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 also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.
Disquiet Junto Project 0669: Phonosynthesis
The Assignment: Make music to help a forest regenerate.
A scientific research paper this month documented evidence that sound can help fungus grow. The conclusion: “Demonstrating a tangible impact on fungal activity, our findings suggest that carefully tuned acoustic parameters might be able to enhance ecological processes.”
Record music to help a forest grow. Imagine an array of solar-powered speakers is spread through a forest-in-need. Or come up with another deployment scenario of your own imagining. What sort of music would you play for the forest to encourage its regeneration?
The research paper: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2024.0295.
Coverage in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/04/science/fungus-sounds-growth.html
The paper is the work of four people from the College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University, in Australia.
Thanks to Michael Rhode for having shared with me the research coverage.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0669” (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-0669-phonosynthesis/
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you. How hard do you need to work to keep your secret?
Deadline: Monday, October 28, 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 669th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Phonosynthesis — The Assignment: Make music to help a forest regenerate — at https://disquiet.com/0669/