Very beautiful! I love these granular snippets and the overall sound.

Disquiet Junto Project 0712: Zebra Code
The Assignment: What rhythm do you hear in a bar code?

Step 1: Locate something you purchased or received that has a zebra code, or bar code, on the packaging.

Step 2: Interpret the bar code from Step 1 as a rhythm.

Step 3: Make music using the rhythm from Step 2.

This project was proposed thanks to Jason Richardson (aka Bassling), who shared this Boing Boing post:

https://boingboing.net/2025/08/19/will-it-riff-turns-product-barcodes-into-heavy-metal-jams.html

Deadline: Monday, August 25, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

Details: disquiet.com/0712

Disquiet Junto Project 0712: Zebra Code

13-07-21

infinite longings

Electronics and guitars. A look at possible future worlds. I loved Gil Scott-Heron as a child.

The Code of Silence disquiet0680

More on the 680th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Reverse Resolution — The Assignment: Finish something (musical) you started last year — at https://disquiet.com/0680/

Reverse Resolution [disquiet0680]

This was my contribution for Disquiet Junto Project 0680: Reverse Resolution. The Assignment: Finish something (musical) you started last year.

Here’s a copy of my post on the Disquiet Junto 0680 discussion thread on Lines:

I didn’t realize I had such a large collection of unfinished tracks and musical sketches from last year on my laptop. For this piece, I used a sequence I created last year when I was exploring the new plugin Tela by Fors.fm. I added additional tracks in Ableton Live using Madrona Labs Sumu and Slate+Ash Spectres.  

More on the 680th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Reverse Resolution — The Assignment: Finish something (musical) you started last year — at https://disquiet.com/0680

Gathering Stray Totems [disquiet0680]

Radwaste

Zeta Reticuli (disquiet0680)

Lines post can be found here: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0680-reverse-resolution/70376/21

**Disquiet Junto Project 0680: Reverse Resolution**  
The Assignment: Finish something (musical) you started last year.

This project has just one step: finish something you started last year, likely a piece of music you left unfinished.

#### Background
It's been a long time since I played anything on keyboard. For the last six months, my electric piano has been sitting up vertically against the studio wall, covered with a sheet and pretty much neglected. During my staycation (almost at an end now) I'd come into the studio, and just before I decloaked the keyboard, I'd get distracted or discouraged somehow.

I thought about the keyboard in relation to this week's assignment and recalled that I had a chord progression that I'd been meaning to do something with. So that's where this started.
#### Studio approach

The chord progression itself is very simple and revolves around a Bb Major 7th in second inversion (F-A-Bb-D) which occasionally resolves to a Dm7 and/or G7. This forms the scaffolding for the track, with degrees of improvisation after resolving to the Dm7.

I found a bass melody which could lead into these chords and played these on an electric (Rhodes-like) piano patch, with the chords played on the piano patch. Beneath this was a spare 3/4 click, which once the piano parts were in place, I used an ML-generated drum pattern with tweaked parameters.

An electric guitar largely compliments the piano chords and steadily opens up a bit, whilst a myriad of synth patches are introduced to provide a bit of atmosphere. Lastly, I included a field recording as a backdrop. This was a recording from new year's day in a national park on the Fleurieu Peninsula.

I guess I could sum up the mood of this track as 'wistfully pensive', much like my general outlook for this year.

[Disquiet Junto 0680] Time Removed, Facing Backwards

picked up an ableton live session from last year, with a recording from my modular system - notes at the time mention using a matrix mixer for effects sends with feedback, one send to delay and another to beads, with a chord voice going in - revisiting this recording, i ended up layering two slower copies pitched down -1 and -2 octaves and working in some field recordings.

--

More on the 680th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Reverse Resolution — The Assignment: Finish something (musical) you started last year — at https://disquiet.com/0680/

disquiet0680 - bilinear form

Connect with your inner heron! 😜 ... An abstract take on a beautiful haiku, making good use of Virsyn's wonderful Cube 2 resynthesising synth ... Enjoy! ☺️

Amongst the rushes,
a stillness comes over us -
Heron in winter.

roekin is a mark of gratitude; an attribution to all that is; kin.
Dependently arising, from a life lived simply, peace+haiku is the growing collection of poetry and writings attributed to roekin.
The collection can be found at roekin.com.
 
