Recorded in February 2024 as part of the RPM Challenge.

B LLOON S

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

Several sets of sounds, layered and altered.

Smear the Fish Well

Short test to try out my new csound distortion "dodecafuzz".

dodecafuzz test 01

Zoom H5 recording of a very noisy escalator in Seattle's Roosevelt light rail station 10/27/22.  I think it needs some maintenance.  Sound modified with 100 hz high pass filter to remove some wind, and maybe hand, noise.

seattle subway escalator

First track for RPM2023. Humming with my mouth.

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 ]

A buildup of a "beat", then a stretching of the percussive sounds, and addition of other sounds in rhythm.

More on this 619th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Beat Accrual (The Assignment: Rebuild a complicated rhythm from scratch), at: https://disquiet.com/0619/

Beat Accrual [ disquiet0619 ]

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

Recorded in February 2024 as part of the RPM Challenge.

I wanted to see what repeated bits with changing envelopes
would sound like.  Lots of layers, a bunch of 
pitches all at a ratio of 4/3.

When it was done, I hacked it quite a bit to shorten it and
reduce monotony and then added reverb by convolving it with
a recording I made in a stairwell I know that has 4+ seconds
of reverberation.  I used my umbrella, and recorded the reverb
when I hit the floor with it.   You can hear the umbrella
hit a number of times in the track: I'm not sure why.

Enveloppe

More recursion-based composition experiments.

Recursion 2024-1

Ambient sound in the Seattle Pinball Museum, July 1, 2024. Recorded with a Zoom H2.

Seattle Pinball Museum (III)

Two sequential field recordings of quite a lot of crows in Seattle, February 2025.  Also traffic noise and at least one airplane flyover.  

Crows

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

This is a sound file created from an EKG strip.  The strip included two cardioversion shocks; these result in the primary rhythmic elements.  The EKG was incorporated at two levels: a "base" waveform, and as an envelope at 10 times the base waveform scale.

I scanned the strip to an image file, then wrote a Processing sketch to create a Csound score from it, then used Csound to create the sound file.  

sound from EKG

Lena Horne's Stormy Weather, chopped up into equal length subintervals, then sorted by loudness, naively measured.

Stormy Weather, Sorted

RPM 2019                      

Bass stretch

There is a graveyard for weather

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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