Name: San Jose Del Pacifico, Oaxaca by lfnoise
Duration: 13 min 3 s
Description: A collection of early 1980s work done in the University of Texas Electronic Music Studio. This piece was done on the Fairlight CMI.

A collection of early 1980s work done in the University of Texas Electronic Music Studio. This piece was done on the Fairlight CMI.

San Jose Del Pacifico, Oaxaca

This week's project is one of my all-time favorites.  Given over 100 short audio files containing vocalizations of various vowels, syllables, and occasional other things, from dozens of different voices, we were given the task to weave these into a composition.

With the exception of some transposition towards the end of the piece, I chose not to modify the character original material in any way.  What I did do was write a set of scripts which chose randomly from those files and figured out how to generate randomly-varying loops within the files in order to allow any one of them (I did have to skip anything shorter than one second) to be extended to an arbitrary length.  Then from that script, I built big, chordal sections where all the voices begin as the same moment (up to 42 parts at one point!), and other sections where the parts overlap and weave in and out over time.

The increasing transposition (up and down) of the sounds gradually distorts them in some disturbing ways.  Pretty early on, I thought of this as a vocal requiem, and structured it to reflect the austere, ceremonial nature of such a work.

All sounds were processed, mixed, and virtually placed in a 3-d sound environment using the RTcmix software toolkit.
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More on this 419th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Dischoir / The Assignment: Make music from 100+ vocal samples of held syllables by members of the Disquiet Junto — at:

https://disquiet.com/0419/

This all came about as a result of something Alan Bland mentioned on the Junto Slack. He pointed out that my having misspelled Disquiet as “Disquier” in the December 19, 2019, project title made him think of “Dischoir,” a possible Junto project. Thanks to Alan and to Jason Wehmhoener for helping me think this project through, and to everyone (over 50 contributors) who sent in samples.

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-0419-dischoir/

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

The image associated with this track is by Joe Lencioni, and is used (image cropped, text added) via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/8Bk9Rx

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

San Jose Del Pacifico, Oaxaca

lfnoise

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