newly announced Kindles (Kindle, Kindle Touch, Kindle Touch 3G) build on the line’s next-generation e-ink technology, the Fire is a tablet computer with a multi-touch color screen. The Kindle Fire is powered by a modified branch of Google’s Android operating system. Other non-Apple tablets and ebook readers are built on Android, and several have been targets of the affections and aspirations of hackers. The Nook, a product of Barnes & Noble, has likely been the most popular ereader for after-market tinkerers. Reports that Amazon will not aggressively derail those who seek to root the new Kindles (i.e., take control of the operating system; see liliputing.com) suggest that the Fire may soon rival the Nook in that regard.

The absence of a microphone, however, has unfortunate potential ramifications, especially if the Fire becomes a top-ranking Android device. For one thing, the popularity of microphone-enabled software will likely suffer — ranging from interactive sound applications like RJDJ (which takes sound in realtime from the microphone and makes new, musical sound out of it) to utilities like Shazam (which identifies songs based on them being “heard” via the microphone). Voice activation overall may be de-prioritized, should Fire gain significant market penetration. Companies may be less likely to innovate with such microphone-sensitive options as the Three Little Pigs children’s book app that makes good on the promise of blowing the house down, or the way the Clif Bar SOS iPhone app fogs up when you breathe into the microphone. Soundcloud.com’s Android app has a record function — will it need to devise an alternate version for deaf devices like the Fire? (Note: not all of these apps mentioned above are available for the Android operating system. They are simply mentioned as illustrations of the range of microphone-sensitive developement.)

The absence of the microphone emphasizes the Fire’s Kindle heritage: it is depicted as a device for consumption, not production. This is why the initial promotional materials for the Fire refer to how you, the Fire user, can “Read Your Documents” (rather than edit or create documents). The key concern is that consumption and production are not mutually exclusive; they are, in fact, two distant ends of a broad and gradated continuum. The apps mentioned above are in several cases examples where microphone use is part of the consumption.

In addition, the absence of the microphone nixes one of the staple utilities of mobile devices: the ability to take voice notes, which is arguably a better user experience when reading an ebook (or web page) than is momentarily switching one’s position in order to type notes.

The microphone is not the only immediately evident technology lacking in the Fire. Also missing are 3G support, and a camera. These absences have been explained collectively as means by which Amazon reached the Fire sale price of $199, which has been widely viewed as competitive (in response to the Amazon release announcement, Barnes & Noble for one day dropped the price of its Nook Color to $150 from $250; via mobilewhack.com). The absences also make for a certain amount of planned obsolescence, providing a simple path for Amazon to the Kindle Fire 2.0, which could add one or more of the missing features, much as cameras were added when the iPad 2 was introduced.

Certainly Android’s preeminence as a mobile-phone technology means that the operating system is, for the foreseeable future, linked to devices with microphones, but the absence of a microphone on the Kindle Fire is an unfortunate development.

More on the Kindle Fire at amazon.com.

And for reference, here are my thoughts on the iPad, a few days after its January 2010 announcement: “Avoiding iPad Bloat.”

Concrete Evidence: GAFFTA’s space below the Warfield on Market Street in San Francisco

First, many thanks to Cullen Miller and everyone at GAFFTA (gaffta.org), here in San Francisco, for hosting this past Wednesday night’s sonic-arts discussion session. Billed as “Eyebeam / GAFFTA Sound Research Meetup,” it was a collaboration with the Manhattan-based organization Eyebeam (eyebeam.org) to provide people involved in sound an opportunity to discuss their work.

In addition to myself, the presenters were Roddy Schrock, a sound artist and musician who also works at Eyebeam, and Shane Myrbeck, an experimental musician whose day job is as an acoustic consultant at the San Francisco branch of Arup, more on which in a moment. The moderator was Luc Meier of swissnexsanfrancisco.org. Because the world is small, Schrock has in fact contributed to two Disquiet.com remix projects (the very first, Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet, and one of the most recent, Anander Mol, Anander Veig), and Arup developed the winning plan for a projected Eyebeam museum (long before Arup hired Myrbeck or Eyebeam hired Schrock).

