This track turned out nothing like what I expected.  It sort of got away from me for a while -- numbers blowing up to near-infinite values, gain overloads -- you know, the usual.  What I eventually settled on was inspired by the one restriction called for in the notes:  "at least once in your recording, let the source audio be heard clearly".

The original recording of chimes is about 5 minutes long. I created a time-point list for every moment where a new chime hit appears, with the exception of some very close hits. I split the recording into segments at these points.  The piece is structured so each segment of the original stereo recording is played once, in order, and then each is answered by a highly-processed batch of material built from the sounds in the segment just played, sort of call-and-answer. The processed segments end up longer or shorter than will fit properly, so there's a sort of chaotic element at play here. The processing is mostly high-grade transposition and amplitude modulation following by room simulation and reverberation. The entire piece was created using the RTcmix software toolkit.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

More on this 485th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Strange Weather (The Assignment: Remix the pure sounds of Chris Kallmyer’s traveling wind chimes to your own musical purposes) — at: https://disquiet.com/0485/

More on Chris Kallmyer at: chriskallmyer.com.

Major thanks to Alex Hawthorn for support: alexhawthorn.com

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-0485-strange-weather/

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

Image associated with this project is by Chris Kallmyer and used with the artist’s permission.

InterTinabulation

InterTinabulations [disquiet0485]

The image which inspired this piece (more information below) made me think about sheets of paper, and the sentences that had been on them which had now been rendered devoid of any meaning whatsoever by the "redacting" process.  Lastly, the ragged right edge of the image made me think of a paper shredder.  
I built the piece from three elements:  paper noises, vocal sounds, and the sound of a shredder.  The paper sounds were recorded at close range and used with very little modification other than combining large numbers of them at one time.  The vocal sounds heard in the piece are resynthesized from linear-predictive coding (LPC) analyses of recording of me reading a list of synonyms for the word "redacted".  The shredder sound is close-mike recorded, and then processed slightly.
The voice resynthesizer let me produce streams of "conversation" which were, like the NSA document, utterly unintelligible.  The shredder acts as an interrupter and a divider.  The paper sounds take on many roles, including the ostinato near the end.
The individual sounds were edited and processed using my own software, MiXViews, and the public domain software RTcmix (http://www.rtcmix.org).  The final mix was done using Logic Pro X.

***

More on this 83rd Disquiet Junto project, in which a page from recently declassified documents related to NSA collection of telephone metadata records is treated as a graphically notated score, at:

disquiet.com/2013/08/01/disquiet0083-redacted/

Image found via twitter.com/shearm and twitter.com/glennf.

Full document at:

goo.gl/wVydxR

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

Groups – Disquiet-junto

Shred Act [disquiet0083-redacted]

This is my first submission to the Naviar Haiku Music Challenge.  The project for this week:  https://www.naviarrecords.com/2021/05/12/naviarhaiku384-the-beginning-of-all-art.

This haiku immediately brought to mind a musical line, slowly building in length note by note, joined by others building in the same fashion.  I did this with simple sine wave lines which each begin quietly alternating the first 2 or 3 notes of a 23-note melody, adding gradually to how many notes each can play.  Subtle richness is provided by tiny "imperfections" in the rhythm of the lines, plus variations in the attack and decay of each line.  Lastly, the lines are joined by a slow progression of low chords as the music builds towards all four parts playing the entire melody, at which point they vanish.

Haiku 384

Haiku 384 (naviarhaiku384)

Coffee Dance is based on the project constraints listed below.  The oscillator I used was a low-frequency oscillator (LFO) using a custom stairstep waveform which, when used as audio at 1.6Hz, produced a pulse with an accent every 3rd beat.  The oscillator output is filtered to produce a high ringing sound for each pulse.
The drum machine is a software algorithm I wrote which randomly picks from out of 10 "kitchen sounds" (pots, lids, oven doors, slamming drawers, coffee pouring, etc.) that I recorded.  The sounds are run through a room simulator and then gated to chop them at the end of each beat.
The melody is a field recording of my coffee grinder, which I transpose up and down and applied heavy reverb.
And of course I cannot put this piece out there without a nod and a wink to Paul Lansky for his 1990 composition, "Table's Clear".  Thanks, Paul!

