Disquiet Junto Project 0027: Texting

The Assignment: Make a track by turning the instructions text into sound.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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 week’s project may blow up in my face, because it may simply prove ineffective — or unnecessarily complicated to put into effect — for some participants. The theme is turning text into sound in a specifically abstract manner. At a technological level, though, it simply may not function for everyone involved. I’m hopeful that it will work, but if nothing else, the project provides solid evidence that the Disquiet Junto is as much a place where I, as founder and moderator, experiment as it is for the musicians who respond to the projects with their own tracks. I’ve said in the past that the goal of the Junto is, at its core, to provide a place where people feel comfortable failing — and that’s as true for me as it is for the participants.

The assignment was made late in the day, California time, on Thursday, July 5, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, July 9, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0027-texting.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). They appear below translated into six additional languages: French, German, Japanese, and Turkish, courtesy of Éric Legendre, Allan Brugg, Naoyuki Sasanami, and M. Emre Meydan, respectively.

Disquiet Junto Project 0027: Texting

We’re continuing the theme of “creative reuse” this week. In past Disquiet Junto projects we have reworked audio files, and in the process of interpreting a photograph as a graphic score, some participants treated the image file as abstract audio. This week, we’ll be interpreting a text file as sound.

Please copy the instructions to this project and save them as a text file. You will then open that file in one or more pieces of audio-processing software. The resulting sound will serve as the foundation of your track. You can only use the sounds resulting from the text file in the process of making your track. You can manipulate the sounds, and you can use multiple versions that result from different pieces of software, but you cannot add any other sounds.

Deadline: Monday, July 9, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Please keep your track to between 2 and 5 minutes.

Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, please 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 “disquiet0027-texting”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 posting the track please include this information:

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info

Continue reading “Disquiet Junto Project 0027: Texting”

The Bass as Violin / The String Quartet as Sequencer (MP3)

Listening to Jason Charney's "Ocean Body"

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The string quartet “Ocean Body,” composed by Jason Charney, is by no particular means electronic. Heard in a rendition recorded live by the Fifth House Ensemble at the Ravinia Festival last month, however, it displays numerous elements that make it something of a sonic fellow traveler. There is its modest pace, which posits it in a meditative sphere. There is its grid-like metric system, which aligns it with step sequencers. There is the way it builds steadily, a composition-by-accrual approach that suggests a method not unlike that of the sampler. There is the attention to the texture of the instruments, the violin and viola in particular. And yes, that is violin singular. Beyond its intricate internal maneuvers, which become apparent as the work proceeds, “Ocean Body” has an additional distinguishing characteristic, which is that Charney directs the quartet to replace one of its traditional two violins with a bass, played here by Kyle Wescott. The result is a rich sense of grounding.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/jasoncharney. More on Charney, who participated in several of the early Disquiet Junto projects and who is based in Lawrence, Kansas, at jasoncharney.com. More on Fifth House at fifth-house.com. More on the Ravinia Festival at ravinia.org.

And here, as a bonus, is video of Charney peforming his work “Compass” (for iPhone and Max/MSP) at an Apple Store:

Filmless Film Music (MP3)

Tracking the path of "I'll Leave a Light On" by Slow Dancing Society

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s difficult not to hear Slow Dancing Society‘s “I’ll Leave a Light On” as the score to an unseen film. It at once bears the hallmarks of something traditionally musical — guitar figures, a slowly progressing melodic bed — and yet employs those elements in a manner more driven by atmospheric intent than by anything approximating a song impulse. The guitar parts repeat until they take on rhythmic, percussive purpose, and that underlying bed becomes a wash of sound. As the track progresses, it doesn’t develop melodically as much as it transforms. The opening section becomes a swell that reveals a clanging, anxious, metallic climax, which then begins a slow, extended fade. The track is from the album Laterna Magica, due out August 15 from the Hidden Shoal record label.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/hidden_shoal. More from Slow Dancing Society, aka Drew Sullivan, at slowdancingsociety.bandcamp.com.

