The Cimex Resonare is a rare, and strange, species of beetle. It is strange in the sense that, unlike other insects, it is unable to generate its own vocalizations. All it can do is pick up sounds from the environment (mostly, from other insects and animals), filter them, and reproduce them in a highly modulated form. From this point of view, the Cimex Resonare is an example of complete sonic interdependence - without other species around it, or without environmental sounds it can process and resonate, it would remain mute forever.

  Except, of course, that the Cimex Resonare is completely fictional. That is, I made it all up. These sounds were synthesized as a response to the Disquiet Junto Project #0494 - Insect Menagerie, which, at this stage, asks participants to record the sound of an invented insect. This project was prompted by Tobias Reber, and is the first stage of a collaboration between the Disquiet Junto project and this year's Musikfestival Bern.

  Stay tuned.

  (((o)))

  More about the Disquiet Junto here: https://disquiet.com/2021/06/17/disquiet-junto-project-0494-insect-menagerie/

  More about Musikfestival Bern here: https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/

  Image credit: "Heliothrips rubrocinctus", from the Historic Entomology Archive of Wageringen University, via BibliOdyssey:

  https://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2012/04/insect-wall-charts.html

Disquiet Junto 0494 - Insect Menagerie

Cimex Resonare (disquiet0494)

What is the sound of the climate emergency? Can practices such as listening and soundwalking allow us to apprehend its magnitude?

In Klinein 01 - Arga, a soundwalk along the banks of the river Arga between Pamplona and Huarte in Navarre has been modulated and transformed with datasets from NSIDC Sea Ice Index, which contains details on the evolution of the surface of sea ice on the planet since 1978.

Thus, Klinein 01 - Arga attempts to question conventional notion of soundscape, and is a demonstration of the possibilities of soundscape- and data-synthesis, beyond mere data sonification techniques. The listener can not only follow the changing soundscape along the banks of the river Arga - they can also listen to the data of climate change. The resulting datascape attempts to insert otherness into our sound environment in the current context of climate collapse.

Klinein 01 - Arga was produced in November 2020. It was premiered in the /Sonido y Antropoceno/ broadcast programme of the 2020 Tsonami Festival in Valparaíso, Chile, and was also included in this year's Borealis Festival Radio Space in March 2021.

Klinein 01 - Arga

"Martian Flash-Forward" is my contribution to this week's Disquiet Junto prompt. The prompt consisted in the following:

Step 1: Early on in the Philip K. Dick short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” a man named Quail has a daydream interrupted. He dreams of visiting Mars, but then reality intrudes: “the daylight, the mundane noise of his wife now brushing her hair before the bedroom mirror — everything conspired to remind him of what he was.” As the reader will learn, Quail has in fact already visited Mars, subsequent to which his mind was wiped free of the visit. His daydream at the start of the story is as much a remnant memory as it is a wish to be fulfilled. Keep this scenario in mind, and maybe read the short story.

Step 2: Record the sound of some realistic-feeling alien landscape, perhaps Martian, and then at the very end of the recording have real-world sounds appear to break the spell.

More on this 501st weekly Disquiet Junto project — PKD Playback (The Assignment: Record the sound of a Martian daydream, interrupted) — at: https://disquiet.com/0501/

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

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0501-pkd-playback/

Martian Flash-Forward (disquiet0501)

A phenomenon that seems to have escaped the attention of many researchers is how insects in the area of Cambridge, UK, deal with heat waves - maybe because of the relative rarity of heat waves in that part of the UK until recently. Whan dealing with rising temperatures, local insects tend to swarm together and organise their vocalisations into regular patterns that follow a progression not unlike that of cellular automata. Surprisingly, different kinds and geni of insects tend to join in and lock into the pattern together, suggesting a kind of inter-species communication that has also escaped our scrutiny

In fact, in an unpublished article, Martin Gardner has ventured the hypothesis that the late John H. Conway might have been influenced by the sounds of insects while working on his particular version of cellular automata - what we nowadays know as Conway's Game of Life...


...Of course, I'm making things up again. "Insect Automata Swarm" is my contribution to this week's Disquiet Junto project #0503: "Global Swarming". For this project, I used no less than 39 of the available insect sounds, and structured the "swarm" by using four out-of-phase cellular automata objects in Pure Data. The result is a slightly cacofonous, part-machinic and part-organic, but always organised rumble and noise.

Sound sampled here proceed from two previous Disquiet Junto projects: 

Disquiet Junto #0494: "Insect Menagerie": 

https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0494

and Disquiet Junto #0498: "Sonic Entomologist"

https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0498

Samples include work by @analoc, @ausgesuchtestenohren, Bbob Drake, Bee Kind, Bick Brannigan III, Breanna Johnston, Caustic Gates, @creaturesonce, Fake Genius, Gary Barwin, Gerard Paresys, Karmic Resonance, K. Joule, Krakenkraft, Lewlaufer, @Losanch, Michael Ash, @Net, @morgulbee, Parallel Tool, Paul Beaudoin, Piney Boy, Radio Hummingbird, Richard Fichera, Scott Boone, @seramind, @wasabicube, @zedkah, @Zounzabar, et al.

