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.
This assignment was made in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, April 12, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, April 16, as the deadline.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list:
Disquiet Junto Project 0015: RGB Interaction
Deadline: Monday, April 16, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Plan: This week’s effort is the 15th weekly Junto, and it is probably the most theoretical one yet. Think of it as sonic color theory. It veers into matters of synaesthesia (what might be, casually, referred to as the confusion or mixed-association of the senses). We’re going to explore color, and we’re going to do it through sound. You’re going to represent the way Red, Green, and Blue interact with each other and form other colors in the process. You’ll accomplish this through two steps. First, you will create three simple sounds, one representative of each of three primary colors. Second, you will cause them to interact, in the form of a composition. The initial sounds might be tones, or beats, or chords, or even note sequences.
You’ll symbolize Red with a sound derived from the number 600, Green from the number 540, and Blue from the number 450. And certainly, you might choose to explore the ratios between these numbers, rather than the specific numbers themselves (e.g., 60/54/45 or 30/27/22.5, just as two examples).
Please be sure, when posting your track, to include a brief written explanation of how you chose to interpret the colors/numbers as sounds (e.g., “Red is 60bpm, Green is 54bpm, and Blue is 45 BPM” or “Red is 600Hz, Green is 540 Hz, Blue is 450 Hz” — something like that).
Background: The three numbers were chosen because — and this is both technical and inexact — they represent the median range of the associated wavelength as perceived by cone cells in the human retina.
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 “disquiet0015-rgbinteract”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 your track, please include this information:
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/