▰ Open Book:Nothing: John Cage and 4’33” is the title of a forthcoming children’s book about John Cage, written by Nicholas Day and illustrated by Chris Raschka. It comes out on April 2, 2024, from Neal Porter Books. Says Day in an interview with Publishers Weekly: “I think Cage is kind of the most open — especially late Cage — and, to use the word joyful, open-spirited of a composer. And that’s part of why 4’33” works so well as a question for children to start with, right? Because it’s this thing that can feel alienating to people who have had more contact with the world, but if your experience with the world is still fresh, the questions that 4’33” asks seem intuitive and perfectly natural.” (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)
▰ Palm Pilots: “When a distraction force (such as pulling on a finger) is applied, the ambient pressure in the surrounding tissues, which is equal to the air pressure surrounding the body, keeps the joint surfaces together until the force is big enough to overcome this. A vacuum is then suddenly formed in the joint space when the bones pull apart as far as the ligaments and capsule allow.” The New Scientist explains why popped knuckles can be so loud.
▰ Dark Side of the Moon:Gizmodo.com: “International space agencies and private companies alike are racing to the lunar surface, hoping to establish a permanent presence on Earth’s natural satellite that would propel them to farther celestial pitstops. All that increased activity on the Moon may affect the unique radio silence on the lunar far side, an ideal location for radio telescopes to pick up faint signals from the cosmic past.”
▰ AI EQ: Founded in 2021, the Hume AI company (hume.ai) has raised $50M for its conversation AI, which involves “emotional intelligence,” such as recognizing “when users are finished speaking” and generating “vocal responses optimized for user satisfaction.”
▰ Sonic Recall: Tristan Louth-Robins has a lovely six-panel comic on his blog about sonic recall and the evolution of his listening.
The Assignment: Rework musical trios using the constituent parts — one of two ways.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
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 appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.
Disquiet Junto Project 0639: Path Ways (4 of 3) The Assignment: Rework musical trios using the constituent parts — one of two ways.
These instructions are fairly lengthy. Please read carefully. Originally this trios sequence of projects would have ended with the completion of the trios after three consecutive weeks. However, those went particularly well, so let’s see if we can push it a little further.
Please note: You needn’t have participated in any of the prior Junto projects to participate in this one.
Step 1: In the previous project, we completed musical trios. Project 0638 was the third of three consecutive projects. In the first one, 0636, musicians recorded solos. In the second, 0637, musicians took those 0636 tracks, nudged them to the left side of the stereo spectrum, and then added their own music to the right, forming duets with a hole in the middle. In project 0638, other musicians introduced a third track down the center of the 0637 recordings, completing the trios. You can revisit the music via the blog posts disquiet.com/0636, disquiet.com/0637, and disquiet.com/0638, and you can follow the forking paths through the related Google Drive spreadsheet.
Step 2: The goal of this project is to rework the material that accumulated over the course of the previous three projects. There are two main ways to go about this. One is to simply choose one or more tracks and remix, combine, mash-up, or otherwise transform them. The other is to move on to Step 3.
Step 3: Choose one 0636 track, a solo, that yielded more than one 0638 trio. (These are highlighted in light blue, or maybe it’s teal, in the leftmost column of the spreadsheet.) Trace the various routes that 0636 track took. Perhaps it also led to some 0637 tracks that never went any further. Perhaps there are various 0638 versions based on varied 0637 versions. In any case, record a piece of music that lets the listener experience the branching paths that the original 0636 track took over the course of the three phases of the trios project sequence. Clearly you will be using a linear form to represent variations, so how to achieve that will require some compositional ingenuity. But you’re up to the task.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include either “disquiet0639remix” (if you follow the loose rules of Step 2) or “disquiet0639paths” (if you follow the more specific rules of Step 3) 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).
License: It’s required for this sequence of projects 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 639th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Path Ways (4 of 3) — The Assignment: Rework musical trios using the constituent parts — one of two ways — at https://disquiet.com/0639/
One nice thing about having moved to Buttondown for these Disquiet Junto project emails (from TinyLetter, which was shut down just over a month ago by its parent company, Mailchimp) is that I can send more emails than I used to be able to.
Previously, sending one email each week kept the list just under the maximum that the account was capable of. I promise to not start sending out emails willy-nilly. It’s just nice to have the freedom to communicate a bit off-cycle, solely to the extent that it serves the projects and the Junto community.
All of which is a lead up to a simple request: please make sure, if you did tracks for project 0638, that they are downloadable (whether you posted to SoundCloud or to YouTube). This was stated in the 0638 instructions. I mention this here because project 0639 will build on project 0638. This recent sequence was initially planned to be a three-part project, but with the option to extend it further if it went well. Suffice to say, the past three projects went very well, indeed.
The official project instructions for 0639 will go out in about 11.5 hours, shortly after midnight California time tomorrow.
I’m excited to have a short piece on Groundhog Day, one of my favorite movies (and, perhaps just as key, one of my favorite stories), in this series alongside some friends and writers I admire. It’ll be rolling out on hilobrow.com over the next few months.
