Disquiet Junto submissions

My process was to bring the assignment's three samples into Audacity and then extract parts for percussion loops and isolated sounds. In Audacity I pieced together different pitches of one piano note into three; layered one sound on top of itself backwards; and some pitch-stretching. I dropped these into Garageband and moved them around.
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More on this 161st Disquiet Junto project — “Create a new track from three tracks from three different netlabels” — at:

http://disquiet.com/2015/01/29/disquiet0161-netmixrelabel/

This track includes material from the songs “Dog Kiss” by Chtin Mara off the album Animus Animal Anima (Enough Records), “Qif Kiff” by Ayato & Natalia Kamia off the album Cluster (eg0cide Records), and “Espasmo” by Lingering Last Drops (Bump Foot). More on Enough at enoughrecords.scene.org. More on eg0cide at eg0cide.com. More on Bump Foot at bumpfoot.net. All work used courtesy of a Creative Commons license allowing for derivative use.

Manipulating A Machine

Celephod Warning [disquiet0161-netmixrelabel]

From the challenge at http://disquiet.com/2015/04/23/disquiet0173-overversion/

Associated photo from Gareth, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/trois-tetes/147640480/
part used as graphic with this soundcloud track, and rendered from photo to sound with Audacity.

The phrase "The Past is Breaking Through" synthesized using this service: http://imtranslator.net/translate-and-speak/

Since the source track is bass and rhythm-oriented I focused on higher-pitched or non-percussive sounds.  The Sears field recordings were made this weekend so they were on my mind when composing as a sound source. I can see seven tracks but hope the disparate "sounds" unify into one musical piece in the listeners' minds.

Buy on Bandcamp

The Past Is Breaking Through (disquiet0173-overversion)

For the assignment detailed here: http://disquiet.com/2015/10/22/disquiet0199-spacecrickets/

All sounds are from Soundtransit at http://archive.turbulence.org/soundtransit/index.html
except one track of a field recording of cicadas I made in North Carolina this summer; and a second of a slowed-down piledriver from the building work around China Basin in San Francisco. The SoundTransit sounds are all reused under their Creative Commons license.

All sounds arranged and mixed in Garageband. 

My intent was to make the basic foley sound of a spaceship in space at the moment a character plays a cassette featuring the crickets/rain earth sounds. From the movie I expect lots of engine rumble and pipe sounds during their long journey. Matt Damon was creepy in that movie.

Space Crickets [for disquiet0199-spacecrickets]

Submission for the Disquiet Junto assignment, here: http://disquiet.com/2015/11/12/disquiet0202-costoffreedom/

My plan was to maintain focus on the speaking, while rendering the text with a text-to-speech synthesizer and adding background sounds. 

Text-to-speech service used is here: http://www.fromtexttospeech.com/
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More on this 202nd weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Create an audiobook chapter from the new essay collection The Cost of Freedom) at:

http://disquiet.com/2015/11/12/disquiet0202-costoffreedom/

The source of the text in this project is from the book The Cost of Freedom, which raises awareness about the ongoing detainment of Creative Commons coder/artist Bassel Khartabil Sadafi. More on it here:

http://costoffreedom.cc

Buy on Bandcamp!

Image, Identity, Attribution, Authorship - Disquiet0202 - Costoffreedom

Created as part of the Disquiet Junto project  no. 204, structured around the audio provided at https://soundcloud.com/toaster-1/beacon-for-marissa

For this project I abandoned the set BPM of the garageband file and just drummed along with the ambient track, and then added in a few other sound elements.

More on this 204th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Add a foundational rhythm to an ambient foreground”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2015/11/26/disquiet0204-underbeat/


Beacon - Toaster - Remix (Disquiet0204 - Underbeat)

For this Disquiet assignment, looking at the graphic notation, the main keyboard plays the three full notes and pause. The drum tattoos were an attempt to play the second notation hidden behind the first but I lost track. The third track slides and panning represent the spiral, telescoping edge of the wooden object behind the two sheets.

I used this wikipedia guide to determine what the fourth piece of notation was on that top sheet (a quarter note rest) -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_symbols

Garageband instruments are: Titanic Waves synth; Event Horizon synth; "Heavy" drum kit.

More on this 205th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Interpret boxed-up music-education materials as a graphic-notation score”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2015/12/03/disquiet0205-superposition/

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

Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/

Buy on BandCamp

Superposition (disquiet0205 - Superposition)

Disquiet 207 project, remixing three samples.
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More on this 207th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Rework source audio from Michel Banabila’s 1983 album, Marilli”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2015/12/17/disquiet0207-remixingmarilli/

The audio was sourced from the 1983 album Marilli by the album’s composer, Michel Banabila. This project marks the release of the 2015 album Marilli Remixed:

https://banabila.bandcamp.com/album/marilli-remixed-free-download

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

Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/

Marilli Disquiet Remix [disquiet0207 - Remixingmarilli]

For this 208th Disquiet project (details below), I used only the on-board mics on my laptop to record our hissing radiator, and noise off the television. 

