Smart beat, came in nicely and adds to the emotions around the tracks.

I always look forward to the beginning of the year when this project comes around.  This year I used this piece as a study for a much larger work - specifically using it as a way to experiment with a complex scripting language I have built on top of the RTcmix (www.rtcmix.org) scripting language, MinC.
My scripts allow me to create algorithmic musical patterns in a large number of dimensions:  volume, pitch, sample selection, tempo, placement in a simulated room-space etc.  Each dimension can be moved about in via an algorithmic plug-in, for example, random choice, sequential access, fixed value, etc.
The Psychedelic Ice Machine uses three sets of ice sound samples I have recorded over the years.  The score loops, creating an ever-changing set of patterns.  The relationship between these is sometimes clear and sometimes obscured.

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More on this 575th weekly Disquiet Junto project — On Ice (The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it) — at: https://disquiet.com/0575/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0575-on-ice/

The Psychedelic Ice Machine

The Psychedelic Ice Machine [disquiet0575]

Disquiet Junto Project 0575: On Ice
The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.

Welcome to a new year of Disquiet Junto communal music projects. This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, way back in January 2012. The project is, per tradition, just this one step:

Step 1: Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.

Track notes:

Happy new year all! 

For this year's ice challenge, I put about ten ice cubes in a large  wine glass and filled it with water. I placed an Aquarian hydrophone into it and routed it into my little modular skiff, using an ohcd LFO,  DLD(stereo delay) and Morphagene module.

Recently I'd been playing around with Karpus-Strong delay effects on the DLD, which is in essence 'resonance feedback', which is useful for generating plucked string sort of sounds from an incoming signal.

One of the things I like about experimenting with resonance feedback is how very transient and discrete sounds can become powerful (and unpredictable) impulses when used in conjunction with the effect.

With an ultra-short delay and high feedback threshold set on the stereo delay module, I rattled the ice in the glass and recorded the very end of the tail of the rattle to the Morphagene and used a couple of LFOs to control the CV of the sample's grain and morphology. 

Because the sample captures the tail-end of the rattle, there's only a little movement interspersed with very discrete crackles, squeaks and pops.  

For recording this track, the dry/wet of the Morphagene was set to 50/50 so that the ongoing 'quiet' action within the glass is heard in conjunction with the granulated sample. At a couple of points, this develops dramatically, with some incidental ice movement, followed by a large crack. The final part involved me turning the Morphagene mix to 100% wet and attempting to break the sample apart, so that only vague traces of the original sample recording can be heard.

[Disquiet_Junto_0575] Ice Murmur

Disquiet Junto Project 0575: On Ice
The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.

I always wanted to do the ice project, but year for year I missed it because of … reasons. Last year I even build a diy hydrophone (see here https://www.instagram.com/p/CXoJtm5tR_w/ ) for this project (and missed it again). Now I tried to melt the ice with the frozen contact mic inside, and record it 'from inside'.

I made some videos: In the “red part” of the video I hoped to create (and record) a crack in the ice, in the “ice inside a glass” part you may even see the bubbles of noises you will hear in my track (not in the video, it's meta only): https://www.instagram.com/p/CnFbiOiNIV3/

The results were … unspectacular. By whatsoever reason the ice didn't click or make interesting noises and because I had to amplify the signal from the contact mic of the hydrophone, there was a lot of noise and hum in the Zoom H5 recording. 

I used a 1 minute sample from the recordings, reduced the noises and the hum and tried to isolate the sound of the slowly melting ice, which was a sound between cooking water, eating popcorn, burning wood. It didn't work well, because the noise frequencies were mostly on the same range. But you can hear them in the background noise floor, which I doubled time-displaced for having stereo. I added some Supermassive FX, because it worked.

I could have lived with that alone, but decided to add some bass. Fortunately there was the f…ing 50Hz AC humming in the recording, which I had filtered for the melting ice noise tracks – and which I amplified for the bass track. Maybe not the most interesting bass lick, but I liked it for its endurance. 

I used another, unfiltered version of the sample to add rhythmic elements with the help of Audiomoderns Stepfilter and Gatelab plugins, which are always nice for something like that, and here I used two instances with different speeds (1/4, 1/8T) for creating some unexpectedness.

I think I clearly failed recording "ice in a glass". Next try next new years eve … but I really like the resulting track, because all is made with a single noisy humming 1 minute recording sample. If someone wants to add some solo or remix it – be my guest ;-) 

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More on this 575th weekly Disquiet Junto project — On Ice (The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it) — at: https://disquiet.com/0575/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0575-on-ice/

Krakenkraft On Ice [disquiet0575]

More on this 575th weekly Disquiet Junto project — On Ice (The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it) — at: https://disquiet.com/0575/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0575-on-ice/

Boiling Hot Ice (disquiet0575)

[disquiet0575] Thin

My contribution to Disquiet Junto Project 0575: On Ice.

