This is a playlist with each of my submissions to the disquiet junto, a weekly electronic music writing prompt at http://disquiet.com/

Disquiet Junto Compositions

Tinyletter Content

More on this 419th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Dischoir / The Assignment: Make music from 100+ vocal samples of held syllables by members of the Disquiet Junto — at:

https://disquiet.com/0419/

This all came about as a result of something Alan Bland mentioned on the Junto Slack. He pointed out that my having misspelled Disquiet as “Disquier” in the December 19, 2019, project title made him think of “Dischoir,” a possible Junto project. Thanks to Alan and to Jason Wehmhoener for helping me think this project through, and to everyone (over 50 contributors) who sent in samples.

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0419-dischoir/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this track is by Joe Lencioni, and is used (image cropped, text added) via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/8Bk9Rx

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

Disquiet Junto Project 0419: Dischoir

sample: Patricia Wolf ,Tabu,Banabila 
release date :09 _01_2020  
This all came about as a result of something Alan Bland mentioned on the Junto Slack. He pointed out that my having misspelled Disquiet as “Disquier” in the December 19, 2019, project title made him think of “Dischoir,” a possible Junto project. Thanks to Alan and to Jason Wehmhoener for helping me think this project through, and to everyone (over 50 contributors) who sent in samples.

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0419-dischoir/

Mantra For Peaceful Awareness(disquiet0419)

Dischoir - disquiet0419

This was made for the Disquiet Junto 419. I had 113 soundfiles from participants, which was way too much. So I started with throwing away files from anyone who had submitted more than one sound and sounds on which audibly an effects processor was used. The remaining 44 files I imported into Audacity and I started shuffling until I had something that sounded more or less as a composition. I did not use them all. Some didn't fit in because it was unclear what tone they sang and some were too exotic. I gave every singer his own position in the stereo field. And I am happy to say that I could fit in my own voice.
More on this 419th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Dischoir / The Assignment: Make music from 100+ vocal samples of held syllables by members of the Disquiet Junto — at:

https://disquiet.com/0419/

This all came about as a result of something Alan Bland mentioned on the Junto Slack. He pointed out that my having misspelled Disquiet as “Disquier” in the December 19, 2019, project title made him think of “Dischoir,” a possible Junto project. Thanks to Alan and to Jason Wehmhoener for helping me think this project through, and to everyone (over 50 contributors) who sent in samples.

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0419-dischoir/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this track is by Joe Lencioni, and is used (image cropped, text added) via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/8Bk9Rx

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

Disquiet

Dischoir (disquiet0419)

More on this 419th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Dischoir / The Assignment: Make music from 100+ vocal samples of held syllables by members of the Disquiet Junto — at:

https://disquiet.com/0419/

Disquiet0419

Disquiet 0419: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0419-dischoir/

I don’t really use samplers. I mean, I use big sample libraries sure. But I’ve not loaded samples into something labeled a sampler in decades. And so the exercise was somewhat freeing, because I decided to keep not loading samples into something labeled a sampler. 

So I wrote a bunch of python code which (basically) figured out the fundamental frequency of every 512 sample block of almost every one of the dischoirs (a few really non-pitched ones I excluded). This gave me a complete frequency map where I could pull the samples i wanted by frequency, pick them at random, etc. I did a bit of analytics and rubber banding to make some re-tuned copies to fill in some holes in the frequency space too. The code is all available in my GitHub, although it’s an iPython notebook and as such, a bit of mess. But it makes music!

But In effect, it’s an instrument. When you “play” c4 for some time period, I randomly hunt through the set of samples on a 512-sample block level to find a sample which is roughly 261.63hz, then expand around it to make a long enough sample, then send that out to the stream. Sometimes the frequency detection is wrong; sometimes the note drifts during duration. So it goes!

The bit of music I intended to make was the first prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier, and I actually worked that out and it sounded pretty good. I ended up intersecting with that music several times this week. I won’t bore you with that here, but if that sort of thing interests you I have a tinyletter at tinyletter.com/baconpaul

But then I heard the sad news that Neil Peart had died. That changed plan some late on Friday night.

And so i like to share with you “The Well Tempered Dys-Qyr-Z (disquiet0419)”

The Well Tempered Dys-Qyr-Z (disquiet0419)

Disquiet 0422: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0422-chapter-cascade/28907

The challenge, to make very short collections of noises, in a relatively prescribed A/B pattern, immediately clicked in my head with an idea. I would write 3 very short pieces of music, two a pattern and one a loop. Then I would “play” the loop with the patterns radically sped up being each note of the loop. 

So some constraints. For the fastest rendition of the patterns to work, they could not have repeating notes. So one pattern is a sort of opposing pair of melodies and another is three rising chords. The loop has one repeated theme of 7 notes and another of 5, so the item ends up 140 “notes” long.

And then I had to execute it.  About half the disquiets have me writing some custom code, and I did so here, writing some python to take a performed version of each theme as midi, and radically speed it up. And once I was in code, I could do things, like speed it up a bit less as time went on; and offset the themes at the start and phase them towards not being offset at the end; and some other tricks. It’s all on my GitHub if you want. 

