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.
Tracks by participants will be added to this playlist as the project proceeds:
This project was published in the evening, California time, on Thursday, May 29, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, June 2, 2014, as the deadline.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (sign up at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0126: NOLA Re-metered
This week’s project combines two familiar Disquiet Junto elements: shared source audio and a pair of dice. The goal is to rework an existing archival jazz track by adjusting it to a new meter. The steps are as follows:
Step 1: Download the song “Slow and Easy” by the Louisiana Five Jazz Orchestra from this URL:
https://archive.org/details/LouisianaFive-SlowAndEasy
Step 2: Roll two dice. Add 1 to the result of each rolled die. Thus, if you rolled a 4 and a 6, you would have a 5 and a 7. (Note: if both dice resulted in the same number, roll one of them again until you have two different numbers. And if you find your result just plain confusing, certainly feel free to roll until you find one you’re comfortable with.)
Step 3: The new meter of your project is the first die over the second. Thus, the result from step 2 would mean your new meter is 5/7.
Step 4: Rework a segment of the source track and in the process change the meter from the original to the meter that was determined in step 3. You may add additional audio, but some prominent aspect of the original source track should be evident in your final work.
Deadline: Monday, June 2, 2014, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your finished work should likely be between a two minutes and four minutes, but there’s no formal length requirement.
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 “disquiet0126-nolaremetered” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
Download: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).
Linking: When posting the track, please be sure to include this information:
More on this 126th Disquiet Junto project — “Change the meter of a 1918 jazz recording by the Louisiana Five”— at:
Disquiet Junto Project 0126: NOLA Re-metered
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
The Disquiet Junto Project List (0001 – 0574 …)
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Track sourced from:
https://archive.org/details/LouisianaFive-SlowAndEasy
I don’t understand, unless I’m understanding what’s meant by meter. I thought the lower bit on time signatures had to be a binary number – 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 etc (breve, semi breve, minim, crotchet, quaver etc). With the 5/7 example, I wouldn’t know where to start – you could argue the 7 equates to three 32s/semi quavers, so a bar would be fifteen of them (five times the three 32s) so more traditionally notated as 15/32. Would that work, or am I missing something?
I’ve just woken up and I’m no music theory expert, so I’m entirely prepared for the possibility that I’m being very stupid here. Just that I haven’t properly participated in a Junto project yet (just watched from the sidelines), but Jazz in Compound time is right up my street, so I’d like to have a go but want to make sure I understand the setup. Could I maybe adapt the second die to: 1: 1 2: 2 3: 4 4: 8 5: 16 6: 32
? And maybe multiply the faces of the two dice to get the top number? That’d give (4×6=)24/32 in the example, which is weird, but playable (and easy to setup in most sequencers). Only problem with that is you won’t get any odd numbers (no 5, 7, 9, 13, all of which are fun) so maybe roll three dice and add them for your top number – that way we can have anything between 3 and 18 over anything from 1 to 32. What do people think? Stick to 5/7=15/32, adapt to two multiplied dice and have 24/32, or throw a third and get (eg I roll a 3, to go with the 4 and 6 in the original example) 13/32?
Hi, Mr. Bish. Thanks for unpacking it all. I think one could go either way with this, either to come up with an approximation like you did with 5/7 or to just roll again as the rules suggest.
Were you to go the third route, of an alternate outcome of the dice, you would be in a healthy lineage of Junto activity, though I’d argue for one of the above two options first.
Thanks so much for the thought you put into this.
Perhaps another way to look at this would be to use both numbers as numerators over the unit of beat, so 5/8 and 7/8, either alternating every bar, or as sections of each, maybe one for the verse and the other for the chorus.
As I remarked on our very new forum, having the seven on the bottom is theoretically possible, most sequencers could be set up for a ‘seventh’ note as a unit of beat, but just thinking outside of the 4/4 box for some folks is hard enough.
I am definitely looking forward to hear what the geniuses here do with this one!
Thanks — yeah, the sequencer mode was on my mind. (I deleted the forum discussion about this because I wanted to unify the discussion here. The whole forum thing is still quite in beta.)