soundtrack for Jun Cen's 2013 MFA Thesis film, "Mutual Tunnels"

Video HERE: http://vimeo.com/73787389

Mutual Tunnels

8-channel surround piece (stereo reduction)

Cisterna II was composed from recordings I made in the small town of Guanacaste, located high in the mountains of southern Honduras. When I visited in 2013, I was amazed by a giant cistern that sits on the mountain just outside of the village. Despite this, the residents of Guanacaste had infrequent access to clean water because the pipes had deteriorated and the town is very remote and difficult to access. Fortunately, a volunteer project rebuilt the pipe system and reconnected the community to the cistern in the years following my visit.

Many of the sounds in this piece – including interviews with residents about their relationship to water, local livestock, and the constant bachata music on the local radio – are convolved with the sound of the cistern's interior, its resonance captured by dropping a microphone in the open pipe that was eventually reconnected to the village.

A live performance version of this piece was premiered in Paris in 2014 as part of the IRCAM Manifeste festival, and recomposed for premiere at the DIFFUSION festival in Baltimore in 2021.

Cisterna II

The narrator in Jorge Luis Borges' 1945 story "The Aleph" describes a remarkable singularity his friend discovers under his cellar stairs: the titular point where, if one lays in just the right position, the universe can be experienced in its entirety:

"Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me...I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe."

At the end of the story, the narrator describes other Alephs that might exist in the world:

"The Faithful who gather at the mosque of Amr, in Cairo, are acquainted with the fact that the entire universe lies inside one of the stone pillars that ring its central court...No one, of course, can actually see it, but those who lay an ear against the surface tell that after some short while they perceive its busy hum...The mosque dates from the seventh century; the pillars come from other temples of pre-Islamic religions, since, as ibn-Khaldun has written: ‘In nations founded by nomads, the aid of foreigners is essential in all concerning masonry.’"

The mysterious column and its inner cosmos are imagined in several different ways: as the long, closed tube of the baritone saxophone formed by fingering the lowest note on the instrument, the harmonic series on this note (from which a majority of the piece’s pitches are derived), and the "alif" character, the vertical first letter of the Arabic alphabet that shares a lineage with the story’s title. Many of the melodic contours in the piece were loosely traced from Arabic orthography, translations of a few phrases from Borges' story.

Foreign Masonry (2014)

8 or 16-channel audio, steel mixing bowls, wood; generative | 2015

A contact microphone and transducer attached to the bottom of each bowl creates a feedback loop, turning these bowls into resonant objects that play themselves. A computer listens and adjusts the signal flow to create a variety of sonic results. The sounds of visitors walking around the room or ambient noise from the space adds slight variation to the signal chain, magnified by the exponential nature of feedback. 

photo: installation view at KANEKO gallery as part of Omaha Under the Radar Festival 2016

feedback bowls

A quick demo of three layers of a wavetable synth patch I've been working on for another piece.

The only difference between each instance of the instrument is filter settings.

"Many" loops became 3 in this compressed scale.
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More on this 189th Disquiet Junto project (“Create a dense stack of attack-free tonal material from one audio source”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2015/08/13/disquiet0189-tonelayer/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

http://disquiet.com/forums/

[Disquiet's] Image associated with this project by Nicholas D., and used thanks to a Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/ca1iLd


fairchild demo [disquiet0189-tonelayer]

text by Jeffrey Harrison, from "The Singing Underneath" (1989)
Jennifer Beattie, mezzo-soprano
Adam Marks, piano

live recording from Artists at Albatross Reach salon concert, Sea Ranch, CA, August 22, 2015

How the Ginkgo Got Its Smell (2011)

Wanted to test out Logic 10.2's new synthesizer "Alchemy" so I made three pad instruments from scratch and played the same chord into each one.

I bounced them as audio files separately and opened them in Max/MSP, using the Venn-diagram-like [nodes] object to crossfade among them, recording a take.

Looking forward to playing with Alchemy more, it seems like an INCREDIBLE tool!

