A set of tracks from the 31st weekly project from the Disquiet Junto group. 

The Assignment: Make music from a recording that is initially considered to be silent

More information on the group at: 

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info

More on the specific project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/08/02/disquiet0031-onomatch/

Disquiet Junto Project 0031: Ono's Match

I played some strings with just a tad bit of distortion applied. I suppose this could be considered program music,.



More on the 30th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/08/02/disquiet0031-onomatch/ ;

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info

antithesis [disquiet0031-onomatch]

<b>Disquiet Junto Project 0031: Ono’s Match </b>

Instructions:

This week’s project takes the opportunity to focus on the art movement known as Fluxus. We’ll use as the starting point a 1955 composition by Yoko Ono. Her work is titled “Lighting Piece” and it consists of a single, simple sentence: “Light a match and watch till it goes out.” It is one of a number of pieces that Ono produced as part of Fluxus. For this week’s Disquiet Junto project, please interpret her instruction as closely or as loosely as you choose.

Length: Your finished work should be as long or short as you wish to make it, though longer than a five minutes seems unlikely.


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More on the 30th Disquiet Junto project at: 

http://disquiet.com/2012/08/02/disquiet0031-onomatch/ ; 

More details on the Disquiet Junto at: http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info

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<i>"Light a match and watch till it goes out."</i>

My first instinct was to go down a familiar road – record a match striking and flaring, try to capture the soft crackle as the wood burned (I have some big, 7 inch long bbq matches), process all the sounds, make a drone track… etc etc

Then I re-read the instructions (always a good idea from several lessons learned the hard way) and realised/decided that the concept was a little more skewed than that – the match was immaterial, it was the meditative act of watching that Yoko was encouraging; that is, her words - "Light a match and watch till it goes out." - were what it was about, a sort of verbal/visual koan. So, I pasted her instructions into a text-to-noise synthesizer, chose an arbitrary 55 bpm and it produced a weird little elfin-hop which I then tried to turn into something “musical” without going all Mr T on it!

Onomatch point [disquiet0031-onomatch]

I used a recording of a match and designed something from the moment the flame starts to replicate the focus of the mind in the flame.

Into the flame of Ono´s Match (disquiet0031-onomatch)

Based on Yoko Ono's "Lighting Place", her 1955 one sentence composition:  "Light a match and watch till it goes out."  

Lots about process below the links . . .

More on the 31st Disquiet Junto project at:
http://disquiet.com/2012/08/02/disquiet0031-onomatch/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info

About Gleetchlab 3:
http://www.giorgiosancristoforo.net/softwares/gleetchlab-3/

A source recording looped in Gleetchlab 3 along side randomized selections of the same recording played at various speeds.

The source recording was made in a dimly lit room.  The same light dependent oscillator I used in Junto 19 (http://soundcloud.com/krseward/band-of-angles-disquiet0019) is plugged into a Radio Shack battery powered mini amp.  A piezo mic clamped onto a match was fed into another mini amp.  So the light of the burning match drove the fluctuations of the oscillator and the sound of the match being struck and moisture steaming before the flame are caught together.  The amplified sounds and whatever direct sounds were recorded with the built in mics of a Zoom H4 Handy Recorder.

There were several tries at this.  Some attempting a more DI approach.  And more than half of the take chosen was feedback, fidgeting & getting ready.   In earlier stretches of improv with Gleetchlab, the whole take was used.  By this point, most (but not all) of the extraneous getting ready sounds were not in the main, normal speed loop.  The other multispeed loop was randomized, so anything was game.  In this overall improv, I set up the Recall feature that allowed quick and distinct speed changes.  I generally like (and elsewhere used) the gradual varispeed approach, but went this way in this pass to see what would happen.  So, for about 1 minute 25 seconds (out of the five minutes recorded before I crashed out of the program), this happened.

This segment was clipped out of the overall improv in Audacity, with the fade out made at the very end.

A little more TMI:  I say all the above not just to lend some words to the overall Junto mission of info sharing, but to frame a few notions about intention and such.

Were I to conceptualize and plan out some musical representation of a burning match, as an experience in itself and within the context of Yoko Ono & what I understand of Fluxus (happening happenings notwithstanding), it'd probably have been more meditative, sedate.  Something more like slowing down the mind and experiencing.  

Perhaps what happened is more comical and complicated, no doubt in line with my overall horror vacui/low rent technophilia.  Some sounds of the event via the contact mic and lots of busy reactive sounds driven by light fluctuations.  While my eyes, your eyes, human eyes in general could register the match flicker without being so overwhelmed, it's no misread of the one specific burning match or Ono's words.  Just a radical interpretation of the text.

Not What I See [disquiet0031-onomatch]

Disquiet Junto Project 0031: Ono's Match

Instructions:

This week's project takes the opportunity to focus on the art movement known as Fluxus. We'll use as the starting point a 1955 composition by Yoko Ono. Her work is titled "Lighting Piece" and it consists of a single, simple sentence: "Light a match and watch till it goes out." It is one of a number of pieces that Ono produced as part of Fluxus. For this week's Disquiet Junto project, please interpret her instruction as closely or as loosely as you choose.

   Information:

I thought I would revisit a technique I used a few weeks back and employ text to voice software to create a spoken poem version of Ono's line.  With the audio create I then wanted to take various aspects and process them so as to recall the sound and dynamics of a match being lit and then dying away.

Plans are one thing, but I often get sidetracked, so the finished track doesn't quite end up quite as planned as I kept building on the time stretched speech-derived drone until it resonated and then made it resonate some more. Ultimately, the track is a tone poem following Ono's original piece. To me it sounds like the track is powered by the gases burning off the surface of the match head.

I used my usual writing and mixing technique (Ableton Live, Max for Live granulator effects and Reaktor then into Logic Pro).   

Credits:

Photo: @echosonic

More on the 31st Disquiet Junto project at:  http://disquiet.com/2012/08/02/disquiet0031-onomatch/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:   http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info

Tändsticksfabriks [disquiet0031-onomatch]

I'm not disciplined enough to put forth effort into a recording, and so this is what we get.

antithesis [disquiet0031-onomatch]

bad trails