And then take the midi files into Logic, set up some Pianotec and some reverbs and delays and stuff, and voila.

In some ways I really like this, and I think it was super successful, especially as I let it open up. But in other ways it sounds exactly like the sort of mechanical formal toneless music that makes people not like “modern” music. I hope you enjoy listening and making your own decision, and I’m glad to share “3 Ideas; 5040 Notes (disquiet 0422)”

3 Ideas; 5040 Notes (disquiet 0422)

Disquiet 0423: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0423-hold-noise

Luckily, here in modernity, our zooms, our hangouts, our skypes, and our facetimes have chosen to do away with the tradition of hold music. But iproviders of yore made a choice to foist music upon us, and in my experience seemed to pick either a (presumably low license cost) uninspired recording of some baroque music or a bit of music somewhere between smooth jazz and bad fusion. And in the spirit of the second, I approached this week’s prompt.

But also, this week we shipped Surge 1.6.5. If you are a Surge user you should totally upgrade. Loads of new stuff, all detailed in the changelog. One of the big changes is we now have a complete SCL/KBM tuning implementation. I spent quite a bit of time writing and testing this with the rest of the surge team, but I hadn’t used it to make music in anger. So I chose an 18 note even division of the octave scale and went for it. I picked this scale because it makes diminished arpeggios on a standard keyboard equivalent to a whole tone scale. And what is more smooth jazz/bad fusion than a whole tone scale? But all those other notes are hanging out there too… The bit uses the Logic Pro built in drum samples and three virtual instruments with a solid retuning implementation (Surge, dexed and Pianotec).  

And of course, our intrepid hold-music musicians, getting more adventurous as the call goes on, moving further from their whole tone roots, meet the fate of all hold music. If you listen to the end, you’ll find out what that is, if you can make it that far. If you can, I hope you enjoy listening to “The 3:30 is Running a Few Minutes Late (disquiet0423)”

The 3:30 is Running a Few Minutes Late (disquiet0423)

Disquiet 0425: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0425-crop-score/29584

Finally, scientists unpacked the signal in Crop Circles, and amazingly they found encoded audio. The sounds were released Feb 21, 2076. Is it noise? It it speech? Is it an alarm? No-one knows, but the entire world is listening, rapt, to the strange and mysterious sound - a thrum and an unsettled whistle - trying to understand what it is that we have received. In the bar at the teleportation station which we last visited in disquiet0414, the night band sits silent, trying with everyone else to garner a glimpse of meaning. And then the pianist realizes the sound is an invitation to cooperate, a lead from a song that we have to write together across space and time. That some alien, deep in the past, was looking to sit in on the session and make music, and sent us that message as a pile of compressed wheat fields. So turn to the keys - pluck out a hint of a sympathetic melody. As the rest of the group joins in, the bar looks on, thinking:  “No. No, that’s probably not what the signal means. But let’s listen and order another cocktail anyway.”

This week is my 11th disquiet. As I’ve done with several others, I wrote some code and some music. This time I used python to extract 2 dimensional signals from the wikipedia image, turned slices of those signals into one dimensional signals, turned those one dimensional signals into midi cc, and pulled about 2 minutes of lots of midi control into Logic. I made a feedback-y Surge patch controlled by the CC, and then played along on piano. Nicely, as I was playing, I realized I was returning to the sound palette of disquiet0414, and so I wrote the above little micro-story in my head. And voila.

With that, I hope you enjoy “Space Sits In on The Last Number (disquiet0425)”

Space Sits In on The Last Number (disquiet0425)

A single take improvisation, after sitting at the piano for a bit on a saturday.

An Improvisation, March 7 2020

Disquiet 0428: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0428-urban-moss/30154

I’ve never met Marc. Almost swung by that bar in Dumbo 2 weeks ago but had another thing. But this week he took a picture of a pole and asked us to think about concerts of the past in this turbulent time. And wished us well. And I wish him well also.

Less surprisingly, I’ve also never met Thelonius Monk. In 1959, Wikipedia tells us, he recorded his third solo album “Thelonius Alone in San Francisco” at Fugazi Hall on October 21 and 22, live. 

But without an audience.

And recently I’ve been spending time with “Ruby, My Dear”, the second track from the record. It’s a fun item. This week with a friend and I just sort of ended up holding onto the chords to really let the voicings become part of my vocabulary. 

Those ideas all collided at once this afternoon. And while the resulting reflection on the first 8 bars of Monk’s piece really are pretty far away from the disquiet style and intent, I still thought I would share what I recorded anyway. So, with a hope that you and yours are safe, I hope you enjoy “A Reflection on Ruby (disquiet0428)”.

A Reflection on Ruby (disquiet0428)

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0439-hybrid-self/32979

The prompt: Think of two musicians who you admire with different styles. Hybridize. Your choice if you want to disclose who they are.

You know who they are.

Alice at the Gates (disquiet0439)

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0440-tuning-in/

A simple challenge: make music with an alternative tuning. Enjoy.

Untitled, with Resolution (disquiet0440)

Multi-this-that-and-the-other including composer; 1/3 of @NerdBaitBand / www.nerdbaitband.com