Disquiet Junto Project 0487: Carillon Quotidian

Assignment: Turn a recurring sound from your life into music.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, 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. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 3, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 29, 2021.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0487: Carillon Quotidian

Assignment: Turn a recurring sound from your life into music.

This project was developed by Marty Petkovich (aka K Joule) as part of the celebration of the upcoming 500th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project.

Step 1: Identify a recurring sound in your daily life that isn’t generally considered musical. Try to locate a sound that you would normally ignore: the hum of the dryer, or the way the car trunk resonates when you drop it closed, the sound your boots make on certain stairs, the sound of the water coming out of the kitchen tap, etc.

Step 2: The goal is to explore the innate musicality of the sound you identified in Step 1. When recording the sound identified in Step 1, please keep in mind the effort may require some production techniques, because you want to try to isolate it as best as possible.

Step 3: Make an original piece of music employing the sample you recorded in Step 2 of the sound you decided upon in Step 1. Transpose the recorded sample and compose a short theme to use as the central voice in your composition. Complete your piece with other instrument lines as needed.

Background: Invented almost 500 years ago, the carillon is one of the first attempts to take a quotidian sound, the bell, and transpose it into a scaled instrument (which comprises a keyboard that mechanically works 23 bells of different sizes). It is also one of the loudest instruments, designed to broadcast music across an entire village. Before the carillon, the most important role of the bell was to announce the hour (functioning at its most basic level) or the beginning or ending of some event, spiritual or otherwise. The carillon instrumentalized the bell, much as samplers can instrumentalize any recorded item. In honor of the impending 500th Disquiet Junto project, this week’s challenge is to revisit the 500-year-old process of taking a common sound that resonates in your life and instrumentalize it in order to craft a piece of music. Your “carillon” should be the central voice in your piece which can then be embellished as you wish with other instrument lines.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0487” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0487” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your tracks in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

[https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0487-carillon-quotidian/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0487-carillon-quotidian/)

Step 5: Annotate your tracks with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #disquietjunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 3, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 29, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0487” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to 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. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 487th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Carillon Quotidian (Assignment: Turn a recurring sound from your life into music) — at: https://disquiet.com/0487/

This project was developed by Marty Petkovich (aka K Joule) as part of the celebration of the upcoming 500th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project.

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

[https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0487-carillon-quotidian/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0487-carillon-quotidian/)

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet) for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this project is by Jade, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:

[https://flic.kr/p/2sThNR](https://flic.kr/p/2sThNR)

[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/)

Videos Games Killed Ambient Hyperreality

A sonic subculture on the other side of the screen

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

YouTube is filled with videos of ambient sound from cities and nature alike. There are [walking tours of Notting Hill in London](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsShjs–8I4), and still-camera video documents of [redwood forests](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F0RLk7fYQ4). You can even hop aboard someone’s bike as they [cycle around Tokyo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz_7guYo4tA), mic to the world, picking up traffic and chatter and wind. Some of these are too good to be true. If your browser finds you in picturesque desert or drenched Amazon rain forest, there’s a good chance the sounds originated elsewhere entirely, perhaps nowhere — which is to say, the nowhere that is an audio technician’s computer, refining idealized sounds of what we think the world sounds like, what the world “should” sound like. Reality is rarely as good as one might hope, especially reality recorded for hours straight without an edit and immediately uploaded to the internet. As for fictional reality, that is something else entirely. Right alongside the audio-video of seaside boardwalks and mountain tops are extracted segments extracted from television, movies, and video games. This one, for example, shows different settings from the video game *Cyberpunk 2077*, soaking with precipitation, the city streets circled by occasional cars, haunted by solo pedestrians, and flush with enough little sound objects — a honk here, a crossing signal there, the buzz of electricity everywhere, the halfhearted appeal from advertising on repeat — to feel not so much real as dourly welcoming, a false reality that’s arguably all the more real than the hyperreal hillside lake or [island paradise](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nep1qytq9JM), or [campsite fire that manages to stay lit for a quarter of a day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqqpcFj8G-s).

Video originally posted to the [Slow Walkthroughs / Video Game Ambience](https://youtu.be/hKq7kqtS9ts) channel at YouTube.

1 Harp x 50 Guitar Pedals

Emily Hopkins is a force for good.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

You should know this old line, “Question: What was the acoustic guitar called before the electric guitar? Answer: the guitar.” Now, here’s a new one: “Question: What was the guitar pedal called after Emily Hopkins? Answer: the pedal.”

