With only one exception, all of the rhythmic and melodic material in this composition is taken from a field recording of waves and gulls I made while watching the sun rise over Caye Caulker in Belize last December.  I listened for interesting parts of the source material, decided on a compromise tempo so that I could work in measures, and cut the interesting sections into loops of between three and sixteen beats.  I filtered each loop to extract different timbres and added spatial and ambient effects on return buses.  As my arrangement took shape, I cut and rearranged the arrythmic source material in places to enable gradual transitions between breathing, natural rhythms and more mechanical, precise ones.
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More on this 220th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Make overtly rhythmic music from short loops of overtly arrhythmic source audio, following instructions from Dennis DeSantis”) at:

http://disquiet.com/0220/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

http://disquiet.com/forums/

Sunrise, Caye Caulker, 12/21/15 [disquiet0220-rhythmicarrhythmic]

I've long loved the second Bourrée from BWV 1010 (and not just because it is accessible to mediocre guitarists).  I thought it would be fun to use it as the departure point for a contemporary reworking in honor of Bach's birthday earlier this week.  I played the Bourrée on a slightly out-of-tune nylon-string guitar and used Ableton's polyphonic dictation to convert it to MIDI.  Because the guitar was out of tune, there were lots of odd and sometimes pleasant artifacts and clusters in the generated MIDI.  I resynthesized and rearranged the MIDI, trying to keep some of the character of the original dance form in a glitchy result.

bourrée pépin

This piece, which is meant to provide a soundtrack for contemporary dance, has two main components:  a relatively fixed ostinato and an ever-shifting rhythm.  The ostinato is a processed-guitar pad doubled by synthesized pitched percussion.  The rhythm section is Audio Damage Axon and Taiko drums; the former is constant throughout the piece but the latter is regularly cut up into smaller repeating subdivisions, ideally implying metric feet in places, stutter-steps in others.

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More on this 222nd weekly Disquiet Junto project (Compose a piece for contemporary dance — with a “soft top” and a “shifting bottom”) at:

http://disquiet.com/0222/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

desuetude [disquiet0222-boundedfoundation]

oktogon

Generative sequences that eventually come together in a cadential figure (four times).  Physical modeling synthesis with a dynamically resizing resonant chamber takes the main timbre from "fake theorbo" to "fake consort of viols."  (I dig the late-90s aesthetic of the really basic physical modeling synths!)

apricari

This is mostly guitar and Mutable Instruments Clouds.  The pitch classes in this piece are taken from the ratios of the orbit periods of six of the planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system:  1:1, 4:3 2:1, 3:1, 5:1, 8:1.  I recorded some guitar noodling into Live, processed it into multiple loops, and then fed the loops back into Clouds, automating the buffer position from Live and automating other parameters by hand.  Two hard-panned aleatoric tracks of full notes and tails of the high E (8:1) keep the texture varied.

I used reverb, delay, and channel-strip plugins in the box but all sound sources are either guitar or Clouds.

More on this 272nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Exoplanetary Intervals: Use music to express the relationships between planets” — at:  http://disquiet.com/0272/

http://audio.willbenton.com/#2017

extrasolar sympathies [disquiet0272]

my songs gently imploring

midwinter

background music to clear your mind of thoughts of dogs, sheep, people, bicycles, &c.

More on this 323rd weekly Disquiet Junto project (Music for Meditation: Record a piece of music suited to meditation) at:

https://disquiet.com/0323/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0323-music-for-meditation/

visual object classes [disquiet0323]

Percussion and pads are processed vinyl noises (courtesy of several public-domain samples from freesound.org); the synth sounds are all sine waves (courtesy of Ableton Wavetable).

More on this 326th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Wave Turntable: In collaboration with composer Danny Clay, make music for his exhibit with artist Jon Fischer using only sine waves and turntable surface noise) at:

https://disquiet.com/0326/

More on Clay and Fischer at:

http://dclaymusic.com
http://feather2pixels.com

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

willbenton

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