A set of tracks from the 29th weekly project from the Disquiet Junto group. 

The Assignment: Make music from running water, inspired by William Gibson's novel Count Zero.

More information on the group at: 

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info

More on the specific project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/07/19/disquiet0029-countzero/

Disquiet Junto Project 0029: Count Zero

My submissions to the Disquiet Junto projects that I've participated in, in reverse chronological order.

Disquiet Junto

2012

Csound

This is my entry for the 97th Disquiet Junto project, where we were asked to take an 80-character excerpt from a book we're reading, transform it into a melodic line based on some simple rules, and make a short track out of it.

I'm currently reading Thomas Pynchon's novel "Bleeding Edge", so I used that as my source. The excerpt  (including the terminal comma) was: "a gong from a hitherto-unreleased Fu Manchu movie goes off, abrupt and strident,".

I mapped the derived melody to La Monte Young's Well-Tuned Piano tuning, which is in just intonation. The piece consists of eight simultaneous renditions of the melody, played twice. The first time through, the eight lines are played at the same speed but with slight offsets in time, creating a rhythmic echo/tremolo effect. The second time, they repeat starting with the same offsets, but lines two through eight are each scaled slightly differently so that by the end, they converge on unison.

I made the piece entirely with Csound, using Steven Yi's graphical composition environment blue. The instrument I used is called "Sine modulo pluck" and was designed by Mark Van Peteghem for use within blue.

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More on this 97th Disquiet Junto project, in which music is decoded from a phrase in a book, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/11/07/disquiet0097-page99remix/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Image via wikipedia.org.

Maxine's Bells [disquiet0097-page99remix]

My first Disquiet Junto submission for 2014 (and my first one in far too long). This project has us take a visualization of the weather in one's local area, and use it as a graphical score.

My process:
- Use the Awesome Screenshot extension in Google Chrome to clip the image from the WeatherSpark site.
- Open the image in GIMP. Transform it by inverting the colors and posterizing.
- Imported the image to Virtual ANS, a program that can convert image into sound. Tweaked the ANS parameters until I was satisfied with the result, and exported it as a WAV file.
- Imported the sound into Audacity. Added a little silence to the end, applied some EQ to boost the bass, applied a simulated plate reverb, adjusted the amplitude, and exported as an MP3.

Additional notes:
- I decided to prepare the image before submitting it to Virtual ANS because it would allow the graphical elements to emerge more starkly.
- There is an artifact at the end the track resulting from the ANS process; I decided to keep it as it seems to work as a coda.
- The weather data came from the Silver Ranch Airpark in Jaffrey, NH, US, which is one of the weather stations closest to Peterborough, NH (where I live).
- The Flickr set shows the original captured image and the altered image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seidel/sets/72157639652552553/
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More on this 106th Disquiet Junto project (“Treat the weather as a graphically notated score”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2014/01/09/disquiet0106-sonarvortex/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/?p=16588

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

0110 [disquiet0106-sonarvortex]

I decided I might as well mess around with my own stuff since everyone one else is, so here is the mysterybear mix.

I took the third chunk, and decided to layer it over itself, using Audacity effects only and no editing. I did it pretty fast and didn't take notes, so some of my details may not be completely accurate.

First layer: pitch-shifted up an octave, subjected it to crossover distortion, and finally run though a resonant filter swept by a Lorenz fractal.

Second layer: pitch-shifted down an octave and then went through a Chebychev distortion effect.

Third layer: the original chunk with no effects at all.

I applied staggered fade-ins and fade-outs to the layers, and then mixed them down into a single stereo track.

I found the image at http://jellybellyonaplate.tumblr.com/

--

More on this 114th Disquiet Junto project — “Combine elements of Dave Seidel’s album ~60 Hz (Irritable Hedgehog)” — at:

disquiet.com/2014/03/06/disquiet0114-60hz/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/?p=16588

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

The source audio is from Dave Seidel’s ~60 Hz album, released on the Irritable Hedgehog record label. More on the album at:

http://recordings.irritablehedgehog.com/album/da…el-60-hz

Wibbly Wobbly [disquiet0114-60hz]

My entry for Disquiet Junto project 148: "Make music inspired by and suitable for listening to while reading William Gibson’s novel The Peripheral."