More on this 502nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Global Swarming (The Assignment: Create a swarm of imaginary insects) — at: https://disquiet.com/0502/

Thanks to Tobias Reber and Musikfestival Bern for collaboration on this project. More on the festival at:

https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/
https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern
https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern

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

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0502-global-swarming/

Disquiet Junto #0502: Global Swarming

Insect Automata Swarm (disquiet0502)

"The voice may well be the key to the presence of the present and to an unalloyed interiority, but it conceals in its bosom that inaudible object voice which disrupts both. (...) This object embodies the very impossibility of attaining auto-affection; it introduces a scission, a rupture in the middle of the full presence, and refers it to a void—but a void which is not simply a lack, an empty space; it is a void in which the voice comes to resonate."

(Mladen Dolar, The Voice and Nothing More, MIT Press, 2006)


This is my contribution to Disquiet Junto project #0515: Talking Cure. This week, the prompt consisted in creating a piece of music that you imagine hearing in a therapist's waiting room.

More on this 515th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Talking Cure (The Assignment: Write music for a psychotherapist’s waiting room) — at: https://disquiet.com/0515/

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

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0515-talking-cure/

Disquiet Junto #0515 - Talking Care

Le sujet-supposé-savoir (disquiet0515)

This is my contribution to Disquiet Junto Project 0516: "Outside In (Co/Exist 1 of 3)", a first in a series of three. This week's assignment was: Record a minute or two of nature (whatever you understand by "nature"). 

This is a recording made  back in 2019. I was out in the fields, recording, when I was surprised by a light rain and took refuge under an oak tree. The birds kept me company until it stopped raining.

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

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0516-outside-in-co-exist-1-of-3/

Rain, Birdsong (disquiet0516)

This is my contribution to Disquiet Junto Project 0517: Inside Out (Co/Exist 2 of 3). This week's assignment: record a minute or two of civilization (however you interptet "civilization").

This was recorded during a brief trip to Bilbao a couple of weeks ago.

Few things connote the idea of a place inhabited by humans better than the sounds of traffic and public transport. Public transport sounds tend to be very cyclic, rhythmical, but the beat of these mechanical escalators in Bilbao's metro peaked my curiosity. I was carrying luggage, but had just enough time to whip out my recorder and binaurals and go all the back up the escalators and down again. The sounds appeared to be a very apt welcome to a city known for its industrial heritage.

More on this 517th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Outside In (Co/Exist 1 of 3) (The Assignment: Record a minute or two of nature) — at: https://disquiet.com/0517/

This is the second of a three-part project sequence. You can participate in all three parts, or any two of the three, or even just any one of them. Part one began on November 18 and ended on November 22, part two began on November 25, and part three will begin on December 2. Thanks to Alan Bland and Mark Lentczner for having proposed the project.

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

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0517-inside-out-co-exist-2-of-3/

2021-11-14 Bilbao - Mechanical Escalators (disquiet0517)

Yesterday I joined Sonia Overall's #DistanceDrift, in what became my first soundwalk of the year. These are some sounds I managed to glean along the way.

 Writer and psychogeographer Sonia Overall started running the Distance Drifts during the first confinement of this pandemic, in April 2020. They consist in a series of Sunday morning synchronised and distributed walks, coordinated via Twitter:

   " #DistanceDrift is a space to walk alone – or in your social bubble – and connect with other walkers. Themed prompts keep the walks playful and interactive. Walks can be followed in any space, indoors or out. "

For photos and further info about #DistanceDrift, see: https://dr0m0mania.tumblr.com/post/672372669324361729/2022-01-02-distancedrift.

2022-01-02 #DistanceDrift

Part of an overnight drop rig field recording produced in Tancat de Mília, l'Albufera Natural Park, in Valencia.

More about the Tancat the Mília here: http://www.albufera.bio/index.php/en/

2022-01-21/22 Tancat de Mília, l'Albufera (nighttime drop rig recording) #PresentesDensos

This is a short piece for the disquiet 171 "Oblicardo" project, following the «Into the impossible» Oblique Strategy.

Most of the processing was done using a feedback delay network in Pure Data.

Into The Impossible (disquiet0171-oblicardo)

On March 20th 2015, I recorded a SW radio sweep, following and listening in on how the eclipse was affecting short-wave radio propagation. Samples were selected from this sweep, and a Game of Life algorithm was used to sequence them, presenting the listener with a peculiar "walk" through the radio spectrum.

RadioWalk #00: Conway Eclipse (Disquiet0292)

Surprised by a thunderstorm in a small village Northeast of Segovia, Spain, in the middle of a particularly hot month, the sound of the windchimes in the doorway of the country house I was staying in caught my attention, so I quickly set up my gear and hit the red button...

This was recorded on July 18 2012 for the Third Edition of World Listening Day, and was included in «Green Field Recordings: World Listening Day 2012», a compilation curated by Luís Antero (which you can find out about and download here: http://greenfieldrecordings.yolasite.com/audio-2012.php).

Gear: Soundman OKM II Classic Studio -> Microtrack II @ 24/96.

Windchimes, Rain, Wind, Thunderstorm

Melt-Nine is part of the Disquiet Junto #0418, Ice-Nine collective
project. Traditionally, the Disquiet Junto project starts out every year
with its original protocol: Record the sound of ice melting, and do
something with it.

In this case, Melt-Nine is more a datascape than a soundscape
composition: the original recordings of melting ice have been convolved
with a dataset from the NSIDC Sea Ice Index, which contains details on
the evolution of the surface of sea ice on the planet since 1978. So, in
essence you are listening to more ice-melting data than sounds of ice
melting.

For more information about the Disquiet Junto, see
<http://disquiet.com>.

Photo: William H. Peirce, "Iceberg in the Atlantic, off the coast of
Labrador", 1864.

acoustic_mirror

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