Listening to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles

Interview with Christof Migone that I did for nomorepotlucks.org

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


The Canadian art journal No More Potlucks asked me to interview Christof Mignone about his piece “The Rise and Fall of the Sounds and Silences from Mars.” The project is an act of sonic forensics applied to Ray Bradbury’s classic science fiction novel The Martian Chronicles. Migone’s work is as much an act of sound poetry as of sound art. Each page of the original Bradbury book was culled for only those words that represent sound, and then only those words were reprinted, page by page, in a series of columns. The piece has taken several forms — as a book published by Parasitic Ventures and as an outdoor installation at the Electric Eclectics festival. The latter is show above.

The full interview is online at nomorepotlucks.org. I’ll post it here after it’s been up there for a little while. Here in the meanwhile is an excerpt, focused on his decision making about what words made the cut:

Weidenbaum: There are two questions I want to ask at this juncture. The first is: When did you decide to include the word ”˜said’, which seems like it would significantly increase the ratio of words?

Migone: It came late. Basically, there was a second round of going back into the book and looking at what I had culled from it and making sure I hadn’t made any mistakes. While the word ”˜said’ clearly denotes dialogue, I initially feared that it would overwhelm my project; be too present. But I came to the decision of including ”˜said’ during the second stage because it became obvious that it would have otherwise been a glaring omission. I had several categories in terms of selection. It could be words in a scene where sound is very clearly being engaged by the author, or words that could allude to sound but weren’t necessarily intended that way in that particular place in that book. I also wanted to up the number of words selected, and since I was already abstracting the words into a different arrangement, it seemed fitting to the project to include any words that in and of themselves had sound properties. But obviously I didn’t add any words.

Weidenbaum: And that would have been the second question: Do you include words that suggest sound but that don’t specifically mean it? Like, if someone says: “I can hear the sounds”that includes two words – ”˜hear’ and ”˜sounds’ ”“ and mean sound. But if someone says: “it sounds like you’re headed north not south”, that’s different.

Migone: Yes, in that second case, I would include that. I like the fact that obviously those words had more than one usage.

Read the full piece at nomorepotlucks.org. More on Migone at christofmigone.com.

What Does a Brand Sound Like?

The core question of a class I'm teaching this fall at San Francisco's Academy of Art

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Does the start-up sound of a computer have an emotional meaning to its user? Why are ringtones more popular than ringback tones? Is the commercial jingle a relic in our supposedly media-savvy age? How does a retail space decide upon its playlist? Do bars and restaurants really sell more drinks when the music is played louder? Why do some stores hide their speakers, while others make them prominent features of the interior design? Should websites have scores, or background music, the way that movies and TV shows do? Should ebooks? Should movies and TV shows, for that matter? Why are voice actors famous in some countries and largely anonymous in others? What have online MP3 retailers learned from brick’n’mortar stores — what have they unlearned, and what have they forgotten? How do darknet filesharing services promote themselves in secret? What does the relative prominence of social-network functionality say about Apple, Bandcamp, eMusic, Rhapsody, SoundCloud, and other online services? When and why did musicians stop being perceived as sell-outs when they licensed their songs to TV commercials?

What, to put it simply, does a brand sound like?

These are some of the questions we’ll explore in a course I’ll be teaching this autumn at the Academy of Art in San Francisco (academyart.edu). The official title of the class is “ADV 499-30: Special Topics: Sound Branding.” More specifically, it’s titled “Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds.” It’s a weekly class, running for 15 weeks straight on Wednesdays from noon until 3:00pm. The first day of class is September 12. There will be a mix of lectures (by me and by some invited guests), exercises, and assignments. Throughout we’ll look closely at — that is to say, we’ll listen closely to — how sound functions in the media landscape. The course is divided into three segments: first a focus on listening, second “Sounds of Brands, and third “Brands of Sounds.”

I’ll be posting more information in advance of the class, and throughout the class’ run. Those posts will be tagged, as has this one been: sounds-of-brands.