There weren't any sound sources going on at home except these two. The first track in the picture (green strip) is a basic bass drum and high note; second is hissing radiator, followed by a small section of it looped over and over; track 3 is the main musical element - a few bars from a TV commercial; track 4 is the same at the end, offset and with effects; track 5 is backing musical vocal samples from other TV commercials; track 6 is a selection of edited dialog from the TV recordings.

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More on this 208th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Record a composition in place using only the sounds around you”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/12/24/disquiet0208-insitu/

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

Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/

Steamships Sailing [disquiet0208-Insitu]

Disquiet 217: " Create a new track by taking the existing track from Step 1 and from it constructing something that follows the verse/chorus/verse format of a traditional song. You can include a bridge, too. No singing is required. You can alter the original audio, beyond just cutting and splicing, and certainly feel free to add a melody, but do maintain some sense of resemblance to the source material."

Sourced from Rupert Tally's piece - “Square Pins in Thin Layers”, originally submitted to Disquiet 216: 
https://soundcloud.com/rupertlally/square-pins-in-thin-layers-disquiet0216-thinlayers
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More on this 217th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Take an existing assemblage of rhythm and tone and turn it into verse/chorus/verse”) at:
http://disquiet.com/0217/

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

Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/


The Observer-PindropRevisited [disquiet0217-formsong]

For Disquiet Junto 220 - "Make overtly rhythmic music from short loops of overtly arrhythmic source audio" - I pieced together vocal fragments from a synthesized voice talking about photographic copyright, and Michelle Bachmann, and then looping them in places to make them more rhythmic. A backing track of a street musician playing part of the Godfather theme gets a similar treatment towards the end.


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More on this 220th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Make overtly rhythmic music from short loops of overtly arrhythmic source audio, following instructions from Dennis DeSantis”) at:

http://disquiet.com/0220/

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

Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Manipulating A Machine [disquiet0220 - Rhythmicarrhythmic]

Disquiet Junto project 223: My first new turntable in 20 years came with direct drive and speed controls, so for this project I thought to play some drum beats, back up, and play them again. The source I used was half as many measures as I remembered, and lacking DJ skills I couldn't queue backwards fast enough to maintain rhythm, or even restart at the beginning. The horns are just to smooth it out some.

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More on this 223rd weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Record multiple, slightly varying takes on the same looped composition in this project by Monome’s Brian Crabtree”) at:
http://disquiet.com/0223/

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

Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

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

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/



Sole Louve [disquiet0223 - Layeredsameness]

The Pepper Jelly and HNY samples make the majority of rhythm in this piece. The “Autista 3” sample is a little buried in the middle, where there is less percussion. 

The "lyrics" were randomly generated by WriterBot at http://writerbot.com/lyrics and synthesized at http://www.fromtexttospeech.com/  I had hopes of matching the monotone vocals to a melody of keyboard notes but that is beyond Garageband for now.

The final vocals are a synthesized Thomas Piketty quote from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2016/feb/16/thomas-piketty-bernie-sanders-us-election-2016 -- I wanted something a little more "statement" oriented but running out of time. 

The guitars throughout are from guitar stems I recorded months ago in order to use for textures, and not recorded while working on this project. The protesters at the end are from a free field recordings site, SoundTransit: http://archive.turbulence.org/soundtransit/search/sounds.php

I come back over and over again to an idea of using sound samples, generated text, and synthesized voices to make deconstructed pop songs. I want to make them more "catchy" than the results, which to me sound like someone trying to manually recreate AI song generation, lol

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More on this 233rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Make one track from three different netlabels, courtesy of a Creative Commons license” — at:  http://disquiet.com/0233/

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

Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Manipulating a Machine

Glance Back For An Instant

Buy it on Bandcamp

Glance Back For An Instant [disquiet0233]

For this Disquiet project I utilized 3 pieces of found sound: a construction site piledriver that echoed off a nearby building; some moody, dubby background music in the mens department at Sears 2 or so years ago; someone playing an accordian on the sidewalk. Each are in 10-second segments. Looking at the instructions closer I am seeing the 90 second requirement means that each section does not need to be 10 seconds long. I used the visual equalizer for the first time to clean up some of the sound, and will continue to explore this tool.

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More on this 237th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Build a 90-second composition from three 10-second segments” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0237/

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

Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

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

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place on a Slack (send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for inclusion) and at this URL:

http://disquiet.com/forums/

Sears Squeeze Pile - [disquiet0237]

For Disquiet Junto Project 0239: Code Requiem -- "Compose a short composition in memoriam for a piece of recently deceased software."

This week's theme was inspiring and I latched onto the tortured history of Altsys/Aldus/Macromedia/Adobe Freehand. I remember using it long ago and then seeing it eclipsed by Photoshop + Illustrator, and Adobe maybe not supporting it any more. A more detailed history is here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FreeHand -- note the passion of the community response as each company tries to shutter the software.