More on this 191st Disquiet Junto project (“One chord to rule them all — on several instruments”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2015/08/27/disquiet0191-heldchord/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

http://disquiet.com/forums/

Image associated with this project by Max Nathan, and used thanks to a Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/3aL7nK

Transmutation [disquiet0191-heldchord]

Performance by Patchwork (Noa Even and Stephen Klunk), 
Spectrum NYC, June 12, 2016

Program Note:
When I was a teenager, I had a fascination with progressive rock, a genre that emphasizes technical precision and rhythmic complexity. Often the eclectic and wildly contrasting sections that comprise its long form songs are stitched together with short interludes. These are frequently unrelated to the sections they bridge, but nevertheless have recurring tactics: rhythmic unisons, repeating and gradually lengthening melodies, and sudden, incongruent silences. "Interstitch" expands on these tropes, creating a whole piece out of transition material inspired by "prog rock" classics.

Interstitch (2014)

performed by Justin Massey

The soprano saxophonist becomes a percussionist in "Scrap Metals," exploiting the many metallic timbres of the instrument – as a rich and noisy gong, sharp and jangling like a cascade of coins, rumbling with the flex of a large sheet, or ringing pure as if bowing a bell. The computer convolves the live instrument’s signal with recorded samples of metal to create a hybrid timbre with the saxophone’s extended techniques. Scrap Metals was written for and is dedicated to Justin Massey.

Scrap Metals (2015)

This week's Junto project was well-timed for me as I am currently reprogramming my sound installation "feedback bowls" for an exhibition this week, adding in more collections of pitches for the filters in each feedback loop signal chain. (more about the piece here, which Marc graciously shared on disquiet.com a while ago: https://soundcloud.com/jasoncharney/feedback-bowls)

Each filter setting multiplies a base frequency by a collection of (decimal-approximated) ratios to distribute among the 8 bowls' filters, so I created a setting that had a combination of the correct/mistake microtones (in two octaves), and slowly moved the base frequency up from around 400 Hz to 900 Hz over the course of my experiment, letting the algorithms continue to change the delay times of each bowl's signal chain dynamically. I recorded the results and mixed it down to a stereo image. No other effects were applied.

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More on this 214th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“The Assignment: Bring to the fore the distinction between two specific microtones”) at:

http://disquiet.com/0214

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/

The image associated with this project is from Alain Danielou’s 1958 book Tableau Comparatif des Intervalles Musicaux, found via Kyle Gann. Major thanks to Ethan Hein (ethanhein.com) for helping word the project assignment.

feedback bowls: (1/1 - 569/512 - 567/512)[disquiet0214-microtonalerrata]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQJrem2w6oo

Ted Come Out

Score to short animation by Jun Cen for Chevron's "Invisible Darkness" exhibit in Beijing, January 2016

Animation: https://vimeo.com/154666824

Jun Cen's website: cenjun.com



Invisible Darkness (2015)

This experiment sonified a buckyball molecule’s mass spectrum.

Mass spectrometry measures a chemical mixture's components by plotting the charge intensities of its various ions, creating a characteristic spectrum. I took the spectrum of buckminsterfullerene, C60, a molecule nicknamed “buckyball” that resembles Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes and was named after him. I scaled an analysis of its mass-to-charge ratio plot to show frequency vs. amplitude, creating a matching spectrum in the audible domain.

I then made a wavetable from a short excerpt of Fuller saying the words “mathematical possibilities” and assigned a bank of oscillators to read through it, creating a timbre directly from Buckminster Fuller’s voice and the molecule that bears his name (which, incidentally, is one of the largest objects to display wave/particle duality). I sequenced multiple layers of this texture, with filters, panning, and reverb added.

molecule spectrum adapted from this data (converted to frequency/amplitude pairs from JCAMP-DX format): http://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C99685968&Mask=200

sample taken from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6yaSLipeWg

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More on this 226th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Compose music for a fictional greatest-hits collection of the electronic music of R. Buckminster Fuller”) at:

http://disquiet.com/0226/

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/

Project inspired by a dream that C. Reider of Vuzh Music had:

http://vuzhmusic.com/

Image of album cover created for this project is by Brian Scott of Boon Design:

http://boondesign.com/


buckyball spectrum [disquiet0226]

for mezzo-soprano and computer
poem by Patricia Lockwood (from "Motherland, Fatherland, Homelandsexuals")