Haiku by roekin: https://www.roekin.com

To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

more halF unusuaL

halF stillnesS [naviarhaiku576]

Disquiet Junto 0712 invited us to interpret a barcode as a rhythm.

The first barcode patent was issued in 1952, but they didn't look like the ones we usually see now: they were bullseye-shaped. Today's linear barcodes use what is called "many-width symbology", meaning that the vertical lines ("modules") in the barcode are different widths, from 1 to 4. The lines are printed vertically instead of horizontally so that if the ink smeared during printing, the code would still be legible and no information would be lost. 

Barcodes almost failed in the retail space, because no one wanted to be the first to invest the money to adopt them when they were unproven. They were a lot  more popular more quickly in the railroad business, where by the early 1960s optical scanners could read the color-coded barcodes on train cars as they rolled past at full speed.

The barcode I chose as source material for the prompt was from a tape dispenser that I bought to help my daughter pack to leave home. This piece is probably an aural photograph of the feelings I'm having right now, but that's neither here nor there. Where was I?

Instead of reading the barcode as if it were visually measuring out beats, I decided to decode the modules and transcribe the widths. This turned into the sequence 2 1 3 2 1 4 4 1 / 2 1 2 3 1 1 1 3 / 3 1 1 1 3 1 1 1 / 1 1, which I incorporated into this piece in several ways.

First, the percussion pattern is built by breaking the sequence into chunks of four numbers. These four numbers indicate the beat position of a series of drum kit components on a 16-step grid. So 2-1-3-2, the first sequence, means the kick drum hits on the 2nd, 1st, 3rd, and 2nd beats of the four divisions of the pattern. Next would be the snare, then the tom, and finally the hihat with 1-1-1-3. The sequence also determines the note length and note number of the "melodic" sequence. 

Finally, I translated the sequence into steps in a custom arpeggiator, with the width of the modules transposed into the vertical axis of the beats in the pattern. There are two arpeggiated synth tracks, running at different rates, played on the Logic ES2 and Alchemy software synths. A triggered vocal sample rhythmically reflects the numeric sequence. The rest of the synth parts came from the Roland boutique Studio Electronics SE-02, a reissue of the "Moog-adjacent" SE-01 analog monosynth of 1982.

There's a lot going on in this piece, but there's a lot going on over here, too. The sound that a single mom makes in her empty nest. Snapshot of a moment in time at 90bpm.

More on the 712th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Zebra Code — The Assignment: What rhythm do you hear in a bar code? — at https://disquiet.com/0712/.

The Passage (disquiet0712)

Beats generated from barcode, other modular synth and piano.

Bar Beats  disquiet0712

A short electronic noise track inspired by a barcode, sounds created using Audacity with databending, delay, reverb, etc.

More on the 712th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Zebra Code — The Assignment: What rhythm do you hear in a bar code? — at https://disquiet.com/0712/.

Barcode Blend (disquiet0712)

sound art for disquiet0712.

More on the 712th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Zebra Code — The Assignment: What rhythm do you hear in a bar code? — at https://disquiet.com/0712/.

leaf litter (disquiet0712)

This is my submission to this week's Disquiet Junto assignment.

More on the 712th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Zebra Code — The Assignment: What rhythm do you hear in a bar code? — at https://disquiet.com/0712/

250822 [disquiet0712]

barcode disquiet0712

My 33 1/3 series book about the Aphex Twin album <i>Selected Ambient Works Volume II</i> was published in 2014. The book was one of the top 5 bestselling titles for the calendar year, and in 2015 was ranked by Pitchfork as one of the "33 best" of the 100-plus books in the 33 1/3 series. It has subsequently been translated into Japanese (2019) and Spanish (2018)

Since 2012 I have moderated the Disquiet Junto group, which began on SoundCloud. More at disquiet.com/junto. 

I've written for Nature, Pitchfork, The Wire, Down Beat, Boing Boing, NewMusicBox, Red Bull Music Academy, Art Practical, the website of The Atlantic, and many other publications. 

I've exhibited sound art at galleries in Los Angeles (Crewest), Manhattan (apex art), and Dubai (DUTAC), and I had a audio-visual installation at the San Jose Museum of Art as part of its 45th anniversary.

And since 1996 I've run the website Disquiet.com about the intersection of sound, art, and technology.

barcode disquiet0712

alex lupo

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