A recording of an ice cube tipped between a glass and vase spliced and arranged in Ableton Live.

More on this 575th weekly Disquiet Junto project – On Ice (The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it) – at: https://disquiet.com/0575/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0575-on-ice/

disquiet0575 On Ice

I recorded the sounds of ice cubes in a couple of different wine glasses, on a Roland R-07 handheld digital recorder, and an iPhone. I chopped and sampled the recordings in different ways, like using Samplr iPad app to create gestural sounds, and Ableton Drum Rack to make the drum patterns using transient samples from the recordings. As I was processing sounds and tracking things out a bit in Ableton a drum and bass type rhythm pattern took shape pretty quickly, and I let it continue in that direction.  
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Disquiet Junto Project 0575: On Ice
https://disquiet.com/2023/01/05/disquiet-junto-project-0575-on-ice/

On Ice • [ Disquiet 0575 ]

My submission for Disquiet Junto Project 0575: On Ice. Followed the instruction: "record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it". This track uses only samples from a 5 minute recording I made pouring water into a few different glasses with ice and clanking the cubes around. Primary tools used were Bitwig's sampler (pitched notes) and Stepic VST (5/8 rhythms). Animating Bitwig's filter device on sequenced clanks made the tabla like drums.

Ice Ice Junto (Disquiet0575)

Disquiet Junto Project 0578: Rabbit Spirit Ally
The Assignment: Make music for Lunar New Year.

I started with the idea of following the white rabbit and the Disney scene in my mind, where Alice falls down the rabbit hole and things became strange. I took used stems from older tracks, selecting only weird ones, cutting and rebuilding them by hand and with some Puremagnetik and other FX, to what I felt was an acoustic funnel which hopefully sucks you in.

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Cover based on PD image by Dric: 
https://pixabay.com/de/illustrations/schwarzes-loch-art-optik-schwarz-2942914/

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More on this 578th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rabbit Spirit Ally (The Assignment: Make music for Lunar New Year), at: https://disquiet.com/0578/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0578-rabbit-spirit-ally/

album.link

Down The Rabbit Holes [disquiet0578]

By chance, the beginning of the summer vacation coincided with an exciting challenge from the Disquiet Junto and my recent acquisition of a vintage Yamaha PS55 keyboard [link: https://jimatwood.wordpress.com/2012/07/13/yamaha-ps-55-keyboard-wonder/]. I immediately decided to participate once again and make use of this new keyboard. Midway through the process, I struggled in piecing everything together, but ultimately, a unified and coherent final product emerged.

IDEA - Abstract with Arp
The task, of course, was to use different parts, so I wanted to record them on the PS55 first. I thought about recording various snippets and assigned them numbers on paper that corresponded to the values of a dice. I once heard about Jean-Hans Arp (1886 - 1966) [link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Arp] during an art academy lecture. He was associated with the Dada movement, which aimed to reject rationality. Arp chose to incorporate randomness into his artistic process by allowing paper fragments to fall onto a surface and affixing them wherever they landed. However, when you observe his creations, it's hard to believe that chance alone could produce such harmonious and orderly results. Arp likely made subtle adjustments to his compositions along the way.

COMPO
I started with AminMAJ7 and experimented with chord combinations. I structured the piece into three main sections. I included a supportive bassline and arpeggiated chords throughout the entirety of the song. Furthermore, I selected three primary voices with distinct melodies, labeled 1, 2, and 3. The relative presence of each voice was determined by the number I rolled on the dice, although I allowed for some flexibility in that regard. Melodies naturally emerged through improvisation over the chord progression. I recorded main rythm parts that come with the PS55, and then seperatly recorded the five fills. On places where a fill could be inserted I would let the dice decide which part to use.

GEAR
DAW: Samplitude X3
VST: Stock plugins
HARDWARE: Yamaha PS55, Korg Pandora, TASCAM FW1804, PONIC FIREFLY808 & Hudson guitar.

IMAGE
I created a collage loosely inspired by Arp's work. Then, I edited the photo to my liking using PhotoDemon.

Seat of Wise

Seat Of Wise [disquiet0601]

Disquiet Junto Project 0617 Haunt Scape

Desagrada (disquiet0617)

I took a few ominous sounding extracts from a previous track, stretched and mixed them, multi-tracked and reversed one and remixed an excerpt of organ music and speech recorded in the astonishing echo chamber of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

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The Assignment: Halloween is coming up. Do your thing.

There is just one step to this project: Halloween is nearly here, so make some haunted sounds for people to play for trick-or-treaters.

More on this 617th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Haunt Scape (The Assignment: Halloween is coming up. Do your thing), at: https://disquiet.com/0617/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto /

Desagrada (disquiet0617)

treast is instrumental atmospheric electronica, featuring synths, guitars and bass, virtual instruments, sounds and noises. No loops or samples.

Seat Of Wise [disquiet0601]

treast

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