Name: disquiet junto #367 Trio Initiate by circlingcrows
Duration: 3 min 30 s
Description: Part one of a three-part disquiet junto collaboration.

This is incredible.  You should be very proud of what you've accomplished here.

In the late '80s, my dad recorded the foghorns of San Francisco on tape for my mother.  Many of the foghorns in San Francisco Bay can never be heard again as they have been replaced by more advanced technology. (Please read on)

Here is what my dad has to say:

This recording was made late in the evening on the foggy night of August 29th, 1987 from 
Lands End near Lincoln Park in San Francisco, using fairly inexpensive stereo equipment. The coordinates are approximately N 37 degrees 47' 14"; W 122 degrees 29' 40.5".  Years later I converted the recording to digital for posterity.  There are four separate fog horns audible, each with specific characteristics such as direction, intervals and frequencies; two are single, two are double.  I believe two of these are located on the nearby Golden Gate Bridge itself and another may be at Point Bonita on the Marin Headlands, 2.5 miles west of the bridge. Also audible is the surf below the cliffs of Lands End. At about 1:08:00
 into the recording a small plane can be heard flying overhead.  For more information about these and other fog horns in San Francisco Bay, visit:

http://goldengatebridge.org/research/factsGGBFogHorn.php

http://science.kqed.org/quest/audio/changing-foghorns/

1987 San Francisco Surf and Foghorns

Part one of a three-part disquiet junto collaboration.

disquiet junto #367 Trio Initiate

Recorded at Église Sacré Coeur in Montreal, Qc. on March 13 2019. The recording is of a polyphonic no-input console in the main church space, recorded with omni-directionnal lavalier microphones.

Music and recording by Christian Carrière

Suspension of Disbelief

Washington Square Collage (disquiet0478)

what a great set of samples! It was really hard to choose a subset. I chose one from each contributor and then randomly sampled the rest, and wound up with 11 samples. I took the samples and roughly leveled and pitch-corrected them (if you want these samples they can be downloaded here:

https://soundcloud.com/north_woods/sets/dischoir

I loaded them each into ChucK with each sample buffer having its own envelope, echo, reverb, pan, and pitch transposer. Then I set up pitch transposing to create simple chords. For example, at about 1:54 it comes in with a version of the program that randomly assigns pitch transposing of either 1 (no transposition) or + 1 third to each sample. I cycle through a few chords before winding up at the original samples again. The whole thing is recorded live with no dubs (I did a few takes). the code is here:

https://github.com/charliekramer/ChucK/blob/master/disquiet0419%20dischoir.ck


To get chords you just replace [1.] @=> float notes[]; with [1., third, fifth] @=> float notes[] or something. The 11 samples is too much for my laptop if I'm running more than one copy of the program at a  time so some of the chords use just a couple of the samples instead of the full 11. I may set it up to randomize the set of samples it uses. I liked the way it came out--might use it at a show coming up this weekend.

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/ 1

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/

disquiet0419 dischoir

This week's project is one of my all-time favorites.  Given over 100 short audio files containing vocalizations of various vowels, syllables, and occasional other things, from dozens of different voices, we were given the task to weave these into a composition.

With the exception of some transposition towards the end of the piece, I chose not to modify the character original material in any way.  What I did do was write a set of scripts which chose randomly from those files and figured out how to generate randomly-varying loops within the files in order to allow any one of them (I did have to skip anything shorter than one second) to be extended to an arbitrary length.  Then from that script, I built big, chordal sections where all the voices begin as the same moment (up to 42 parts at one point!), and other sections where the parts overlap and weave in and out over time.

The increasing transposition (up and down) of the sounds gradually distorts them in some disturbing ways.  Pretty early on, I thought of this as a vocal requiem, and structured it to reflect the austere, ceremonial nature of such a work.

All sounds were processed, mixed, and virtually placed in a 3-d sound environment using the RTcmix software toolkit.
---------------------------------
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/

Requiem Vocalise

Requiem Vocalise [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/ 2

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 1

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

Dischoir - disquiet0419

Rather than choose a few voice samples, I wanted to be able to "play" as many voices from the choir at once with each voice on an individual key. I was unsure how to do this, and got some help from Dave Hilowitz who makes his own sfz sample instruments (thanks Dave! Check out his site, linked below).

He showed me how to write a simple sfz pad and play the samples using the sforzando plugin.

I assigned each sample a random number from 00-59 and then mapped those files to the corresponding midi key and everything panned from extreme left to right manually. None of the samples were grouped by note or person, so I was hitting random chords and getting some really interesting clusters of notes. With some minor editing, this is essentially what I played.

I have also uploaded the sfz pad I made along with 60 voice samples (edited from the original versions to be in mono, match velocity and blend together better) to my google drive, if you're interested in playing around with it too:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qlPPgutlHLrZUAUSpu1kJVKat7SX1fe2

And here's David Hilowitz's site:
https://davehilowitz.com/

Photo by JR Korpa

**
Disquiet Junto Project 0419: Dischoir
The Assignment: Make music from 100+ vocal samples of held syllables by members of the Disquiet Junto.

Step 1: Welcome to a large, asynchronous, distributed choir. The Dischoir consists of 113 samples of held syllables by over 50 participants in the Disquiet Junto. You can access the files at the following URL. Note that a few of them deviate from the initial instructions:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/pkuvmzwcdz6dx27/AACUsNclLLqToLp-OJWVkaQXa?dl=0

Step 2: Create a piece of choral music from the provided samples. You are encouraged to make music that feels “human,” that feels like it is simply a lot of people singing at once. However, of course, the end result is up to you; you can and should mix, mash, and create as you please.

Sanal Koro - disquiet0419

Performed in complete darkness by Red Shift Ensemble... music inspired by the Aphotic Zone. Premiered December 16, 2019, Pyatt Theatre, Vancouver. Featuring Laine Longton, cello, Sarah Kwok, violin, Parmela Attariwala, viola, mark haney, double bass

Blind

I made a single track out of all the samples, an easy task thanks to Audacity. Probably should have balanced them then, but I was too lazy. This track was multi-tracked; all were repeatedly “ambiented” using plugins, 2 being pitched down a tone as well. Another was put through a subtle reverb. A bit tricky as I hadn’t balanced the samples and had to go in and manually reduce peaks on all tracks using Audacity’s Envelope Tool.

The track was also improvised on in Audiobulb’s ambient, then doubled and overlaid on the 2nd half of the mix with one reverbed. This produced some strange moments which don’t sound vocal at all. Which is why I like it!

Track image is pinched from the Wikipedia image of the cover of James Lane Allen’s 1897 book and modified.

----------------------------------------------

The Assignment: Make music from 100+ vocal samples of held syllables by members of the Disquiet Junto.

Step 1: Welcome to a large, asynchronous, distributed choir. The Dischoir consists of 113 samples of held syllables by over 50 participants in the Disquiet Junto. You can access the files at the following URL. Note that a few of them deviate from the initial instructions:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/pkuvmzwcdz6dx27/AACUsNclLLqToLp-OJWVkaQXa?dl=0 

Step 2: Create a piece of choral music from the provided samples. You are encouraged to make music that feels “human,” that feels like it is simply a lot of people singing at once. However, of course, the end result is up to you; you can and should mix, mash, and create as you please.

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/ 

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

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

The Choir Invisible [disquiet0419]

I'm a psychologist working with creative persons.  This is where I keep my own musical efforts.

disquiet junto #367 Trio Initiate

circlingcrows

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