Disquiet Junto Project 0611: Music That Listens to Itself
The Assignment: Record a piece of music that repurposes itself as it proceeds.

My notes can be found here: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0611-music-that-listens-to-itself/64092/9

Step 1: The underlying idea is to produce music that, so to speak, listens to itself. This would be music that employs techniques to revisit itself — repurposes itself — as it proceeds. From reverb to echo to tape loops to granular synthesis to accessing a buffer, various techniques serve such a compositional and performance purpose. Consider a means to achieve this result.

Step 2: Record a piece of music that employs the technique you focused on as a result of Step 1. Please note: for the Berkeley Alembic event, I’ll be sharing music that is particularly quiet, particularly appropriate to a meditative state of mind. You don’t need to record quiet music for this project, but quiet music is what I’ll be playing at the event.

[Disquiet_Junto_0611] Imaginary Windchime

More on this 611th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Music That Listens to Itself (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that repurposes itself as it proceeds), at: https://disquiet.com/0611/

Some of the music resulting from this project may be included in a September 29, 2023, event at the Berkeley Alembic in Berkeley, California: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/expanded-listening-music-that-listens-to-itself-tickets-712124101357 2

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-0611-music-that-listens-to-itself/

New Beginnings (disquiet0611)

Disquiet Junto Project 0611: Music That Listens to Itself
The Assignment: Record a piece of music that repurposes itself as it proceeds.

After using granular delays of different kinds in https://soundcloud.com/winterer/infinity-piano-mirror I gave the hardware feedback a try. Which wasn't that easy on the Soma Cosmos drifting memory station. First I used on of the outs directly on the ins which made some unspectacular noises that are now used in the rhythmic part. Then I used a Zoom H2 Mikro and it's line out as an input for the Cosmos and cheap headphones (expecting their destruction) for the output of the signal. I "played" the "instrument" by holding the headphones near the micro. So the Cosmos really "listen's to itself". I found the recorded result too harsh and slowed this stem down to 50% and EQed the whistles, to get their character just so as a musical contribution. My wife asked for the source of the strange sounds and my answer got woven into the recording, as did my squeaking chair (again). I cut all down to 3 minutes (because I train to be short at the moment) and added some additional FX just to soften the track. It's not as meditative as the piano granular first try, but more true to the prompt.

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More on this 611th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Music That Listens to Itself (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that repurposes itself as it proceeds), at: https://disquiet.com/0611/

Some of the music resulting from this project may be included in a September 29, 2023, event at the Berkeley Alembic in Berkeley, California: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/expanded-listening-music-that-listens-to-itself-tickets-712124101357

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-0611-music-that-listens-to-itself/

BandCamp album

The Cosmos Listens To Itself [disquiet0611]

More on this 611th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Music That Listens to Itself (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that repurposes itself as it proceeds), at: https://disquiet.com/0611/

Where The Wind Makes A Curve (disquiet0611)

For this project I recorded a few guitar picks and looped the recording. To this I added some spare synth notes. The whole thing then went into a granular reverb. I gradually raised the effect level and finally removed the input entirely.

My goal - as to the prompt - was to put the listener into a meditative state. For this reason, the track is rather long and well above my usual two minute goal. The last few minutes are pretty meditative and I recommend listening only in company of a trained meditation guide so that you don’t get lost forever. You have been warned!

More on this 611th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Music That Listens to Itself (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that repurposes itself as it proceeds), at: https://disquiet.com/0611/
Some of the music resulting from this project may be included in a September 29, 2023, event at the Berkeley Alembic in Berkeley, California: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/expanded-listening-music-that-listens-to-itself-tickets-712124101357 2
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-0611-music-that-listens-to-itself/

Disquiet0611 - Don’t Get Lost

I started out on this track by trying to put together a self-modifying feedback loop in VCVRack. Much to my dismay, I am really out of practice with Rack, and was getting absolutely nowhere. The number of modules is now astronomical, and I was getting bogged down in “what module do I use, and they're so small I can't really see this anyway” decisions, dragging modules around, flailing, and definitely not progressing.