More from the project description: "You will make two minutes of loopable background music. The music will be inspired by a phrase from William Gibson’s novel The Peripheral. Think about music that is suitable to reading."

We were provided three different passages to use as possible starting points. I chose this one from Chapter 56 (“The Light in Her Voice Mail”): “The ambient sound was glum as the light, as calculated to unsettle.” The title comes from the previous sentence in the book: "A wintery light found its way down, as from unseen windows."

I wrote this in Csound, using the blue frontend. After looking into ultrasound and infrasound, and rejecting them as impractical for MP3s, computer speakers, and headphones, I decided to stick with the general idea of using a high sound and a low sound. The high sound consists of three pitches at or near 1920 Hz, expressed using binaural beating. The low sound is at 45 Hz and also uses binaural beating. I used only sine waves, with a bit of digital reverb and finally some convolution reverb using an IR from York Minster in the UK as provided by the Openair project: http://www.openairlib.net/auralizationdb/content/york-minster. This was all done in Csound, then normalized and converted to MP3 in Audacity. Total working time, once I started actually making it, about 2 hours.

The image comes from Wikipedia (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FC8.H8177.879dc_-_Des_destin%C3%A9es_de_l%27ame_-_Harvard.jpg) and is described as follows: "Copy of Des destinées de l'ame by Arsène Houssaye, published in Paris, France, 1880s. According to source's item description: Bound in human skin taken from the back of the unclaimed body of a woman patient in a French mental hospital who died suddenly of apoplexy; laid into case with this book is typed memorandum by J.B. Stetson giving details of its provenance (an example of anthropodermic bibliopegy)." It is in the public domain.

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More on this 148th Disquiet Junto project — “Make music inspired by and suitable for listening to while reading William Gibson’s novel The Peripheral″ — at:

http://disquiet.com/2014/10/30/disquiet0148-peripherallistening/

a wintery light [disquiet0148-peripherallistening]

My entry for Disquiet Junto 178. In this project, we were presented with a field recording of bells in Berlin, and directed to "[r]ework the source audio in a manner that reinforces the melodic component of the bells. Beyond that sole instruction, the choices are up to you." 

Process:
1. take a 56-second excerpt from the source file (156s - 212s)
2. apply fade-in and fade out
3. stretch the track to four times its original length (using the Paulstretch effect in Audacity)
4. using Csound, convolve the track against an impulse response file made in an empty nuclear reactor hall (see below for details)
5. repeat step 4 four more times (five times in all)
6 convert to FLAC, add tags, upload

No additional sounds were added.

The impulse response I used is from the CC-licensed Open Acoustic Impulse Response (Open AIR) Library, specifically the "R1 Nuclear Reactor Hall" IR, made in empty hall of the first nuclear reactor in Stockholm. Link: http://www.openairlib.net/auralizationdb/content/r1-nuclear-reactor-hall

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More on this 178th Disquiet Junto project — “Emphasize the bells in an urban field recording” — at:

http://disquiet.com/2015/05/28/disquiet0178-sepulchrabells/

Source audio by Michael Raphael, aka Sepulchra, who runs the sound-library firm at rabbitearsaudio.com. Audio used with Raphael’s permission. Track originally posted at:

https://soundcloud.com/sepulchra/150526-marienkirche

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

http://disquiet.com/forums/

Reactive Sepulchre [disquiet0178-sepulchrabells]

From Complex Silence 12, released February 2011. Full release at <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/Complex_Silence_12" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.archive.org/details/Complex_Silence_12</a>.
Binaurally-beating sine waves in just intonation. Made with Csound and blue.
Best listened with headphones and eyes closed. Dedicated to Eleh.



Gyre II (from "Complex Silence 12", 2011)

A single chord tuned in just intonation, with each note's spectrum stretched using exponential curves to an interval of 21/20 (a "septimal chromatic semitone") and back again. The chord consist of the intervals 9/8 3/2 1/1 4/3 7/4 (in that order, low to high), where 1/1 is 240 Hz. I used a waveform made from the first 11 prime overtones. Some reverb was also applied. Made entirely in Csound with blue, converted from 96/24 WAV to 320kbps MP3 in Audacity.

