Disquiet Junto Project 0634: Bust a Move

The Assignment: Record a piece of music on top of a muffled recording of a piece of classical music.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

These following instructions went to the group email list (via juntoletter.disquiet.com). 

Disquiet Junto Project 0634: Bust a Move
The Assignment: Record a piece of music on top of a muffled recording of a piece of classical music.

Step 1: Locate a public domain recording of a piece of classical music, perhaps at archive.org.

Step 2: In some manner, muffle the original until it sounds like it is being heard from underground or through a thick wall. Perhaps run it through a low-pass filter. Or actually record it through a thick wall.

Step 3: Listen closely to what remains of the recording after Step 2.

Step 4: Record a piece of music on top of the audio that resulted from Step 2, leaving that foundation audible to some degree.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0634” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0634-bust-a-move/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Optimally, it will be exactly the same length as the source audio.

Deadline: Monday, February 26, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 634th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Bust a Move — The Assignment: Record a piece of music on top of a muffled recording of a piece of classical music — at https://disquiet.com/0634/

The image associated with this track is in the public domain, via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beethoven_bust_statue_by_Hagen.jpg

Looking for Sound

A fox in the spectrogram headlights

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In this past Friday’s issue of This Week in Sound, I shared a link to an example of a field recording practice in which spectrograms aid in the isolation of instances of activity within massive amounts of audio. Mat Eric Hart, whose work I had linked to, subsequently gave me permission to share examples of that technique. 

This is the appearance of a fox:

This marks the arrival of a little grebe:

And this is an owl:

I love the concept of looking for sound in advance of hearing it, since the approach reverses how the brain can work — we experience sound more quickly than we might see something. I also love how these images resemble objects surfacing in a night vision camera. Visit Mat’s post to hear audio from the session that yielded these results.

This Week in Sound: Entrainment, Radio, Fungi

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the February 20, 2024, issue of the Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound. This Week in Sound is the best way I’ve found to process material I come across. Your support provides resources and encouragement. Most issues are free. A weekly annotated ambient-music mixtape is for paid subscribers. Thanks.

▰ THAT’S ENTRAINMENT: To answer the question as to whether electronic music might inherently “alter the consciousness” of listeners, “researchers used electroencephalography, which measures electrical activity in the brain via electrodes attached to the scalp, to gauge the participants’ neural entrainment to the music.” As described in New Scientist, the effort, which explored the concept of “entrainment,” may have medical applications, such as for therapy and in intensive care units. “Entrainment occurs when synchronisation arises between an external rhythmic stimuli, such as electronic music, and the firing of neurons in the brain.” (Thanks, Paolo Salvagione!)

▰ ADIOS, RADIO: “Who in the world steals a radio tower?” asks the station manager of a radio station, WJLX in Jasper, Alabama. He asks because the station’s tower has gone missing: “The tower, all 190 feet of it, had vanished — its 3,500 pounds of spindly steel beams possibly sliced into pieces and dragged away earlier this month by thieves, the police said. … There are, however, some precedents in Alabama. In 2021, the police in Dothan arrested a man who had stolen a 30-foot aluminum trailer with a collapsible radio tower that reached up to 100 feet. And in the summer of 2013, the police in Talladega said that a 75-foot steel radio tower and other equipment had been stolen from a broadcasting group.”

▰ QUICK NOTES: Vitamin Z: Scientists are exploring the role of zinc in causing and addressing hearing loss. ▰ Roots Music: “A pair of experiments has found that fungus grows much more quickly when it’s blasted with an 80 decibel tone, compared to fungus that receives the silent treatment.” ▰ Physics Ed: The discussion of newly confirmed “second sound” (thanks to everyone who sent this — along with related — links to me) in fluid dynamics made me think about the first and second cracks in coffee roasting. ▰ Root, Root, Root: For the first time, a woman is the lead voice in Major League Baseball play-by-play: Jenny Cavnar of the A’s. ▰ Bird Brain: The Shriek of the Week is that of the wren, “one of our tiniest and yet loudest resident songbirds.” ▰ Don’t Worry, Be Haptic: Learn about vibrational suits, which translate music (and sound in general) into full-body experiences. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) ▰ Cry It Out: Exploring how infant marmosets use sound to communicate to caregivers.

Sound Ledger

Audio culture by the numbers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

82,000,000: Number of people in the U.S. who listen to AM radio monthly

20: Number of microphones used to capture sounds in a house in the film Zone of Interest

266: Percent increase in sperm mobility as a result of ultrasound treatment

Source: Radio: nytimes.com. Zone: variety.com. Sperm: newscientist.com.

On the Line: Two Poems and a Film

Some favorite recent sentences

/ By Marc Weidenbaum 
"The spaces
between
things began
speaking. So it was

I understood I
was now
to remain
silent."

That is the opening of a poem, “Upon the Furthest Slope You Know,” by Jorie Graham in a recent issue of the London Review of Books. Later she says of something “almost” said by the wind: “Listen to it / when it speaks to you – it is / the next world.”

. . .

"Almost every artistic direction and decision was guided by the sound. The construction of the shot was not so much the point of view of where he fell but where the music is looking from."

That is Justine Triet, director of the film, Anatomy of a Fall, speaking to the LA Times of the influence of a steel band cover of a 50 Cent song on her movie. 

. . .

"... I felt most  
myself when I was least loved. Cast into  
the night like a half-formed sound, I was falling  
toward sleep when I heard a faint  
rustling as if it were calling from a distant world, 
near enough to startle me awake."

That is from “Shadow Study,” a poem by Jennifer S. Cheng published by The Atlantic.