More on this 85th Disquiet Junto project, in which a song is made with three simple parts (oscillator, drum machine, field recording), at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/08/15/disquiet0085-3parts/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Coffee Dance [disquiet0085-3parts]

When I started thinking about this project, my biggest concern was how to deal with the repetition built into the constraints (I don't much care for direct repetition).  What I came up with was a "beat" track in 12/8 time, with 3 drum hits dividing each measure into three unequal parts.  Against that I put a melodic fragment in the same tempo and meter, which repeats, but the gap between the repeats varies randomly from 1 to 3 beats.  This causes the relationship between it and the drums to constantly vary.  The drone track was created using the RTcmix GRANULATE instrument processing 2 low cello pizzicato notes.

Each track was processed using a 3D sound placement + room simulator program I wrote many years ago and have used in many pieces.  The "rooms" for each track are very different:  auditorium-sized for the drone, small and narrow for the beat, and medium but reverberant for the melody.  The drum track is also binaurally filtered to give better placement for headphone listening.


More on this 88th Disquiet Junto project, which explores 3D sound, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/09/05/disquiet0088-3d/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Three Rooms [disquiet0088-3d]

In this piece, I tried to work contrary to some of my most common ways of dealing with prerecorded material.  I employed no processing whatsoever, not even the addition of reverb on drier tracks.  Secondly, I made heavy use of looping, which I normally avoid.  I also made an attempt to use every second of material from all raw sounds at least once (I only cut out a few seconds of accordina that I could not handle).
I used Logic Pro exclusively to assemble this piece.  I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to create movement, foreground vs. background, and a little bit of structure.  I only had to splice in one or two places where a prerecorded bit was too far off the beat - I did not feel like I would have the time to construct a musical structure around the original rhythm glitch.
Other than that, I just had fun orchestrating.

More on this 507th weekly Disquiet Junto project — In DD’s Key of C (The Assignment: Make music with 10 acoustic instrument samples all in a shared key) — at: https://disquiet.com/0507/

Tracks made with samples created generously by Daniel Díaz.

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-0507-in-dds-key-of-c/

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

The image associated with this project is by Thorsten Sideb0ard, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:

https://flic.kr/p/bvKCrv

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

C Shanty

C Shanty [disquiet0507]

This track was created in response to this Naviar Haiku challenge:
https://www.naviarrecords.com/about/naviar-haiku/
for the following haiku:

On the spring equinox
Clouds wander about
The entrance of a mountain temple.

About this work:  This is one that the basic structure and process came to me quickly, and the music was created within a single day (plus one for final edits).

The Clouded Temple

The Clouded Temple [naviarhaiku403]

In this piece I decided to have some fun and learn more about creating Logic sampler instruments out of raw recorded audio data.  I created three instruments, one each for the bird, kitten, and pig sounds that were supplied for the project.  The primary melodic part loops a small part of a kitten "mew" sample to allow me to sustain it.  I composed the little piece in Logic's MIDI sequencer, layering 6 parts (3 pig, 2 kitten, 1 bird) with some reverb and a bit of EQ to bring out the bass in the pig part.


More on this 94th Disquiet Junto project, in which the sound of three animals is combined into an unlikely vocal trio, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/10/17/disquiet0094-naturalisttrio/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Sampimals [disquiet0094-naturalisttrio]

SoundPrism 3 is part of an ongoing set of studies I am composing which each explore a different and particular recorded sound source.  My goal is to transform the source sounds into multiple dramatically contrasting sound "fields" which can then interact, combine, and interrupt each other.  For this piece, the source was a set of close-miked recordings of a sheet of aluminum foil, which I tapped, rattled, and eventually crumpled.  This piece was started several weeks prior to, but completed specifically for, the 95th Disquiet Junto project described below.

I had no form or structure in mind when I started.  When examining the recorded snippets in a sound editor, I noticed how the long (1-10 second) sounds were built up of many dozens of much smaller bits of sound, separated by small silences.  Using RTcmix, my composition software tool of choice, I wrote scripts to slurp small, closely-spaced, randomly-sized bits of sound from the recordings and place them in a synthetic acoustical environment (i.e., with wall reflections and reverberation).  Some sounds are transposed, others not.  I also wrote scripts to produce layered mixes of different recordings of the same basic timbre, such as a crunching sound.