Image: "Day 43 - Red Shift" by Brian J. Matis, licensed under Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) from http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianjmatis/3275483167/

Drift Study III

From Complex Silence 4, released October 2009 on the Time Theory netlabel. It uses scales based on the golden ratio, and was made with Csound, blue, and Scala. The full release is available at http://www.archive.org/details/tmth06A. Cover image by Phillip Wilkerson.

Complex Silence 4 got a nice review on Disquiet in November 2009: http://disquiet.com/2009/11/03/dave-seidel-complex-silence/

Meridian Transit (from "Complex Silence 4", 2009)

Mark (aka Mystahr) at the Justnotnormal Netlabel has just released their second massive compilation, no-R-mal II, 71 tracks of experimental music organized into six sets (each of which is suitable for burning to a CD). Each CD has a theme; the first one is called Warm voices, and it includes a track of mine called Penumbral.

Penumbral started life several years ago as a piece called Passacagla & Fugue State and uses a “scale” I built from the set of pitches used in the La Monte Young sine wave installation called (deep breath) “The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of 279 and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped above and Including 288 Consists of The Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119”. This is a revision of my earlier piece, with (hopefully) higher-quality sound and several other changes here and there.

The piece was not intended to imitate natural sounds, but it did result in some sounds that are somewhat reminiscent of the peepers and insects that can be heard in rural places. Listening to it this morning, it blended very well with the cricket sounds coming through the open windows of my living room.

Here is the track for streaming and/or downloading, but I encourage you to check out the rest of the No-R-mal II release — there’s a LOT of good music there.

Penumbral (from "no-R-mal II", 2010)

I had just the field recording for this.  It was recorded in early 2011 at a garden center / drug store near my house.  The sprinkler was on a timer and was watering trees and shrubs late in the evening, and I heard it while exiting the store so I ran home and got my portable digital audio recorder and got about 8 minutes along with bird and parking lot sounds while sitting in my car.

For this piece, I carved out a little over 2 minutes of the field recording then added some of the rhythm source I used in Disquiet0020 Nodebeat, a looped bit of the train sound I used in Disquiet0002 Duet, along with some background color used in Disquiet0001 Ice.

Had to mix it all so the non-sprinkler rhythms wouldn't overpower the source, as advised.  I think the Nodebeat rhythm is very complimentary even if it and the sprinkler regularly go out of phase but I like it when things go out of phase.

The inspiration for this track came from the opening of chapter 17 of William Gibson's 1986 novel Count Zero.

More on the 29th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/07/19/disquiet0029-countzero/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info 

Prickly Sprinkler (disquiet0029-countzero)

This is four recordings of rain hitting inverted singing bowls of varying sizes. These were then cut into samples of 15, 13, 11 and 9 seconds and then looped 8 times. After the 4th repetition of each sample, I faded in the hold function on the "Ambient" VST which freezes any sound.  There was also some ping pong delay, overdrive and EQ'ing involved with each sample.

Disquiet Junto Project 0029: Count Zero 

The inspiration for this track came from the opening of chapter 17 of William Gibson's 1986 novel Count Zero.

More on the 29th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/07/19/disquiet0029-countzero/ ;

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

Disquiet Junto

Forecast [disquiet0029-countzero]

Disquiet Junto Project 0029: Count Zero

  This week's project is inspired by an aside that occurs at the opening of chapter 17 of William Gibson's classic cyberpunk novel Count Zero, originally published in 1986. The chapter is titled "The Squirrel Wood." It opens as follows:   "The plane had gone to ground near the sound of running water. Turner could hear it, turning in the g-web in his fever or sleep, water down stone, one of the oldest songs."  

This idea of water running down stone, of a gentle but insistent natural stream, being one of the "oldest songs" is explored further in the chapter in various subtle ways. The Disquiet Junto project this week is to explore that idea: that there is music in the natural environment. We'll makes songs from running water.  

Instructions:

  Step 1: Locate and make a field recording of source material that involves running water. It can be a stream, as in the Gibson book, but it needn't be natural. The sink, a toilet, a hose in the backyard — any such source material would be fine.  

Step 2: Extract a segment of the recording. That segment will serve as the basis for your composition, as its foundation. It will provide both rhythmic and melodic material. You can either use one long piece of the recording, or you can create the foundation of the track by combining and looping one or more brief segments of your original field recording.

