Calliopesque in all the right, woozy ways.

David Lynch-y. The ring mod makes perfect sense.

More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/

SONG 67 - DisquietJunto0682 - Unring a Bell

This week's #disquietjunto prompt was to create some music "in which you try to unring a bell."

In practice, I recorded the sound of a gong from our school’s band room (it’s like a bell but BIGGER). Then I tried to create the little snippets of sound that would fly around as the bell rang and which our hard-working theoretical performer would eventually have to reassemble.

Disassembling the bell’s tone into fragments was fun and challenging. I loaded the bell into Anemond’s Factoid to break it up into pieces based on frequency ranges, which got me lots of little snippets (including the drone tones you hear now and then). I also loaded it into Synplant, which generated tons of weird synthetic bells that led me down various rabbit holes of sound design and thoroughly distracted me from this project. I also put the bell sample into Ableton’s Simpler, sliced it into snippets based on transients, and then used the Arpeggiator plug-in to play the snippets randomly.

Isolating and organizing all these fragments and new samples into a track was pretty challenging! Eventually, I outlined the structure of the track, which helped me find my way.

1) Bell tone
2) Bits and pieces dance around the stereo field and an attempt is made to reassemble them
3) The bell is rung again, but this time it sounds slightly different
4) Part of the tone breaks off into a drone while a few snippets flit around
Once again, the bell is reassembled, with a big reverse sound leading into…
5) A big, new bell sound (created by layering pitch-shifted iterations of the original sample)

More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/

You Wouldn't Unring A Bell (disquiet0682)

getting back into disquiet junto a bit this year, me hopes, after year or fews absence. this track is made with the UDO Super Gemini. i wanted to do some fancy sequencing, and had all kinds of fancy compositional ideas to do with unringing a bell, but i ran into problems, so ended up just playing over myself a few times with the bell-like (plenty ring mod) patches I had created. the playing is really bad/i can't - but weirdly i feel this gives it, along with its simple nature, some kind of wonky heroism that does after all remind that there ain't no goin' back (unless we is torquin waaaaay back). peace peeps, all the best for 202555zzz.

unrung heroes wonk disquiet0682

This is part of Disquiet Junto Project 0683: Space Shot. See more at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0683-space-shot/70693/.

Escapism 1

SONG 68 - DisquietJunto0683 - Space Shot

Resonant/reverberant space is something I've thought about a lot since high school, but I never have dragged mics and equipment into a concrete stairwell or washroom before today.

I work at Alfred University in New York and our division of Expanded Media in the School of Art & Design has a four story stairwell which feeds the back of house to two of our galleries and the sonic/video arts studios. I set out four Tascam DR-100 field recorders and captured the sound of my wallet being dropped from the highest point to the lowest. In the accompanying artwork you can see two pictures of this stairwell (one from the bottom looking up [the bottom left picture], and one from the top looking down [the top right picture]). My calves always tighten up a bit at the top.

For the less reverberant space, I chose an old storage closet we're in the midst of transforming into a vocal/studio booth. It has rubberized floors, and a much lower drop-ceiling. I placed the quartet of recorders in the corners of the room, and then dropped my wallet from a much shorter height to the floor. You can see two images from this room set up in the other half of the cover art.

All of this for less than five seconds of audio total. In the first two seconds you'll hear the initial hit of the wallet, followed by a second quieter hit after it bounced in the concrete stairwell. At four seconds you hear the other room with a much more muted single drop (which to my ears sounds a bit like a champagne cork popping, but I've had champagne maybe twice in my life so I probably don't really know what that sounds like.)

More on the 683rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Space Shot — The Assignment: Combine reverberant and non-reverberant — at https://disquiet.com/0683/

Space Shot disquiet0683

Disquiet Junto Project 0683: Space Shot
The Assignment: Combine reverberant and non-reverberant.

Disquiet Junto Project 0683: Space Shot
The Assignment: Combine reverberant and non-reverberant.

This weeks prompt immediately gave me the idea of combining an inherently natural reverb sound with a guaranteed unnatural, reverb-free sound. 

The natural reverberated sound comes from two layers of a field recording of a church in Vienna, recorded in October, which provides ambient noises. The naturally guaranteed reverb-free sound consists of several layers of yesterday's WebSDR recordings, which provided rhythmic and melodic components.

The reverb-free sounds here start with a lot of synthetic reverb and end as they are in reality. The church was stripped of reverb from the beginning with two layers of RX10 de-reverb, which is gradually reduced until the natural reverb of the church dominates. Mono/stereo and panning followed these ideas. So at the end of the track there is a naturally reverberant church and the WebSDR noise, which comes naturally without reverb.

I particularly liked this contrast because reverb indicates spaces; a church is more than a space, as a sacred space it has its own spatiality, so to speak, in Karl Popper's World 3, which contains ideas as much as art. The WebSDR signals seem spaceless, and yet they fill the expanding sphere of their propagation – and the signals itself may transport meaning and ideas from a World-3-Level.

Yes, perhaps a little bit over the top, but that's what I liked. 

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More on the 683rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Space Shot — The Assignment: Combine reverberant and non-reverberant — at https://disquiet.com/0683/


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Discussion: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0683-space-shot/70693

ReSpaced [disquiet0683]

More on the 683rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Space Shot — The Assignment: Combine reverberant and non-reverberant — at https://disquiet.com/0683/

This is five channels of earthquake synth by David Hilowitz (four pads and one drum) partly into Norns RPLS and several reverbs. Also a field recording. Halfway through the reverb is completely of. It still sounds roomy though, so I consider this a bit of a failure. Maybe it’s the earthquake synth that needs (and creates) space? I guess an earthquake does not fit into a shoebox... 

Disquiet0683 - Earthquake in a Shoebox

Original work by Richard D. James. This is part of Disquiet Junto Project #0684: Early Bird. See more at https://llllllll.co/t/70788/3.

Start + On (Aphex Twin cover)

More on the 690th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Knot Bad — The Assignment: Interpret wood grain as a graphic score — at https://disquiet.com/0690/

disquiet0690

Disquiet Junto Project 0692: Combust a Move
The Assignment: Make music using fire for the rhythm track.

While tidying up unfinished tracks I stumbled upon a somehow phasered pad that I liked very much and for which I have long forgotten what I once did it for and how. I did not want to delete it, but I was not able to do something with it either. The unruly sound simply rejected all my attempts to add something. But as much as I liked for itself (even in its original lenght of around 20 minutes) I wanted to do more with it. Then I was tidying up my mails and found the disquiet junto prompt. I downloaded a fireplace and added it to the pad - and I liked it. There was some optimizing, like the fireplace goes thru a gater (adding a slightly straight rhythm) and there is a decrackle plugin set to "output crackle only" (to reduce the noise without loosing the high frequencies), and there is a smoking person in the room.

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Fireplace CC0 by 16FThumaF
https://freesound.org/people/16FThumaF/sounds/499032/
Thank you!

Smoking female CC0 by Roses1401
https://freesound.org/people/Roses1401/sounds/442639/
Thank you!

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Track image by Dall-E

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More on the 692nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Combust a Move — The Assignment: Make music using fire for the rhythm track — at https://disquiet.com/0692/

Discussions
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0692-combust-a-move/71387

unrung heroes wonk disquiet0682

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