Once I had some sense of what my transformed material was like, I began to structure the work as a kind of "perpetual motion" piece, with other contrasting transformations of the sounds interrupting, accompanying, or commenting on the gritty, fast-moving primary material.

***

More on this 95th Disquiet Junto project, in which musicians post recent tracks with the express purpose of getting constructive feedback, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/10/24/disquiet0095-discussamongst/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

SoundPrism 3 [disquiet0095-discussamongst]

This piece, created as a tribute to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, is composed entirely of recorded sounds of a silver dollar (see associated photo), a silver half-dollar, and a silver quarter.  All came from my collection of pre-1964 silver pieces.  The coins were dropped and spun on a granite countertop and recorded close-miked.

When I began work on this piece, I had the idea of a steady, rhythmic pulse as one of the key elements.  The opening track was fortuitous;  in one mix trial, the jangling of the quarter as it hit produced what I heard as a drum-like cadence, which I have come and go over the course of the piece.  I wanted to produce sounds which starkly contrasted with that high, crisp line, and so I worked to produce the low, dark, bell-like sounds which are time-dialated and transposed versions of the coin sounds.

I also discovered that I could create a continuum between a collection of overlaid coin drops and what sounds like pure gated noise, just by chopping off the sounds sooner and sooner so only the initial "attack" is left.  I also really like to have the end of one sound event be the trigger for the beginning of another.


More on this 96th Disquiet Junto project, in which metal machine music is made in tribute to the late Lou Reed, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/10/31/disquiet0096-metalmachine/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Image found via [citizenarcane.com](http://www.citizenarcane.com/index.php/archives/2005/03/19/metal-machine-music).

Silverworks [disquiet0096-metalmachine]

This piece falls into the category of "had an idea about how to generate a particular kind of sound but the results came out completely different".  I started with a 3 or 4-second recording of ice rattling in a glass - that's the only source I used.  I experimented with multiple slightly different rates of time dilation plus frequency limiting.  I had the idea that it would sound like the material was running at different rates while at the same time living in different pitch "strata".  Oh well.  The title came from both the idea of "cold" as in "Chill", and the fact that the material is stretched so a second can take a very long time.

All sounds were generated using the RTcmix software toolkit and were mixed using Logic Pro.

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

More on this 523rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Chill Communication (The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it) — at: https://disquiet.com/0523/

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-0523-chill-communication/

Cryoseconds

Cryoseconds [disquiet0523]

VaporWave was created using the constraint that all source material was recordings of water boiling.  I used both "steady state" boiling, both in a chemical flask and in a large pot, plus the sounds of water being dropped into a red-hot pan.  I played around quite a bit with filters to get the chordal material, plus a vocoder filter to provide the speech filtering.  Lastly, I had some fun with good old transposition.  Nothing too deep.

More on this 100th Disquiet Junto project (Record the sound of water boiling and make something of it) at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/11/28/disquiet0100-vaporwave/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

VaporWave [disquiet0100-vaporwave]

The idea for The Prime Music Box came to me in a single flash:  Multiple lines of notes, each moving at a different rate, with each line's tempo being a prime number so the notes in all the lines never overlap except for the first beat.  There are 18 lines, dividing the total length into 29, 31, 37, …, up to 101 beats respectively.  The lengths of the notes in a line are somewhat proportional to the time between notes in the line, so slower lines have longer notes.  Each line moves through the same chord sequence with the same timing, though there are overlaps.  Each line spans a range of six octaves, so it is (intentionally) impossible to "track" a single part.  All sounds were generated using wavetable instruments and room simulation processors in the RTcmix toolkit.  One more thing: the piece could theoretically loop, because the opening moment would return as the 18 parts only coincide on the very first beat.

More on this 102nd weekly Disquiet Junto project (Record original secular holiday music: glistening, reflective, gentle) at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/12/12/disquiet0102-sonictinsel/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

The Prime Music Box [disquiet0102-sonictinsel]

This piece was inspired by the haiku for this weeks Naiver Haiku challenge (https://www.naviarrecords.com/2022/04/13/naviarhaiku432-spring-blossoms-fading/).
The piece has three layers: 1) A series of 10-note chords, no two alike.  2) A slow, deep bass line, and 3) A slow melody made of rapidly repeating, filtered plucked sounds.