  Step 3: Add elements and treatments to the foundation recording of running water. Do so with the intention of highlighting the water's internal sense of rhythm and melody. Do not embellish so much that the foundation recording becomes unrecognizable.   

Information:

This was a fairly rushed project as I am on business in Baltimore and New York at the moment. God bless wifi on Amtrak's Acela Express … greetings from Delaware at speed!

The recordings were made with an iPhone and the 4 track app of a dripping faucet/tap in my hotel (I had to make it drip, the plumbing was fine) and the overrun of the shower as it hit the resonant faucet beneath.

From these I was able to take a number of rhythmic, semi-resonant loops that I brought into Ableton Live for processing. If you've listened to many of my Junto projects, you'll know that I try to steer clear of pieces that only contain rhythmic constituents, so I also created a couple of granular patches from the sound waves of the water. This all seemed to give the track a post-rock/ambient feel.

These harmonic tracks were run through various instances of Guitar Rig to give some depth to the sounds. All the while, the rhythmic water sounds were pushed around the stereo field a little and given some glitchy movement.

Conceptually I saw this as pulling melody from rhythm with the latter being almost a cage within which the harmonic character is restrained.  

Credits:

Photo: Faucet in Baltimore @echosonic

  The inspiration for this track came from the opening of chapter 17 of William Gibson's 1986 novel Count Zero.  

More on the 29th Disquiet Junto project at: 

http://disquiet.com/2012/07/19/disquiet0029-countzero/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at: http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info

A Good Morning in Baltimore [disquiet0029-countzero]

The inspiration for this track came from the opening of chapter 17 of William Gibson's 1986 novel Count Zero. More on the 29th Disquiet Junto project at http://disquiet.com/2012/07/19/disquiet0029-countzero/. More details on the Disquiet Junto at http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info.

Process:
- take a 30-second excerpt from a field recording I made of the Contoocook River in Peterborough, NH
- time-stretch it 7x in Paul's Extreme Stretch
- in Csound:
-- derive the spectral centroid[1] of each stereo track
-- use the centroid to control the pitch of a pair of sinewave oscillators
-- pass the oscillator tones through some reverb
-- combine the tones with the streatched water sound, crossfading so that the tones increase in amplitude as the water sound decreases
- convert to MP3 in Audacity

Image: "Animated loop of simulated hydrogen line spectra centroid jitter." found at http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/powerfrq.html, no copyright declared.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_centroid

Subsurface Tension [disquiet0029-countzero]

This track is a transformation, in honor of painter Clyfford Still, of a sample of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, II. Andante, culled from this recording: http://archive.org/details/J.S.BachBrandenburgConcertoNo2

More on the Clyfford Still Museum at clyffordstillmuseum.org.

More on this 36th Disquiet Junto project at: http://disquiet.com/2012/09/06/disquiet0036-cstillconcerto/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at: http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info/

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My process:
1.  I took an eight-second snippet of the source recording, starting at 4:33 (happy birthday, John Cage!) and going to the end of the track, then resampled it from 22.05K to 96K.
2. I stretched it to its current length using the Paulstretch effect in Audacity.
3. I duplicated the track and transposed it a minor seventh higher.
4. I duplicated the track again and transposed it a major seventh higher.

That's it other than normalization and transcoding to MP3. All steps performed in Audacity. Elapsed time: about 90 minutes.

I chose the intervals of major and minor seventh because these "dissonant" intervals are characteristic of much of the modernist music that was being written during the Abstract Expressionist period in visual art.

The image is the spectrum of a mono version of this piece. You can see the full image at http://www.flickr.com/photos/seidel/7949114640

Stillness [disquiet0036-cstillconcerto]

Just playing around with a new performance patch. More or less what's in the photo, with a couple of changes. Recorded live direct from mixer to Zoom H4N. Added a small fade-in at the beginning, otherwise unedited.

Gear (starting top center and moving counter-clockwise):  Ekdahl Moisturizer, Gristleizer, Moogerfooger FreqBox, Woftone Chaos, Moogerfooger Ring Modulator, Moogerfooger MuRF, Moogerfooger ClusterFlux, Koma Kommander, Deluxe Memory Man. The thing with nine knobs is a 3x3 matrix mixer made by Repeater Electronics. Also used, but not pictured: a four-key tunable CV controller also by Repeater Electronics.