I don't always ruminate on projects like this and instead may free-associate until an idea forms quickly in my mind, and run with that. Later I saw the software should have had a "recent" death; I thought Freehand died out many years before it did... so maybe it is recent enough. 

I resorted to "false metal" because I don't really play in that style, but have thought more and more recently about metal getting out of its Satanic/death/LOTR escapism and applying itself to political issues, topical concerns, etc. I can't hit the hair metal high notes, and death metal cookie-monster voice sounds really fake to me. The resulting vocal affectation is sort of between Rudimentary Peni and Judas Priest via a sad karaoke night. Also it would give me an opportunity to use Garageband's recent "Smart Drummer" for better composition, instead of basic loops. So I am happy with the occasional fills and tom rolls.

Artificial voice sample in last third of song is a snippet from a freehand help forum.
Lyrics:
"From history’s crypt, there lies Aldus Freehand
The promiscuous mingling of pixel and vector
Sold to Adobe at the dawn of time
Forever exiled to preserve the two empires

Aldus! Freehand! Vengeance will be yours!
Aldus! Freehand! pixels in one layer, vectors in another!

Kickstarter campaign for a reboot/
Or over time, move to open-source/
Fanciers and hobbyists perhaps unite/
To recreate the sensibility and ease-of-use/

ALDUS  FREEHAND -- We mourn. Your. Loss"

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More on this 239th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Compose a short composition in memoriam for a piece of recently deceased software” — at:  http://disquiet.com/0239/

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

Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

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

Cryptohelix

Requiem for Aldus Freehand-[disquiet0239]

This track is available on bandcamp as part of the Manipulating A Machine" release, here: https://cryptohelix.bandcamp.com/album/manipulating-a-machine?mysrc=sc
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This week's project at Disquiet: http://disquiet.com/2016/08/25/junto-0243/

"Step 1: As you now know, Jóhann Jóhannsson was selected to score Blade Runner 2. The news means, among other things, that you didn’t get the gig. Please reconcile yourself with this.

Step 2: Please share your favorite track from the audition tape you sent to Ridley Scott."
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More on this 243rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Share the best track from your audition tape for Blade Runner 2” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0243/

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

Blade Runner 2 Audition [disquiet0243]

Phasing loop project for Disquiet 249 project.

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More on this 249th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Wish the minimalist composer Steve Reich a happy birthday” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0249/

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

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
http://llllllll.co/t/happy-birthday-steve-reich-disquiet-junto-project-0249/

Happy-[disquiet0249]

This track is available on bandcamp as part of the Manipulating A Machine" release, here: https://cryptohelix.bandcamp.com/album/manipulating-a-machine?mysrc=sc

This music is for participation in the weekly Disquiet project, " Disquiet Junto Project 0290: Text-to-Beat." 

"This week we’re going to build a track around text-to-speech, the results of a computer-generated voice speaking. "

This track is constructed from bits of text entered into https://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net/  , some from the samples already provided there. The other sounds are EtherSpace app on my phone, and a Stylophone.

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More on this 290th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Text-to-Beat: Use computer-generated speech as the rhythmic foundation for a track. — at:
https://disquiet.com/0290/

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-0290-text-to-beat/

Generated voices from https://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net/

Espacio-Libertade-[disquiet0290]

Disquiet Junto Project 0335: Alone Time -- "Record conference-call hold music — a private limbo of your own making."  See: https://disquiet.com/0335/

"Step 1: Hold music is a ubiquitous fact of modern life. Ask yourself what hold music you’d like to hear while waiting for someone to pick up the other end of the line, or while waiting for a conference call to begin.

Step 2: Record a short piece of hold music that satisfies the scenario you pondered in Step 1. Your finished track should be suitable for looping, since you never know how long you’re going to be on hold."

For this recording, I played an 80s Casio keyboard horn and synth tracks over the demo function that came with an equally old drum machine (Yamaha DD-14). The xylophone, dogs, and applause are from the drum machine's sound effects bank, and can be played over the demo.

More on this 335th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Disquiet Junto Project 0335: Alone Time / Record conference-call hold music — a private limbo of your own making) at:
https://disquiet.com/0335/

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0335-alone-time/

On Hold, Holding On [disquiet0335]

Support our music on bandcamp! Out now: 
"Manipulating a Machine" - Late-night headphone music - August 2019:
https://cryptohelix.bandcamp.com/album/manipulating-a-machine?mysrc=sc

"Future Funerals", just released Nov. 2018 - 5 songs:
https://cryptohelix.bandcamp.com/album/future-funerals?mysrc=sc

3 more songs on a single, from 2015:
https://cryptohelix.bandcamp.com/album/3-song-45?mysrc=sc

"Traveling back/in time/from our best/future imaginations."