The World Grows Older

The World Grows Older [navierhaiku432]

This project was way outside my comfort zone given my abysmal knowledge of EDM.  I worked from the bottom up, finding sounds that I thought were appropriate to something moving this slowly but also familiar to (some) listeners of techno.  I assembled this in Logic Pro.
 
========================================================
More on this 541st weekly Disquiet Junto project — 10BPM Techno (The Assignment: Make some snail-paced beats) — at: https://disquiet.com/0541/

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-0541-10bpm-techno/

Image used thanks to this license: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grapevinesnail_01.jpg.

SloTechno

SloTechno [disquiet0541]

I was very happy to see this project come back around because I had not yet joined the community a year ago.  Once I settled on a particular recording of an ice cube dropping into a glass, I set about figuring out ways to stretch that 1-second sound out.  Using the RTcmix software toolkit, my favorite, I used granular processing, extreme transposition, room simulation and reverberation, filtering, along with semi-automated scripts that allowed me to select small sections of the original sound and repeat them with variation (gradually louder or softer, repetitions getting closer or farther apart, etc.).  Structurally I tried to let the piece develop intuitively.

More on this 105th Disquiet Junto project (“Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2014/01/02/disquiet0105-ice2014/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/?p=16588

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Photo associated with this project found via Creative Commons at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaukay/384109969

Frozen Landscape [disquiet0105-ice2014]

I always look forward to the beginning of the year when this project comes around.  This year I used this piece as a study for a much larger work - specifically using it as a way to experiment with a complex scripting language I have built on top of the RTcmix (www.rtcmix.org) scripting language, MinC.
My scripts allow me to create algorithmic musical patterns in a large number of dimensions:  volume, pitch, sample selection, tempo, placement in a simulated room-space etc.  Each dimension can be moved about in via an algorithmic plug-in, for example, random choice, sequential access, fixed value, etc.
The Psychedelic Ice Machine uses three sets of ice sound samples I have recorded over the years.  The score loops, creating an ever-changing set of patterns.  The relationship between these is sometimes clear and sometimes obscured.

-------------------------------
More on this 575th weekly Disquiet Junto project — On Ice (The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it) — at: https://disquiet.com/0575/

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-0575-on-ice/

The Psychedelic Ice Machine

The Psychedelic Ice Machine [disquiet0575]

The tenth work in my SoundPrism series derives its material from 5 substances:  Glass, ceramic, metal, plastic, and cardboard.  A large variety of objects of different sizes and shapes, made of these materials, were struck with different hardnesses of mallets and sticks and recorded as individual samples.  From this I developed a set of music "characters", which maintain a timbral identity throughout the piece, but also change in subtle ways as they interact.

I came up with the subtitle on my own, but then found the only online reference to that exact phrase came from a "forgotten book":  "The Technique of Play Writing" by Charlton Andrews (1915).

SoundPrism 10: A Play of Characters

My first Disquiet Junto submission in quite a while.  In this track I decided to explore a dozen or so FX available in Logic Pro, which I use to master most of my music.  Various tracks use flanging, compression, distortion, echo, reverb, multi-band filtering, stereo tremolo, etc., in various combinations.  For the most part I left the source tracks intact, with a few exceptions, and quite a bit of looping.
Thanks go to Marcus Fischer for the source samples!
-------------------
More on this 600th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Reaching Out (The Assignment: This is a shared sample project. Rework a set of seven WAV files provided by Marcus Fischer), at: https://disquiet.com/0600/

ReachingOut

ReachingOut [disquiet0600]

Transfigured Daylight is the second piece in a series of works which attempt to blend algorithmic and human musical materials and structure to create beautiful and compelling results.  The piece was generated from a single RTcmix script.  To hear the first work in the series, listen to https://open.spotify.com/track/34ZLIxpZV55CBm0asQlF0J?si=23d70af0aecd4789.

<a href="https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/sun-clouds_949083.htm#query=photoangel&position=1&from_view=search&track=sph">Image by photoangel</a> on Freepik

Transfigured Daylight

This piece has a long history: Some of the tracks were created more than a decade ago during one of my many attempts to put a piece together.  In each previous attempt, I created a bunch of new material and then abandoned it.  Finally in this composition much of that historic material has been fit together into a new sound tapestry.  Sets of specific material appear and disappear cyclicly, changing order, volume, and relationship to each other.