The event was held at GAFFTA, which has two floors at the base of the building that houses the Warfield theater on Market Street. We three each gave a 15-minute presentation, and then Meier moderated an extended discussion, which included excellent questions and commentary from a clearly engaged audience. (“Audience” is arguably an imprecise term, because the level of knowledge in the seats facing the panel clearly equalled, and in some cases perhaps exceeded, that of the panel — an optimal situation very much to GAFFTA’s credit.)

Schrock talked about Eyebeam’s creative mission (providing disparate hybrids of creative individuals with the funding and resources to pursue their artistic goals) and he focused on an exciting project: Eyebeam is looking into producing a book that would serve as a compendium of “best practices” guidelines for the creation and installation of sound art.

Myrbeck gave an overview of Arup’s endeavors, and of some of his own artwork. The company is a global, 10,000-person firm combining engineering, design, and planning, and it has a strong acoustic consultancy across the many cities where it maintains offices. Myrbeck oversees its San Francisco SoundLab (“an immersive, full-sphere ambisonic sound studio used for composition and acoustic simulation”). Among Myrbeck’s own recent artwork discussed was “Sent Forth,” a collaboration at Fort Mason in San Francisco with sculptor Jefferson Mack (see arup.com/news).

I spoke on what I termed “Sound as Commentary.” I looked at the variety of remix projects that have originated at Disquiet.com and discussed the common thread: how both the politically motivated ones (“politically” broadly defined) and the musically motivated ones serve as “non-verbal” participants in an ongoing discussion.

If you were in the audience at GAFFTA, here are links to the specific Disquiet.com projects I mentioned:

• Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet

• Despite the Downturn

• Lowlands: A Sigh Collective

• Anander Mol, Anander Veig

• Anander Mol, Anander Veig (Outtakes)

I also spoke about several forthcoming remix projects I am shepherding, including one that will be a fitting commemoration of the 15th Disquiet.com anniversary, which occurs later this year. I mentioned that the open-source projects had lead to some commercial endeavors, like the Hanukkah compilation for Tabletmag.com (Anander Mol, Anander Veig) and a current effort with a singer-songwriter. And I described a new Disquiet.com effort to put together a compilation not of fixed audio recordings but of small “webapps” programmed by various contributors working in Flash, HTML5, and other related programming platforms.

Here now are quick notes about some of the subjects that arose during the conversation — as a result both of moderator Meier’s incisive questions, and of the audience’s questions and statements:

¶ It felt off, I realized shortly before I began, for me to talk about “Sound as Commentary,” since the concept of using sound as commentary is exactly that: an effort to use sound as a constituent part of the ongoing conversation that is life on the Internet. To talk about it was to use exactly the kind of communication I was attempting to avoid. I described how Despite the Downturn and Lowlands: A Sigh Collective were, in particular, attempts to respond in sound because in both those situations to have responded with written words would almost certainly have been to raise the temperature in the discussion rather than serve to cool it off. If you accept that, to borrow a recently popularized phrase, “everything is a remix,” then I simply am asking that people consider the closely related idea that “every album is an answer album.”

¶ A question about “ambisonics,” an advanced form of immersive three-dimensional sound reproduction that dates from the 1970s, seemed to focus on the opportunity to create “artificial” sound environments. I just wanted to make sure that psychoacoustics isn’t left behind: that just because a specific sound can be positioned at coordinates XYZ, we don’t lose track of the fact that different people will experience that sound differently. Precision doesn’t equate with causality.

¶ Myrbeck mentioned several subjects I’d like to dig into further, among them (1) an architecture for the blind and (2) the role of sound in healthcare.

