Disquiet Junto Project 0682: Unring a Bell
The Assignment: What if you could?

There is just one step to this project. The idea that one cannot “unring a bell” is a fairly common saying, at least in English. But what if you could? What might it sound like? And what use might the unrung bell serve in the making of music. Please record a track in which you try to unring a bell.

Deadline: Monday, January 27, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/

Disquiet Junto Project 0682: Unring a Bell

An exploration of not bells ... be careful, though ... the SoundCloud algorithm doesn't consider this music, and I didn't really want to "modify your track to make it eligible" for recommendation to potentially interested listeners! 😂

More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/

more halF unusuaL

halF unrunG [disquiet0682]

Features the sound of Great Peter (216 cwt or 10.8 tons) situated in the North-West Tower of York Minster.

More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/

Disquiet Junto | Unring A Bell - disquiet0682

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

More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/

250123 [disquiet0682]

All the sounds in this track are derived from original recordings of small hand bells.
More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/

Cracked Bells (disquiet0682)

Working with Martin Howse's TOAD circuit for this as the description of "resonant, clanging and metallic sounds" made me think of bells. By virtue of patching it with other ERD modules to allow chaos a more firm grip on the proceedings, I imagined the resultant sputtering to be in some sort of alignment for the deconstruction of a peel o' bell.

"TOAD can also model a mass-spring-damper system, or series of damped oscillations, which also can be used as a state variable filter.

Here the equation is: x’’=1/m(-(Dx’ + sx) with m as mass, D as damping coefficient and s as springiness. This is a simple equation to begin with, and can produce resonant, clanging and metallic sounds.

x represents the vertical displacement of the spring, x’ is the first derivative of x (which would be speed) and x’’ is the second derivative (which would be acceleration). We patch the equation by feeding the lower derivatives (x’ and x) produced by the first two integrators into the collector. Paying attention to norms, this can be seen in the next diagram. We can use the first multiplier pair as VCA for our input"

Disquiet Junto Project 0682: Unring a Bell
The Assignment: What if you could?

There is just one step to this project. The idea that one cannot “unring a bell” is a fairly common saying, at least in English. But what if you could? What might it sound like? And what use might the unrung bell serve in the making of music. Please record a track in which you try to unring a bell.

More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/


Unring a Bell disquiet0682

I couldn't help myself. Long Live Oswald!

Rinsed and rung back with GRM Envolution. 

Not available for download for hopefully obvious reasons.

More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/

Stop the Bells disquiet0682

What is it like to unring a bell. Serge Modular plus time domain manipulation in the DAW.

ONIRR disquiet0682

More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/

A Bell Unstruck (disquiet0682)

Recorded, mixed & mastered on 24 Jan 2025 by Jim Lemanowicz at Blissville Electro-Magnetic Laboratories of Massapequa. 

Bell samples, synth, grains. 

Artwork/Photography - Jim Lemanowicz, Massapequa, NY, USA - 05 Sep 2017

©2025 Jim Lemanowicz

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This original version of “Pig Open Again” was submitted as part of Disquiet Junto Project 0682:  Unring a Bell. The Assignment: What if you could?

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

More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/

Pig Open Again (disquiet0682)

Attempt to Unlearn a Short Sequence of Tones - disquiet0682

sound art for disquiet0682.

More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/

I live in Glasgow where every child is taught this verse in school:

here is the tree that never grew
here is the bird that never flew
here is the fish that never swam
here is the bell that never rang

It refers to the Glasgow Coat of Arms which has a tree, a bird, a fish and a bell on it. The symbols represent tales and miracles from the life of St. Mungo (Patron Saint of Glasgow).

It seemed like a good fit for the title of this Junto project.

For the track I used a large metal light shade (that I found in the streets of Glasgow) and a rock. I rubbed the rock around the inside of the light shade, taking special care as to the speed, volume and resonance of the sound. Different areas of the shade produced different sounds; scraping, hissing or resonant tones. I recorded two tracks like this with contact mics and panned them hard left and right. Then playing the edge of the shade with a violin bow, I recorded some pulsing feedbacky sounds. I didn’t use effects or even any EQing, I just kept re-recording things until I got them exactly right, instead of fixing them on the computer.

here is the bell that never rang (disquiet0682)

time's arrow broken [disquiet0682]

This was my contribution for Disquiet Junto Project 0682: Unring a Bell. The Assignment: What if you could?