Jennifer Beattie, mezzo-soprano
Jason Charney, music/recording

video here: https://youtu.be/ZszbIGPhHM8

The Hypno-Domme Speaks and Speaks and Speaks (2016)

Lisa Neher performs "Cardamom Seeds", a setting of an excerpt from poet Megan Kaminski's "Across soft ruins," appearing in her collection "Desiring Map" (Coconut Books)

Live recording from Lisa's "One Voice Project" concert on August 8, 2016 at the University of Iowa

Cardamom Seeds (2015)

for any number of instruments divided in four parts.

commissioned by NakedEye Ensemble for the Trust Performing Arts Center, Lancaster, PA
premiered May 19, 2017

This recording is with 20 musicians with Mind on Fire at EMP Collective on December 9, 2017

program note:
The Amish, a religious group with a large population in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, live an agrarian lifestyle that has changed little since the 18th century. Their community worship includes group singing from the Ausbund, a collection of hymns first printed in 1564.
These hymnals contain no musical notation, only the text in the old German of the Swiss Anabaptists. The tunes, originally based on folk songs and traditional chants, are passed down through each generation orally. To hear a con- gregation sing these hymns is striking: a song leader, the Vorsänger, begins each line with a call, and then the entire congregation responds, singing loudly together as they draw out each syllable almost beyond intelligibility (this lang- same Weise style may have evolved to disguise the religious nature of the songs from persecutors). However, the group moves as a whole without the further assistance of the Vorsänger:
“It is a common observation that groups sing more slowly. And when the group is uncontrolled (by instrument, director, or notation), it drags still more...The singer, holding as best he can to any given tone while waiting till the group-mind decides to sing the next tune-tone, tends to waver up and down...The many tend to waver along similar lines. Their vocal vagaries become fixed, stylized, incorporated with their “tunes,” and a singing manner is born – or evolves.”
– George Pullen Jackson, “The Strange Music of the Old Order Amish”
The music in Ausbund comes from Das Loblied, a hymn that is always sung second in each service. The network of tiles in the score is inspired by both the tessellated roof of the Trust Performing Arts Center and the Amish quilts that once filled the space when it was the Lancaster Quilt and Textile museum.

ausbund (2017)

With the exception of the guitar, every sound in this piece was created from the two samples below:

Fog horn sample by Schaarsen: http://www.freesound.org/people/schaarsen/sounds/69663/

Train whistle sample by Ecodios: http://www.freesound.org/people/ecodios/sounds/119963/

Disquiet Junto Project #2: "Duet for Fog Horn & Train Whistle"


Night Travelers [disquiet0002-duet]

Recorded with 2 wine glasses, a spoon, one mic, Max/MSP, and no edits. This is the first take - hope to expand this and make more formally coherent for live performance.

Decanter [disquiet0003-glass]

Tumuli (2012) – 14’
for solo cello

Tumuli (plural for "tumulus") are mounds of earth or stone raised over graves. Found in disparate ancient cultures across Europe and Asia, the memorial mounds have become weathered by the elements and natural vegetation and melded with their surrounding environment. This set of variations sometimes presents the pastoral theme clearly, and sometimes obscures it, taking only its trifold form.

Live Performance by 
Kivie Cahn-Lipman at Cortona Sessions, Cortona, Italy - 29 June 2012


Tumuli for solo cello

live at the Red Room (Baltimore, MD), January 24, 2019
solo modular synth sounds (rock samples recorded by Thomas Rex Beverly)

Live at The Red Room - 1/24/2019

The thing at the "center" of this is a set of windchimes in my backyard I sampled. I made a little miniature duet between them and my modular synthesizer.

More on this 438th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Disquiet Junto Project 0438: Deep Plan — The Assignment: Compose a piece of music in which something special is situated at the very center — at:

https://disquiet.com/0438/

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-0438-deep-plan/

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

Image associated with this track is from NASA, used thanks to a Creative Commons license and Flickr. The image has been cropped, colors shifted, and text added.

https://flic.kr/p/pewfZo

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

backyard windchimes (disquiet0438)

Remix of "Show Me Your Hand" from Greg Hatem's album "Springlight" (2020). https://greghatem.bandcamp.com/

Image from Alen and Robin Predanič's music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWi9ym_GY9w

Jason Charney

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