¶ Another audience member inquired (in light of Schrock’s description of a “best practices” sourcebook for sound-art installations) about systems to formalize the presentation of site-based sound art (in contrast with other forms of sound art, such as fixed recordings or software projects), to allow it to be documented and therefore to be reproduced in the future. The word “standards” was employed. I raised the issue that even at this late date stereo, an ancient protocol if there were one, is far from perfect in its ability to match experience from one playback system to the next. Thus, we shouldn’t be too hopeful in regard to capturing the wide and disparate array of sensory experiences that constitute contemporary sound installations. I added, though, that there are existing standards that perhaps artists could use more often, like the sound systems in movie theaters. And I mentioned a project that Susan Philipsz, the artist who won the Turner Prize last year (which lead to the Disquiet compilation Lowlands: A Sigh Collective), had done previously in a British Tesco market, and joked that someone could reproduce it here in Fresh & Easy, which is a Tesco subsidiary. Also on the topic of artists employing existing “standards”: I hadn’t thought of this at the time but the stream of related matters reminded me later of what Philip Glass has said about having been in opera halls prior to ever composing an opera, and being inspired to bring an apparent dinosaur back to life.

¶ Someone in the audience — the lights were low, so I’m not sure who — told a sad-funny story about, in light of Eyebeam’s “best practices” project, an opening for a sound art installation for which the gallery, or museum perhaps, had hired a live band, totally missing the point.

¶ Myrbeck made a great comment about how the relation between technology consultant and artist is not unlike the one between producer and recording artist.

¶ Another time when the subject of documenting sound art came up, I suggested that the new skills that arise in the process of learning to document a work were even more interesting when one considered how those skills might be employed in the production of new art. Art will always be at least one step ahead of any documentary techniques or standards. That’s one of the points of art.

¶ One person asked about a mobile version of the Recombinant Media Lab (a promiment technological and curatorial force for adventurous audio-visual work in San Francisco) and I said I felt it fit right in with the rise of the gourmet taco truck, which has trained urbanites for such a thing. (Recombinant is run by Naut Humon, who was in the GAFFTA audience.)

¶ A gentleman in the audience whose name I didn’t quite get, but who works at Arup with Myrbeck, told a great story after the formal session had ended, when people were just having a drink and talking further. He described having worked on refining the sound in a local theater, and how when the new system had its debut performance, the proprietor of the theater was upset. He asked where the “fun” had gone. Apparently they’d done such a good job of cleaning up the sound that the sense of chaos — of projected audio bouncing off walls and mixing with the sound of the audience — was gone. I was reminded of my initial experience with HD television. Everything was so clear it looked like a soap opera. A wise friend advised me that my eyes and sensibility would adjust, and so they did. That turns out to have been the case as well with the theater owner.

¶ The same person also had, in my estimation, the best single sentence of the evening when he said something along the lines of how the ancients keep stealing our inventions — by which he meant that for each new thing that is invented, a distant precedent can be located. Riding the coattails of his comment, I mentioned that for all the high technology involved in modern sound art, a lot could be learned from Fluxus happenings (which in many cases are about as technologically simple as you could get), not just about how to document a work of living art, but also how to free oneself from concerns about documenting the work. Not quite ancient, no, but certainly distant enough to provide useful perspective on the present.

¶ One final comment. The subject of noise pollution, from an aesthetic standpoint and a public-policy one, came up several times. I stated my ongoing sense that noise pollution is not as big an issue as many people make of it, that aside from isolated cases (like the wind farm one that has gained appropriate news coverage) for the most part urban life in particular is more quiet than it has been in the past, not less quiet. I said I think that there other related issues — emotional issues, social issues, and so on — that really should be the focus of public concern. I mentioned in passing that San Francisco was the first city in which the newspaper rated restaurants in part by their noise level. Someone from Arup pointed out that in their research, a high percentage of the top-100 restaurants were also on the loudest-restaurant list, providing anecdotal evidence that context can play a big role in one’s interpretation of loud sound as what is colloquially referred to as “noise.”

(Photo of GAFFTA’s interior space, from a previous event there, via flickr.com and Creative Commons.)