Recorded in February 2024 as part of the RPM Challenge.

B LLOON S

Noisevember 2025

A short bit of dry acoustic guitar, then a finger snap recorded in a stairwell, then the guitar bit convolved with the finger snap recording to add pseudo-reverb.  Convolution done using Csound.

stairwell reverb test

For Disquiet Junto 601, I threw a die in my bathtub and recorded the throws with an AT822 stereo microphone (through a Zoom H5) that I bought (used) years ago but had never used (I’m not really much of a microphone person).
Then, using Csound, I placed copies of each recording across about 3.5 minutes, with various densities, filtering, playback speeds and amplitudes.
The rolls determined for how much of the piece each recording appears: the rolls were 3,5,6,5,6,3, so the 6 rolls appear throughout, the 5’s appear up to 5/6 of the piece and the 3’s cut off at the half-way point.

More info on Disquiet Junto 601: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0601-hard-six/

                              

Dice mix [ disquiet0601 ]

Made for Disquiet Junto 0604: https://disquiet.com/2023/07/27/disquiet-junto-project-0604-heavens-gate/ 

I rewrote from scratch my code to generate sounds from images in a "make the spectrogram like the image" way, and applied this to a bunch of photographs of clouds that I took.  The track is a mix of a bunch of the resulting sounds, done at two different "scales": one short in time and limited in frequency, and one less  so.

Clouds [ disquiet0604 ]

Recorded in February 2024 as part of the RPM Challenge.

A mix of very slowed-down field recordings I've made
of birds in my neighborhood recently. 
The roaring sound is Steller's jays, and the plaintive
sound heard twice is flicker.

The Jungle of 37th Avenue

Recorded in February 2024 as part of the RPM Challenge.

Experiments with a recursive composition idea: each sound
event triggers more sound events.  

Made with Csound.

Recurse 2

Recorded in February 2024 as part of the RPM Challenge.

This uses the same technique as track 1 (Pianno).
The source sound is harmonics played on my acoustic guitar
tuned to E flat/A/E flat/G/B/E flat.

Guittar

Recorded in February 2024 as part of the RPM Challenge.

Experiments with a recursive composition idea: each sound
event triggers more sound events.  Made with Csound.

Recurse 4

Recorded in February 2024 as part of the RPM Challenge.

This started with a bit of code I wrote to generate quasi-chaotic
sounds, very noisy.  I then mixed the results "by hand", 
changing speed of playback, and doing other pretty standard
things to try to give the track as much variety as possible
(for a noise track).

Desperate

Recorded in February 2024 as part of the RPM Challenge.

Source sound was recorded inside a spinet piano I had access
to briefly in Gig Harbor, Washington.  

I cut the recording into chunks, then assigned two 
measures to each chunk (proxies for "pitch" and "loudness"),
thus mapping each chunk to a point in 2D space.
I then created a path connecting all of these points using
a greedy, nearest neighbor method.
The path then determined the sequence of the chunks in 
the output.
This was done with different chunk length, and possibly
different starting points, and the layers mixed together.

Pianno

A first draft attempt to convert the logistic map bifurcation diagram to sound.  The logistics map is f(x)=4Ax(1-x) where A is a real parameter between 0 and 1.  In this draft, the value of A is associated with time: as time goes forward, A ranges from 0.65 to 1 (in general for the logistics map it is reasonable to consider A from 0 to 1, but the sound is very simple and changes slow for A less than 0.65, so I've left that out).  For each A value, many x values are chosen and many iterations of f(x) are applied; the end result is used to calculate a frequency (linearly determined between 100 and 4100 hz) for a sound event at the time corresponding to the A value.

first draft: sound from logistic map bifurcation diagram

I recorded 15 layers of guitar, each processed through a different Csound instrument that I wrote anew for each layer.  Each layer is simple, each has its own timbre.  Somehow I find it all comforting.

Lullaby

A second version.   Converting the logistic map bifurcation diagram to sound.  The logistic map is f(x)=4Ax(1-x) where A is a real parameter between 0 and 1.  In this draft, the value of A is associated with time: as time goes forward, A ranges from 0.7 to 1 (in general for the logistics map it is common to consider A from 0 to 1, but the sound is very simple and changes slowly for A less than 0.7, so I've left that out).  For each A value, many x values are chosen and many iterations of f(x) are applied; the end result is used to calculate a frequency (linearly determined between 100 and 4100 hz) for a sound event at the time corresponding to the A value.

