I added a track to @cjmcgregor 's submission

I recorded an improvisation in response to the initial track and then chose a 12 bar loop to cycle against the original 10 bar loop. To break the repetition I manipulated my loop with cableguys shaperbox. To top it off I added some depth with a bit of delay and a hint of vocoder.
C minor
117 BPM

Disquiet0592 CJM JZ Cm 117bpm

I'm still getting to know the Osmose but wanted to force myself to create a patch and record a piece with the instrument. In this patch two static oscillators, slightly detuned, are fed into two filter banks panned hard left and right. The key pressure contracts the spread of the resonant frequencies of the filter banks. This performance consists of a single slow key press moving as smoothly as possible given my aging joints.

More on this 595th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Filter Progression (The Assignment: Make music by processing a static sound), at: https://disquiet.com/0595/

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

Subscribe to project announcements: Disquiet Junto by Marc Weidenbaum (Disquiet.com)

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0595-filter-progression/

Disquiet0595 One Press

More on this 607th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Silence Wave (The Assignment: From close to zero and back again, alter the relative amount of sound to silence in a piece of music), at: https://disquiet.com/0607/

Thanks this week to Jason Richardson and Klaus-Dieter Hilf.

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-0607-silence-wave/

disquiet0607 ZeroToForty

More on this 609th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Speed Limit Pt 1 (The Assignment: Record a track at precisely 60 BPM with the intention someone will subsequently rework it), at: https://disquiet.com/0609/ 1

About the Disquiet Junto: Disquiet Junto F.A.Q. – Disquiet

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co 1: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0609-speed-limit-pt-1/

Disquiet0609 60bpm

For these pieces Sigmund Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” is rewritten using Google Translate and MS Word ‘s Auto Summarize function. Logically, the resulting texts are sung through a vocoder.

Obvious Difference Scary

Language as Dust is an essayistic sound poem exploring the consequences of electronic mediation within spoken and written language. The investigation is divided into three meditations exploring relations between: 1) sound and meaning, 2) pattern and noise, and 3) presence and absence. 

The text of the piece freely repurposes textual sources relating to the history of vocal technologies as well as psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of the voice, including: Aristotle's De Anima, Thomas Edison's anticipated use of audio recording, abstracted lyrics of "How High the Moon," misheard vocoder communications, and transcriptions of Electronic Voice Phenomena.

Meditation On Presence And Absence

Meditation On Pattern And Noise

More on this 614th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Alternate Route (The Assignment: Do something you often do, but differently), at: https://disquiet.com/0614/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/ 2

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0614-alternate-route/

Disquiet0614 Drums First: The Key to Unlocking Your Potential

Pulsar23 and Loudest Warning/Prism 4U system

Jamuary 01 banagator

Jamuary 04

Playing around with global harmonizing and transposing in Bitwig

Jamuary 09

I woke up this morning with "Cardboard Lamb" stuck in my head. Hmm, the Circle K image doesn't quite make sense as a still. You need to see the video.

Jamuary 11

Still getting the hang of the Oxi One. I think about 80% of what I do on it is on purpose, the rest are accidents - mostly happy accidents.

Jamuary 12

For jam 15 I wrote a normal-ish tune and then remade the instruments with Synplant2's resynthesis engine. I then warped it to noise by modulating the grow parameter. Apologies for stray high freqs. I tried to come up with a clean way to tame some of the highs that resulted from the growing the sound.

Jamuary 15 - synplant decomposition

Simple Serge patch, cross modulated DTGs ringing a Reseq. Processing with parallel fx layers in Bitwig.

Jamuary 22 - processing some serge impulses

Jamuary 23 - Town for a Mystery

Multi-timbral fm mpe patch on the Essence Fm mkII

Jamuary 24 - elephant transport

Jamuary 25 - phaser feedback and some odd stereo imaging

Jamuary 25 - phaser feedback

long tones on clarinet, flute, cello, alto sax, and voice run through frequency shifters

Jamuary 26 - freq shift jam

Jamuary 27 - osmose swells

Subharmonics from a DTG suspended in heaps of reverb

Jamuary 28 - reverberant subharmonics

Jamuary 29 - Pulsar23 Screams

Jam with my Serge system over a bed of sputtering Pulsar 23.

Jamuary 30 - serge and pulsar23 jam

Jamuary 31 - C15 and Pulsar23 jam

Excerpts from a modular synth piece on Striking Mechanism's Quartet Solo Series 2. 
http://www.strikingmechanism.com/sm2.html

Dia No Vive Aqui (excerpts)

Piece for harmonica and computer. 
Recorded live at Ghostprint gallery in Richmond, VA.
2009

Harmonica and Computer

Resonant Traces is a collaborative installation created with visual artist www.emilymharris.com Emily Harris 
( www.emilymharris.com ) installed in the office of Union Street Studio in Brooklyn, NY. We first devised a general form for writing text scores aimed at prompting performative actions that would excite the acoustic properties of the reverberant architecture studio. Each score would include an action, object, location, relation, and duration. Together with composer Sam Morrison we created and performed a series of these text scores. After recording several realizations of our collective scores Emily chose a dozen actions to trace in space as string drawings. The resulting drawings are installed in the studio in the locations where the sounding actions occurred while the performances can be auditioned at a listening station accompanied by the printed scores. In addition to the recorded performances I created an extra piece Greatest Hits that takes every attack from all of our performances and cuts each sound at the end of its decay. The resulting piece is a 12 minute flow of impulses edited in accordance with the acoustics of the building. 