Emily Hopkins’ videos are always a treat. She regularly puts her massive harp through guitar pedals, transforming both in the process. We hear the harp as it is rarely heard, and we hear the pedals put to use that is unusual for them, as well. In this video, Hopkins plays the same exact phrase through no fewer than 50 guitar pedals. Sometimes we just hear the phrase, rendered through echo, or delay, or crushed nearly beyond recognition; others we hear it on repeat as the pedal is itself manipulated — or, in a manner of speaking, played. The result is a sparkly rainbow of electronic possibility.

Video originally posted at [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU_OdU9NDtc).

Current Favorites: Instagram Bits

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Another post in acknowledgement of the small bits of music that pop up on Instagram over the course of the week and are enchanting on loop. Instagram doesn’t particularly lend itself to [the playlist treatment](https://disquiet.com/2021/04/23/a-certain-type-of-ambient-youtube-performance/) I do on YouTube.

▰ This is [Sarah Belle Reid](https://www.instagram.com/p/CNpsLd0hdT4/), based in Los Angeles, California, excerpted from a livestream concert, combining her flugelhorn with software and hardware synthesis:

▰ This is exactly the sort of lovingly sodden, deeply nostalgia-laden synthesis listeners of [Orbital Patterns’](https://www.instagram.com/p/COF2EkHhCrY/) music have come to expect. He’s based in Rochester Hills, Michigan, and is one of my favorite modular synthesizer wizards:

▰ This is [Todd Kleppinger](https://www.instagram.com/p/COD5T7EJesz/), of Fairfax, Virginia, producing delightful melodic, rhythmic patterning on the [Orca](https://100r.co/site/orca.html) software, running on a [Monome Norns Shield](https://monome.org/docs/norns/shield/) and stimulating an [Elektron Digitakt](https://www.elektron.se/products/digitakt/).

▰ This is Mark Lentczner (aka [Electric Kitchen](https://www.instagram.com/p/CN09j8jA-Tp/), of Mountain View, California) producing industrial joy with a combination of the [Recursive Machine](http://www.thehumancomparator.net/rm.html) and the Beebo from [Poly Effects](https://www.polyeffects.com/).

▰ Listening to UK-based [Ryan Lerigo-Jones](https://www.instagram.com/p/CODM0KTJv_w/) drum along with synth collaborators is one of my fave new pleasures:

I’m at [instagram.com/dsqt](https://instagram.com/dsqt), and I follow a vast amount of this.

twitter.com/disquiet: The Skateboard and the Human Seismometer

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each week, collating tweets I made at [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet/), my public notebook. Some tweets pop up (in expanded form) on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.

▰ Someone rides a skateboard down the block weekday mornings around 7:15am. It’s such a beautiful sound, almost always entirely alone in the serene quiet, the cars still dormant. I imagine its rider, heading likely to a job, and I enjoy the clatter of wheels on pavement equally.

▰ Why didn’t anyone tell me the new Godzilla vs. King Kong movie features a young deaf actor whose character, acting as a human seismometer, recognizes the vibrations of Godzilla arriving long before the actual alarms go off?

▰ There are things I wish would happen, and among those is a subset are things I kinda expect to happen, and one is that online crosswords will let us enter words in two colors: black if we’re certain, and a second if we’re uncertain.

▰ Good time to play Prince’s [“Baltimore”](https://youtu.be/hMLI7LFf84w):

▰ Recent but Tired: Taking comfort that the majority of concerts I attend are usually below 25% attendance.

Upcoming(ish)* Wired: Being part of as many of those 25% audiences as possible.

*Pending, you know, a whole lotta tier-based variables

▰ TFW you think spellcheck is broken or paused because nothing in the document is underlined but it’s simply because nothing in the doc is misspelled

▰ Q: What’s the plan for the upcoming 500th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project?

A: I’m not sure one project can properly note the collaborative effort represented by the 500th project. So, we’ll probably celebrate the 500th project for the next 500 weeks until we hit 1,000.

▰ vertiginous
existential
condensation
verklempt
wherewithal

^ Words patiently awaiting their emoji

▰ Out loud I say, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.”

In my head I say, “The Falcon and no, not the Snowman, yeah the Winter Soldier — hope no one caught that pause.”

▰ One of these has arrived (barter for a writing project) and I am stoked.

▰ And on that note, have a great weekend.