Compared to the first draft, this has a shortened "intro" (since A starts at 0.7 instead of 0.65), the pan position is determined by the frequency, and the range of frequencies is smaller (the high frequency in this version is less than in the first draft).  Also, the more chaotic things are, the louder the sound is.

sound from logistic map (second version)

Solo tin whistle modified by a Csound instrument.  Delayed copies of the signal interfere spectrally with each other.  No oscillators.

tin whistle, one

Noise made from the roots of all 15th degree Littlewood polynomials (i.e., polynomials with coefficients that are all ±1).  The sound's spectrogram matches, approximately,  a plot of the roots.

noise from roots of 15-th degree Littlewood polynomials

Noise made from the sequence of integers n such that the digits of n squared contain an equal number of 2's and 3's via the method described here: https://sites.math.washington.edu/~conroy/WXML/integerSequenceNoise/home.htm The photo shows the spectrogram of the first 90 seconds or so.

This upload was an mp3, so it probably isn't quite exact, but with a quick test listen it is subjectively equivalent.

noise from sequence of n such that the digits of n squared contain an equal number of 2's and 3's

A noisy track made from a bifurcation diagram.  The birfurcation diagram is for the function  f(x)=A(1-2|x-0.5|) if x<0.5 and f(x)=4Ax(1-x) if x>0.5. For this sound, A runs from 0.7 to 1 with time.  

bifurcation diagram sound

A few minutes of live-processed (with Csound) guitar improvisation.  The Csound code is a simple version of something I'm working on with delayed copies of the input signal interfering with each other spectrally.  

live processed guitar improvisation, I

More experimenting with live-processed sound using Csound.  I like ring modulation, and I am trying to find things that are like ring modulation, but are not ring modulation.  In this track, delayed copies of distorted guitar interfere with each other spectrally in a not-exactly ring modulation fashion.  It's not really ring modulationy enough, so I'll have to keep working on it.

live processed guitar improvisation, II

Another experiment with live-processing with Csound of electric guitar.

live-processed guitar improvisation, III

A short field recording with escalator noises and a trombone.  Recorded in a parking garage.

escalator and trombone

I took a 10 second chunk from yesterdays "escalator and trombone" track and stretched it to two minutes using some code I wrote a while back (but have not used lately).  I think I'll mess with the code some more to see what else I can do with it.

stretched escalator/trombone

Using my "stretching" code again, with a piece of the "escalator and trombone" field recording. Longer, denser.

even stretchier "escalator and trombone"

Recording of some static electricity noise slowed to 1/10 speed.  It sounds similar to fireworks!

static electric

A field recording of a trombone processed with a vocoder written in Csound.  Trying to get my vocoder to do some things I'm not sure it can do...

vocoder+trombone

Six Schmidt trigger oscillators live-processed with a Csound instrument I wrote.  Noisy.

hex schmidt trigger thing live-processed with Csound

Oh, this is noisy.  Another experiment in generating decent noise with as few lines of code as I can, using mostly modular arithmetic.  I threw a little lowpass filter on afterwards for obvious reasons.

mostly modular arithmetic, again

A tweak of yesterday's track to get thing a little less frantic.  Generated with a short piece of code that uses only integer arithmetic, not floating point so no trig functions or random numbers.  

mostly modular arithmetic, again, II

Made using short piece of a short field recording of an elevator and a trombone in a parking garage.

trombonscalator

A track made from the roots of all 15th degree polynomials with terms ±1/(n+1)x^n.  

15th degree polynomial roots

Some simple noise, filtered using a naive process I am experimenting with, just working with an array of random numbers.

simple filtered noise

A "direct" track made using simple code with trig functions.

direct

Another track using "direct" methods: code with trig functions directly generate the sound.

direct, II

A field recording of a noisy soon-to-be-broken-down escalator.

Noisy Escalator

Alarum (whole lotta)

More Like a Cookie

Nine spread-out clusters of three different pitches.

RPM2021                       

Rust Smut Mildew Mold

A math person making and modifying sounds with custom code, Csound, homemade electronics.

Matthew M. Conroy

Pinned to spotlight

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