Greatest Hits

This project is the result of a year of intense insomnia. I began by imagining a heterogeneous keyboard where each key would trigger a different patch. Having a limited number of modules I made 88 patches one at a time, documenting each patch with a 20 minute mono recording. I then devised two plans for combining the entire set of recordings 1.) each sound is heard once in a piece as if the keyboardist had played all 88 notes on the keyboard, 2.) all 88 tracks simultaneously with constantly shifting volume and pan adjustments. 

Using SuperCollider I created a simple patch for determining the amplitude and panning adjustments for each of the 88 tracks. I wanted to experience the first version (each patch once) on a number of different time scales which lead to the creation of six different realizations ranging in duration from 1:28 to 46:56. At the moment only the simultaneous mix is up on soundcloud. The six realizations of the first version can be found here http://www.jonathanzorn.net/index.php?/project/88synth/

2007-2008

The 88 synths (simultaneity mix)

Live manipulation of speech and instrument samples using SuperColider and a Wacom tablet. The speech fragments are derived from the quotations used in the most-emailed New York Times articles of the day on which the composition was completed: December 8th, 2009.

But (from word pudding)

On Edges
for Christian Wolff

saxophones - Kyle Brenders
doublebass and electronics - Jonathan Zorn

On Edges (twotriosmix)

The Pressure and Speed series grew out of a desire to notate certain aspects of my improvisational practice in a way that can be easily (though obliquely) communicated to other musicians. The pieces in this series can be imagined as guided improvisations using simple instructions that ask the performer to give meaning to notational variables as well as participate in creating the shape and duration of individual phrases. 
Through analyzing my double-bass technique I began developing a generalized description of instrumental actions. This way of describing sound production allowed me to treat instrumental technique parametrically rather than as discrete sounds. In this system standard instrumental technique is only one possible combination of the parameters among many other possibilities. This means that tone producing instrumental techniques and noise producing instrumental techniques can be expressed using one form of notation, conceptually joining the sounds rather than treating one as normal and one as exception. 
One consequence of this notation is that it is slow to interpret and thus does not easily communicate rapid gestural actions. As a result the music created with this notation is focused on layers of shifting textures, which appear and disappear, sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly. The listener, and performer as listener (because good improvisation is in part virtuosic listening) are asked to concentrate on the sound masses created from simple manipulations of pressure and speed, and to work with the surprises brought about by each member of the ensemble making their own decisions about entrances and exits.
The beginnings and endings of each phrase are left open for the performer within specified bounds. Beginnings of phrases are to be decided in performance giving each musician the option to respond, support, or obscure other performers in the ensemble. Once a phrase is started the duration is a function of the performer’s physical interaction with their instrument since the durations are tied directly to bow and breath lengths.
Pitch material is severely constrained to accentuate the variations created by the changes in pressure and speed. All variations in pitch come about as a consequence of parametric changes making the contingency of all the aspects of sound production audible. In addition some combinations of coordinates may seem paradoxical, contradictory, and perhaps impossible. All of the puzzling aspects of the composition are intentional and are offered as a gift to the inquisitive and creative performer.

performed by Flux Quartet

01 pressure and speed full

I composed Increase, decrease, full, and empty at the end of a year spent analyzing the orchestral music of Morton Feldman and Edgard Varèse. I wanted to explore my own ideas about orchestration, accumulated during this period of analysis. Not having access to an orchestra, I staged my journey in the land of synthetic sounds, aiming to treat collections of synthesizer patches as sections of an orchestra. The piece is characterized by slowly shifting layers of erratic synthesized textures placed in juxtaposed illusory spaces. The piece was composed using the Doepfer A-100 modular system.


Increase, decrease, full, and empty

Jonathan Zorn works as a composer, performer, and curator of experimental, electronic, and improvised music. His electronic music pairs improvising musicians with interactive computer systems to create hybrid, human-machine ensembles. Zorn's interest in vocal utterance has resulted in a series of pieces in which spoken language is interrupted by electronic forces, drawing attention to the gap between speech and sound. Zorn has been active as an improvisor on bass and electronics for 15 years and has performed at Red Cat, the Walker Art Center, the Verona Jazz Festival, the Library of Congress, the Seattle Festival of Improvised Music, Line Space Line Festival, and the Chelsea Art Museum. His work has been published in Ord und Bild, the SEAMUS Journal, Notations 21, and UbuWeb. 

Jonathan Zorn

Pinned to spotlight

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