Here’s a copy of my post on the Disquiet Junto 0682 discussion thread on Lines:

My interpretation of un-ringing was based on bell tones morphing and unraveling into other sounds. Initially tried to create this soundscape in Ableton Live but nothing seemed to click. Finally settled on using a small modular system for production. 

Put together a Morphagene reel in Adobe Audition using bell samples as well as atmospheric sounds from freesound.org. The patch routing went from Make Noise Morphagene, Bastl Ikarie, Holocene NLMM, and finally a Make Noise XOH out to an audio interface to Ableton. Manually played Morphagene as the composition progressed. Recorded and deleted multiple versions, till I was finally satisfied with this one. Added a bit of delay and reverb with Valhalla Supermassive. Bells photo by Shaouraav Shreshtha via Unsplash.

More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/

Bells Unraveling [disquiet0682]

A Koala Sampler jam using Tibetan bowls and subtle beats at 120 BPM. I was aiming for conflicting emotions - blissed out trance and moving your body.

Tibetan Bell by the_very_Real_Horst -- https://freesound.org/s/413626/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

Got a Message From Lynne

Got a Message From Lynne (disquiet0682)

bell study for the disquient junto "unring a bell" project.

spent some time with a single chime from the pictured bell. after over-thinking it for some moments, came to dwelling on the most simple loop. the product itself. a nearly-clean chime hits at around 40s.

bell study [disquiet0682]

Back after a lengthy absence from the Disquiet Junto.

The prompt aligned perfectly with my ongoing research into bell-like tones through ring modulation and frequency shifting, inspired by Oren Ambarchi's work, in particular "Grapes From The Estate" (Touch). 
Electric guitar, mostly harmonics, through ring mod plus some atrocious, violent guitar bits and bobs from my archive. 

Hope you enjoy!

More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/

Unring [disquiet0682]

The Assignment: What if you could?

There is just one step to this project. The idea that one cannot “unring a bell” is a fairly common saying, at least in English. But what if you could? What might it sound like? And what use might the unrung bell serve in the making of music. Please record a track in which you try to unring a bell.

More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/

unrung [disquiet0682]

[disquiet0682] spectral bell

This week's #disquietjunto prompt was to create some music "in which you try to unring a bell."

In practice, I recorded the sound of a gong from our school’s band room (it’s like a bell but BIGGER). Then I tried to create the little snippets of sound that would fly around as the bell rang and which our hard-working theoretical performer would eventually have to reassemble.

Disassembling the bell’s tone into fragments was fun and challenging. I loaded the bell into Anemond’s Factoid to break it up into pieces based on frequency ranges, which got me lots of little snippets (including the drone tones you hear now and then). I also loaded it into Synplant, which generated tons of weird synthetic bells that led me down various rabbit holes of sound design and thoroughly distracted me from this project. I also put the bell sample into Ableton’s Simpler, sliced it into snippets based on transients, and then used the Arpeggiator plug-in to play the snippets randomly.

Isolating and organizing all these fragments and new samples into a track was pretty challenging! Eventually, I outlined the structure of the track, which helped me find my way.

1) Bell tone
2) Bits and pieces dance around the stereo field and an attempt is made to reassemble them
3) The bell is rung again, but this time it sounds slightly different
4) Part of the tone breaks off into a drone while a few snippets flit around
Once again, the bell is reassembled, with a big reverse sound leading into…
5) A big, new bell sound (created by layering pitch-shifted iterations of the original sample)

More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/

You Wouldn't Unring A Bell (disquiet0682)

getting back into disquiet junto a bit this year, me hopes, after year or fews absence. this track is made with the UDO Super Gemini. i wanted to do some fancy sequencing, and had all kinds of fancy compositional ideas to do with unringing a bell, but i ran into problems, so ended up just playing over myself a few times with the bell-like (plenty ring mod) patches I had created. the playing is really bad/i can't - but weirdly i feel this gives it, along with its simple nature, some kind of wonky heroism that does after all remind that there ain't no goin' back (unless we is torquin waaaaay back). peace peeps, all the best for 202555zzz.

unrung heroes wonk disquiet0682

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.