So instead, I abandoned that, opened up Live and went to my old favorite, Buchla Easel V. It is possible to feed audio from one track to another via sidechaining in Live, so I sidechained the two instances to each other, chose an interesting self-playing patch, switched it around to feed in the preamp input to the patch, and started cranking up the various gains. It was then a matter of carefully tweaking levels inside the plugins and the feedback between each of the instances to send them into just-controlled mutual feedback oscillation.

To make it a bit more tasty, I added Valhalla Supermassive delays, set slightly differently, to both instances, and fed back the post-effects signal instead of the dry one. This finally got me to the density of texture I was looking for, and after a couple of takes to practice tweaking the feedback in real-time (adding the effects made it quite a bit more sensitive), I finally hit record in Audio Hijack and got a usable take. A little trimming of the silence in Fission and it was complete.

The title is from an early poem of Keats, “Woman! when I behold thee flippant, vain”. I first saw it quoted in a Dorothy Sayers mystery and as faintly ridiculous and infelicitous as it is, it’s still stuck with me.

…but when I mark
Such charms with mild intelligences shine,
My ear is open like a greedy shark,
To catch the tunings of a voice divine.

Disquiet Junto 

My Ear Is Open Like a Greedy Shark [disquiet0611]

The task of making music that listens to itself was approached by starting with a soft piano using Noire Felt which has a function that with desired probability feeds back the note played at 1 or two octaves lower.  So this was a piano that listens to itself.  Additionally, the core piano notes played were provided to another piece of software called Borderlands which allows one to take small segments of the track and loop them as a singlet or multiples (in the form of micro samplers) whilst applying treatments to alter length, rate (forward and back), pitch, etc.  Four such micro samplers were used to provide atmosphere to the track.  Finally, some background tones were added using a monome ARC 4 device to drive Electric Dharma Wheels in Ableton Live.

Just Deserted(disquiet0611)

This was my contribution for Disquiet Junto Project 0611: Music That Listens To Itself.

Here’s a copy of my post on the Disquiet Junto 0611 discussion thread:

Here's my attempt to create music that listens to itself by using delay, reverb, granular and tape effects. As the piece progresses and additional tracks were added, the mix levels of the effects were increased. Tried not to go overboard but might have done that anyway. Some tones toward the end started to feedback on itself, so had to dial things down a bit. 

Tracks were created in Ableton Live using Ableton's Wavetable synth, Max for Live Tombola, Sonic Beds Vol.1 by Jogging House, and Slate+Ash Choreographs/Landforms. Ambient noise tracks were added using Audio Thing Noise and FIELD by ELPHNT. Effects used: SoundGhost Drift, Cableguys Shaper 3, Baby Audio Transit, Inorganic Audio Liquid, Arturia Coldfire, Audio Damage Other Desert Cities, Sugar Bytes Graindad, Strymon BigSky, ValhallaRoom and Phonolyth Cascade.  Image by Vedanti via Pexels.

More on this 611th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Music That Listens to Itself (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that repurposes itself as it proceeds), at: https://disquiet.com/0611/
Some of the music resulting from this project may be included in a September 29, 2023, event at the Berkeley Alembic in Berkeley, California: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/expanded-listening-music-that-listens-to-itself-tickets-712124101357 2
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-0611-music-that-listens-to-itself/

Lesser Facets Glowing [disquiet0611]

pitched down sample being played back repeatedly via a filter and granular delay/reverb, going into two feedback loops
- one immediately feeds output back to input of rings, which dumps its output back into the filter
- another copy runs via a high pass filter into a delay, with envelope opening at regular intervals, again back into the main signal

recording gradually hands over more emphasis to the feedback signals away from the original sample loop 

some editing in ableton live

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More on this 611th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Music That Listens to Itself (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that repurposes itself as it proceeds), at: https://disquiet.com/0611/

Some of the music resulting from this project may be included in a September 29, 2023, event at the Berkeley Alembic in Berkeley, California: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/expanded-listening-music-that-listens-to-itself-tickets-712124101357 3

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-0611-music-that-listens-to-itself/

disquiet0611 - riemann loops

I started by recording a couple of modular feedback patches, with a loose goal of generating steady, slowly animated tones. A Doepfer BBD delay was used as a hub to process a mix of droning pulse waves from two VCOs—the result of which was fed back into the delay. The BBD also outputs CV that corresponds to manually set controls as well as input CV signals, and this was used to modulate other patch parameters in the feedback loop.

