Disquiet Junto Project 0580: Evo Evol Evolve

The Assignment: Record a piece of music that develops like an organism evolves.

Step 1: You’re going to record a piece of music informed by evolution. Think of stages of evolution, perhaps choosing a specific animal or other life form that evolved over time.

Step 2: Record a piece of music that evolves as it proceeds, based on the patterns (phases, stages) you explored in Step 1. And yes, animals that went extinct are a potential subject. 
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Because of this prompt I have been grappling more than usual with half-baked wonderings such as: how might individual-level agency, curiosity and desire eventually contribute to the sum total of evolution if even at all? What does it mean to think of mutations as risky miniature acts of selective rebellion? And how does it feel subjectively for each life form to find themselves as tiny unwitting participants within vast unfolding and unfathomable processes? 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

I decided that mainly I wanted to use the prompt as an excuse to try to take the perspective of an emergent proto octopus - I love that they are some of our most distant and mysterious evolutionary relatives. Well the resulting track is my emotional response to some of these vague, re-volving and unresolved themes anyway. It is perhaps one of the most amorphous things I have ever allowed myself to create so far.

Animoog Z was the only synth I used this time. Oh and I used some aquatic samples to modify a few of my timbres too. This was a fun feature to tinker with.

I dabbled with ZOA generative sequencer in iOS, and incorporated factors of 8 wherever possible, in an attempt to embed some kind of simplistic nod to evolutionary processes. I have also obviously tried to layer my sounds incrementally, to suggest emerging and merging mutations and complexity. But in the end this was all just a jumping-off point for something more intuitive and emotionally exploratory. I enjoyed this prompt, even though the results feel unfinished to me.

Image credit: NOAA Ocean Exploration & Research from USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

More on this 580th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Evo Evol Evolve (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that develops like an organism evolves), at: disquiet.com/0580/

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

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Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-pr…80-evo-evol-evolve/

Proto Octopian disquiet0580

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