The photo is also at http://daveseidel.tumblr.com/post/31372576308

Sketch (2012-09-12)

The source audio for this track is part three of the Kenneth Kirschner album June 5, 2012, which features Kirschner on piano and Tawnya Popoff on viola. The album was released in September 2012 on the shskh.com netlabel, where it is available for free download.

More on this 40th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/10/04/disquiet0040-kirschnerplus1/

More on Kenneth Kirschner at:

http://www.kennethkirschner.com/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info/

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I wrote a Csound program to read in the original track and generate a "double" using a waveshaping process based on Csound's "chebyshevpoly" opcode. This opcode allows control over individual harmonics, and I used prime harmonics 2, 3, 7, 11, 13, 17. Each generated harmonic is controlled by an LFO whose frequency is inversely proportional to the  number of the harmonic; e.g., the second harmonic's LFO has a frequency of 1/2, or .5 Hz; the fifth harmonic used 1/5 or .2 Hz, etc. The shape of the waveform I used for the LFOs, combined with the very slow frequencies, results in an envelope that can sound percussive or plucked. This track also has a bit of reverb to help it somewhat match the ambience of the source track. Finally, I took the "double" and combined it with the original track in Audacity, and this piece is the result. The elapsed time of the project (including writing these notes) was about three hours.

The intent was to add new timbres with a contrasting texture (striated in comparison with the smoother surface of the source material), but to try to do it in such a way that the subtle and delicate beauty of Kirschner's piece was not obscured. I hope that the end result can be heard as an organic extension of the original piece.

The image is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hor and is a statue of the ancient Egyptian king Hor. On his head is the symbol "ka", an Eqyptian word that denotes vital essence, soul, or double.

Ka [disquiet0040-kirschnerplus1]

From January 2006, the title track of my first CD-R (Glass Museum) and netlabel (NetNewMusic) release. Original notes: http://mysterybear.net/article/14/sublimation. Netlabel release: http://www.archive.org/details/nnm007

Now available at http://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/album/sublimation in FLAC (lossless) format.

Sublimation (from "Sublimation", 2008)

Unedited improvisation recorded directly to Zoom H4N. Made with Drone Lab, Digitech Grunge, 4ms/Repeater Noise Swash, Malekko Wolftone Chaos, Repeater matrix mixer, Behringer mixer, Ekdahl Moisturizer. Thanks to Martin Freeman who made the Noise Swash (built from a 4ms PCB with some additional mods) and who took the picture.

There is now a <a href="http://disquiet.com/2012/11/14/dave-seidel-noise-swash/">very nice writeup</a> on this piece at Disquiet. Thanks, Marc!

Unsubtle Body

This is an unedited, unprocessed live recording, direct to Zoom H4N off the mixer. From a performance at 119 Gallery (Lowell, MA), November 17, 2012.

I used a large (14") Tibetan bowl with two SM57 mics. The signal was processed by an effects chain consisting of (in order) Moogerfooger Ring Modulator, Moogerfooger Cluster Flux, Deluxe Memory Man and Ekdahl Moisturizer. I also used the ring modulator's carrier oscillator as a drone, through a 4ms/Repeater Noise Swash and a Moogerfooger Freq Box -- this was a separate signal, but it was also routed through the effects chain.

I struck the bowl with a typical felt-covered wooden beater and bowed it with a violin bow (these are the high-pitched notes heard periodically). In a couple of spots, I used an EBow resting directly on the exposed springs of the Moisturizer. Feedback was employed at several levels throughout.

Image: "Suspended from Afar, Mountainville, NY" by Grufnik (http://www.flickr.com/photos/grufnik/1411375138/). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Suspended (at 119 Gallery, 2012-Nov-17)

Experimental electronic music, mostly in the drone category. This is where I put live sets, one-offs, experiments, and excerpts from longer releases.

CD: "~60 Hz" on Irritable Hedgehog - http://recordings.irritablehedgehog.com/album/dave-seidel-60-hz

All releases, including netlabel items: 
http://mysterybear.net/music

https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/

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