All sound generation, processing, and mixing were done using the RTcmix software toolkit (www.rtcmix.org).

Image by <a href="https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/glitter-texture-background_4167762.htm#from_view=detail_alsolike">Freepik</a>

Premonitions of Waking

Premonitions Of Waking

My first attempt at what I think of as "minimal ambient".

From The Near Distance

I composed my first Disquiet "Ice piece" a decade ago.  Over this decade I have created seven of these (and am sorrowful for the years I missed), and this is the eighth.  As I promised myself, I use the same ice recordings I made those many years ago.  In this composition, four source files are randomly selected for their content.  Each contains ice sounds at a different frequency, and the contrast between those, and the way they are chopped up, repeated, and placed in space and time, forms the narrative of the music.  In addition, two other source files, one a "normal" recording of ice rattling, and the other similar but transposed down, add their occasional commentary.
================================================
More on this 627th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Just Ice Society — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at: https://disquiet.com/0627/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0627-just-ice-society/

Of The Piece of Just Ice

Of The Piece Of Just Ice [disquiet0627]

This piece is scored for 8 solo voices (SSAATTBB).  The text is by the contemporary poet John Giorno.  The work is performed here by the New Calliope Singers at Columbia University, conducted by Peter Schubert.

Suicide Sutra (1982)

'Just In Time' is a one-movement quartet for Bb clarinet, violin, violoncello, and piano. It is part of a new series of compositions marking my return to acoustic music after many years spent working in a purely electronic medium. My fascination with order, permutation, and numeric relationships heavily influence the structure and flow of this piece, while at the same time allowing me to work with essentially diatonic pitch material.

This virtual "performance" was generated via the sequencing and sampling capabilities of Logic Pro.

This piece was awarded the Diamond Prize in season 3 of the Saint-Saëns International Music Competition for 2024 and the Absolute First Prizes for Original Composition and Chamber Pieces in the 2025 season 1 Bach International Music Composition.

Just In Time

Once again, the first Disquiet Junto project of the year.  This is my ninth contribution.  As I promised myself, I use the same ice recordings I used for all the other pieces.  In this one, I created three layers, moving at different rates with different frequency ranges.  The processing of the sampled sounds changes constantly - sometimes up to 50 times per second.  The number of events, the spacing and playback rate, durations, filtering bands, spacial placement and distance, etc., all change constantly in a cyclical and/or random fashion.
================================================
More on the 679th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ice Age — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0679/

Ice Cage

Ice Cage [disquiet0679]

I composed this piece for a dear friend who has introduced me to a large number of composers' works through his playing over the many years of our friendship.  Quadrants is a continuation and evolution of the new compositional language I used in "Just in Time", where my fascination with order, permutation, and numeric relationships heavily influence the structure and flow, while at the same time allowing me to work with essentially diatonic pitch material.

This virtual "performance" was generated via the sequencing and sampling capabilities of Logic Pro.

Quadrants for piano

This piece is my third yearly contribution to the "ice" project.  The previous two are very atmospheric, and I wanted to use the material completely differently this time.  I started with the idea that it would be rhythmic throughout, and created a kind of "rhythm track" built of two primary patterns, one 8 beats long, one 6 beats long.  To this I added what sounds like an improvisation on a vibraphone, a clave marking every 24 beats, and gongs -- but all these are made from recordings of ice.  The "vibe" is ice rattling in a glass passed through a bank of narrow filters to produce the pitches; the clave is rattling sounds speeded up by 4x, and the gongs are ice falling into a glass, slowed down 8x.  The positions of the sounds in the rhythm tracks wander around a bit, and everything is processed through a room simulator with a dry, medium-sized room.  The entire piece was generated and mixed with a single score file (partially shown in the image for the track) using the RTcmix software system.


