Each Thursday 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 in the Junto is open: just join and participate.
This is a set of the tracks created in this project:
The assignment was made in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, November 8, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, November 12, as the deadline. (There are no translations this week.)
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto).
Disquiet Junto Project 0045: Sherlock Sawyer
This is a shared-sample project. It focuses on the human voice, on sonic narrative, and on the public domain. The project has two parts:
First, select one sentence from two different pre-existing spoken sources and combine them in any manner you wish into one sentence, using the entirety of both sentences.
Second, add an underlying sonic bed — a musical score — to lend dramatic tension to the newly created sentence.
You will select your sentences from the following public domain sources: chapter one of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and chapter one of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. You will excerpt the audio from these recordings:
http://archive.org/details/adventures_holmes
http://archive.org/details/tom_sawyer_librivox
Deadline: Monday, November 12, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your finished work should be between 1 and 4 minutes in length.
Information: Please, when posting your track on SoundCloud, include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto.
Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0045-sherlocksawyer”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:
The source audio for this project is the public domain LibriVox recordings of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
More on this 45th Disquiet Junto project at:
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info/
When the track reaches 22 and a half minutes, there is a brief piano figure, very brief, just a few notes. These few notes trace a downward arc. There’s a pause afterward. It’s long enough to make the listener wonder if the sound of piano was overheard from somewhere else, somewhere apart from the recording, somewhere unrelated to the underlying sound that had preceded it — perhaps through a wall, or an open window, maybe emanating from the listener’s own memory. But repeat it does, and then again, and then there’s a modulation at some stage of this repetition of the piano, enough to a suggest formal compositional approach and not merely sound for its own sake, which has been the effect up until now. Up until now it has been a low-level drone. The piece shifts as time passes, it grows. The piano is exchanged for a deeper, orchestral swell. This is “Score to a Quotidian Experience” by Collin Thomas. It’s an hour-long piece recently released on the always excellent 