Disquiet Junto Project 0159: Recipe Hyperlapse

The Assignment: See what music the steps of a favorite recipe yield.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20150115-dj0159

Each Thursday in [the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com](https://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/) and [at Disquiet.com](https://disquiet.com/tag/junto/), 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.

This assignment was made in the early evening, California time, on Thursday, January 15, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 19, 2015.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0159: Recipe Hyperlapse

The Assignment: See what music the steps of a favorite recipe yield.

The steps for this week’s project are as follows.

Step 1: Choose a favorite recipe.

Step 2: Note key moments in the recipe: the procurement of materials, the preparation of an ingredient, the turning on or off of a device, etc.

Step 3: Prepare the recipe, and when doing so record a sound representative of each of those key moments.

Step 4: Stitch the audio resulting from Step 3 into a single piece of audio, roughly a minute or two minutes in length.

Step 5: It’s not necessary, but consider adding tonal material to the results of step 4.

Step 6: Upload the finished track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.

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

Deadline: 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 19, 2015.

Length: The length of your finished work should be between one minute and two minutes.

Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this assignment, and 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.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0159-kitchenhyperlapse”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 159th Disquiet Junto project — “See what music the steps of a favorite recipe yield”— at:

Disquiet Junto Project 0159: Recipe Hyperlapse

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

https://disquiet.com/forums/

Photo associated with this project by Andy Schultz used via Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/5QvQyc

The Sound of Achieving the Third Dimension

A proto-domestic proto-soundscape document by qDot

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

We purchased and installed a new dishwasher recently. It is so quiet that it requires a little red light to be displayed on the floor to confirm that it’s even running. When the machine is on rinse cycle, there is enough sound that one is aware of the motion, of the water, but still it sounds more like your neighbor is running a machine, several walls away, than you yourself are. When the little bell rings to announce that the full cleaning cycle is over, you would be forgiven for having forgotten it was running in the first place. If the previous dishwasher sounded like a stem from an Einstürzende Neubauten remix project, all clangy industrial noise, this new machine sounds like an alarm clock set to play a rainforest storm.

In contrast, our car is a pre-electric, pre-hybrid thing — the appropriate retronym escapes me — and it’s not so loud as the friend’s ancient Volkswagen we used to drive to the city in my relative youth, but neither is it as quiet as its 21st-century vehicular brethren.

What this audio track presents is 30 seconds of a 3D printer, perhaps the epitome of 21st-century proto-domestic appliances, doing its magic. It was recorded by qDot, aka Kyle Machulis, of the San Francisco Bay area, during (I believe) his recent stint as an artist in residence at Autodesk. The sound is nothing anyone wants in their kitchen or garage, necessarily, but convenience can trump all manner of other concerns, from privacy to comfort. One is left to wonder if this sound will become as common to a household as that of the microwave and toilet, or if several more generations of iterative improvement will pass and transformations transpire before the technology is welcome in homes.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/qdot](https://soundcloud.com/qdot/objet-3d-printer-with-mkh8040-mics-in-bed). More on Machulis at his [nonpolynomial.com](http://www.nonpolynomial.com/about/) site.

Where the Work Ends and the World Begins

Chris Wood explores the many signals of Brussels

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20150113-chriswood1

There is just enough noise that none of it stands out, and just few enough noises that the ears strain for distinctions. There are children playing, and a news report, and music from various genres and languages. There is a thick static that seems to want to become music; it hangs low, a sonorous drone, whining like a wounded animal hoping for just a little affection. Sirens pass, and the whole range of noises just keep going, stalwart despite their modest proportions, their simplicity, their everydayness. This is “Oscillating Cities” by Chris Wood. This is, in fact, “Oscillating Cities” heard amid the sounds of the city. Where the work ends and the world begins is unclear, and that may very well be part of Wood’s point.

In [an explanatory post](http://wiki.imal.org/project/oscillating-cities), Wood explains how the piece came to be: “Osciallating Cities is a dynamic sound environment built from local radio, field recordings and internet radio from distant locations retransmitted over FM. It was performed on the square at Comte de Flandres, Brussels in June 2014.” The work was made at the behest of iMAL, the Brussels-based interactive Media Art Laboratory, more on which at [imal.org](http://www.imal.org/en/page/about-imal).

20150113-chriswood2

The mix of source material isn’t the extent of Wood’s mediation. There are, he explains, various aspects of the employment of radio, which influence the quality of the signal, and some of the source audio is filtered through delays and other treatments. Still photographs and footage evidence the sculptural quality of the generic radios placed around the plaza. A (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECeQSZnKmKE#t=363) of related works features a short interview with Wood (at timecode 5:29):

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/wordthecat](https://soundcloud.com/wordthecat/oscillating-cities). More from Chris Wood, who is based in England, at [wordthecat.com](http://www.wordthecat.com/) and [twitter.com/whirringcat](https://twitter.com/whirringcat).