--------
More on this 210th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2016/01/07/disquiet0210-icecoda/

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/

Photo associated with this project by Michael Scott used via Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/5vyz3G



Ice Meditation [disquiet0210-icecoda]

I made a decision to tackle DJ projects which I otherwise might skip due to aesthetic differences, so I am finding ways to make that work for me.  To be honest, the style of source music for this project is really not my cup of tea, so I took some serious liberties...
To be true to the project instructions, the piece is entirely built seven sound segments - one taken from each song.  However, most of the segments are less than a second long - one beat from one track, the final percussive gesture from another, and so on.  
These I transformed in two different ways:  time dilation and what I call "slice and dice", where I take random tiny (0.01 second) bits of a sound and pile them on top of each other.  Most track segments appear at least once in each of these two transformations (except 'Stracture' which appears only once).
The title of the piece comes from the first two letters of the titles of each of the seven tracks, in order.
The image accompanying this track shows the layout of the transformed material: Red=track1, Orange=track3, Yellow=track5, Green=track7, Blue=track4, Purple=track2.
All sound processing was done using the RTcmix software toolkit, with final mix down using LogicPro.

More on this 263rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Overture Edit: Produce an overture to an existing album”:

http://disquiet.com/0263/

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:

llllllll.co/t/overture-edit-disquiet-junto-project-0263/6092

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

Mostdinelonago [disquiet0263]

I created this track on my laptop while vacationing in Vancouver, B.C.  Rather than go out searching for audio material, I decided to keep it simple and just use sine tones.
The structure is simple as well:  A seven-note pattern, C-D-C-F-E-F-D is played once over the 3-minute length of the piece.  Layered over that is the same pattern played twice as fast, repeated once.  Over that, the same, twice as fast, repeated twice, and so on for four or five layers.  The faster the pattern, the lower the octave, though layers do share octaves.
The "instrument" playing all the tones generates a sine wave with added even harmonics (2nd, 4th, 6th), with a slow envelope for both volume and for the slow vibrato.  The volume is also modulated by the LFO, so the tones shimmer.
Because (you might have noticed) the repeat count does not compensate for the halving of the length each time, the faster layers finish first, gradually leaving just the slowest at the end.

More on this 350th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Selected Insomniac Works / The Assignment: Make very quiet music for very late at night for very fragile psyches) at:

https://disquiet.com/0350/

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-0350-selected-insomniac-works/

There’s also a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet to join in.

Image associated with this project is by Helen Cassidy, used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/69oCuU

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

Night Patterns

disquiet0350-NightPatterns

This was my first all-digital composition.  Intervals between successive pitch events are not based on a tempered scale, but rather by integral fractions (e.g., a note being 13/12 of the frequency of the previous note).  The chord which opens the piece returns again and again, transformed as its component pitches are shifted up and down by one or more octaves.  Created using Csound and Cmix.

Apparition (1989)

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.
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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]

This composition, the ninth in my SoundPrism series, grew out of my experience being sheltered-in-place from March-June of 2020.  All sounds are derived from acoustic recordings of a variety of items found around my house and garage: ironing boards, chairs, hangars, slamming doors and cabinets, etc.  All processing was done with the RTCmix software toolkit and final mixing was done using Logic Pro X.

SoundPrism 9: At Home

Psalm 06 was composed in response to the events of 9-11-2001.  The structure of the piece follows the form of the sixth penitential psalm, and the sonic source material for the piece is the recorded text of that psalm, in English and in Latin, whispered, spoken, or yelled at various levels of intensity by vocalist Denise Gill.  Each section of the work uses only text content from the matching portion of the text.

The Sixth Penitential Psalm


Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger; 
do not punish me in your wrath.

Have pity on me, Lord, for I am weak; 
heal me, Lord, for my bones are racked.

My spirit shakes with terror; 
how long, O Lord, how long?

Turn, O Lord, and deliver me; 
save me for your mercy's sake.

For in death no one remembers you; 
and who will give you thanks in the grave?

I grow weary because of my groaning; 
every night I drench my bed
and flood my couch with tears.

My eyes are wasted with grief 
and worn away because of all my enemies.

Depart from me, all evildoers, 
for the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping.

The Lord has heard my supplication; 
the Lord accepts my prayer.

All my enemies shall be confounded and quake with fear; 
they shall turn back and suddenly be put to shame.


Psalm 06 (2004)

Born and raised in Southern California, Douglas studied composition at U.C.L.A, Indiana University, and Columbia University.  Among his teachers were Paul Reale, Frederick Fox, Jack Beeson, Chou Wen-chung, and Mario Davidovsky.

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