The output was split to a crossfader that was sent to a handful of filters and another delay with a long interval—the idea here was to create a bit of slow movement to keep the timbral/spectral qualities in slow motion. 

I stacked a couple of sections of the drones together in Ableton, and layered in parts of a recent recording Tides (in chord mode) being granularly processed with Nebulae v2. This created some mid-higher frequency 'blooms'. Also added some simple granular processing in Ableton that was spread wider in the stereo field. Lastly added in some looped field recordings that introduce some higher frequencies and textures that I wanted to include.

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Disquiet Junto Project 0611: Music That Listens to Itself

The Assignment: Record a piece of music that repurposes itself as it proceeds.

Background: On September 29, 2023, there is going to be an event at a place called the Berkeley Alembic, in Berkeley, California, where I’ll play recordings of music that share a specific theme, and I’ll discuss the sounds with the people who come to listen. The event is titled Music That Listens to Itself, part of the Expanded Listening series developed by Erik Davis (Techgnosis, Burning Shore). That is the theme. Part of the goal of this project is to develop tracks for potential inclusion in the event, and to pursue ideas related to the event’s theme.

Step 1: The underlying idea is to produce music that, so to speak, listens to itself. This would be music that employs techniques to revisit itself — repurposes itself — as it proceeds. From reverb to echo to tape loops to granular synthesis to accessing a buffer, various techniques serve such a compositional and performance purpose. Consider a means to achieve this result.

Step 2: Record a piece of music that employs the technique you focused on as a result of Step 1. Please note: for the Berkeley Alembic event, I’ll be sharing music that is particularly quiet, particularly appropriate to a meditative state of mind. You don’t need to record quiet music for this project, but quiet music is what I’ll be playing at the event.

Additional details: disquiet.com. Tickets: eventbrite.com 1. About the venue: berkeleyalembic.org.

(...)

More on this 611th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Music That Listens to Itself (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that repurposes itself as it proceeds), at: disquiet.com/0611/

Some of the music resulting from this project may be included in a September 29, 2023, event at the Berkeley Alembic in Berkeley, California: www.eventbrite.com/e/expanded-list…ts-712124101357 1

About the Disquiet Junto: disquiet.com/junto/

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-pr…-listens-to-itself/

Pulse Animation • [disquiet 0611]

This week's prompt was to compose music that listens to itself.

So glad you asked! I have been wanting to make a project like this for years as part of my interest in structured improvisation.

I'd still like to do something clever with MAX/MASP and MIDI, but for now I kept myself quite busy with using audio processing in Ableton Live.

Basically, I tried to construct effects chains that would grab short snippets of audio (from a piano improv and also from each other!), process them, and and repeat them much later in the piece (via gates, envelope followers, or LFOs mapped to the inputs of delays and pitch-shifters). I altered the musical material using pitch-shifters (Cableguys, Ableton's Shifter) or delays with very short settings to make percussive sounds.

I also really tried to prioritize changing pitches, with the idea that altering the source tonal material would be a fun nod to classical music's idea of theme and development.

Then I loosely grouped them into things that generated low pitches, medium pitches, and high pitches.

I had a *lot* of material at the end, so I ended up cutting out a few tracks completely. 

Beyond that, my editing was minimal. I managed to volume spikes, and I also cut out some parts of the piano improv, because the generative devices were making their own musical material!

I'm happy with this one - I think it could be done at about 2 minutes and 40 seconds, but I figure this is a good audience for a slightly longer version of the piece.

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More on this 611th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Music That Listens to Itself (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that repurposes itself as it proceeds), at: https://disquiet.com/0611/

Some of the music resulting from this project may be included in a September 29, 2023, event at the Berkeley Alembic in Berkeley, California: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/expanded-listening-music-that-listens-to-itself-tickets-712124101357

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-0611-music-that-listens-to-itself/

Soliaudium (disquiet0611)

Modular, ambient, abstract, and some beats too

My Ear Is Open Like a Greedy Shark [disquiet0611]

Equinox Deschanel (Joe McMahon)