Disquiet Junto Project 0564: Octave Lept
The Assignment: Work an octave leap — or more than one — into a piece of music.

This project has just one step: Work an octave leap — or more than one — into a piece of music.

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “octave leap.”

Details at disquiet.com/0564

Disquiet Junto Project 0564: Octave Lept

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 553rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Break That Cycle (The Assignment: Record in a steady tempo but break it on occasion) — at: https://disquiet.com/0553/

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-0553-break-that-cycle/

Four Four Walks Into A Bar (disquiet0553)

More on this 563rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Digital Magical Realism (The Assignment: What does this imaginary genre sound like?) — at: https://disquiet.com/0563/

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-0563-digital-magical-realism/

The Tragic Magician (disquiet0563)

Disquiet Junto Project 0563: Digital Magical Realism
The Assignment: What does this imaginary genre sound like?

Step 1: Think about what a genre means, where it begins, where it ends, what makes a genre a genre.

Step 2: Familiarize yourself with the concept of magical realism, most often associated with the fiction of such authors as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Hoffman, and Haruki Murakami, among others.

Step 3: Imagine what “digital magical realism” would sound like, were it the name of a genre.

Step 4: Record a piece of music that sounds like what you think “digital magical realism” sounds like.

Track notes:

Along with the writers mentioned under the broad umbrella of magical realism, I would also count two of my favourite writers (Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco) as falling - if not squarely into - frequently against the margins of the genre.

Immediately works by Calvino came to mind. After all, I named my home studio after one of the cities from Invisible Cities(Maurilia), so parts of my creative world takes a fair chunk of inspiration from his wonderful mind.

Aside from Invisible Cities, I was reminded of my favourite book of his, the meta-novel, If On A Winter's Night.. (1979) where the reader and the story itself progressively becomes a slippery boundary, before both worlds collapse into each other. With this is mind and this week's prompt I thought about sound collages, musique concrete and field recordings, with material sourced from digital technologies.

I pulled up a personal archive of field recordings made with several different technologies, ranging from lo-fi to hi-fi sources (old phones, digital cameras, minidisc players, handheld digital recorders, nice mic rig.) 

I selected recordings which evoked aspects of If On A Winter's Night.., mostly restricted to ambiences and sounds which possess double-meanings or are general indistinct as to their source. There's also literal references to some of the objects/events/phenomena that feature throughout the book, such as: the sound of trains, streetscapes, the ocean, wind, etc. In some instances the sounds have been manipulated a rendered in more tonal/sonorous forms along with discrete synth textures.

I wanted to create a dense collage of these sounds, much like a hectic dream, where time is compressed and where one skips, zooms and pulls in and out of several environments, seemingly in quick succession. Some transitions appear to blend together, whilst others are more abrupt.

I took the title of this piece from one of the chapters of this book, the beautiful and very poetically named "Without fear of wind or vertigo".

[Disquiet_Junto_0563] Without fear of wind or vertigo

Built out of a short extract from an improvisation between @stellato-strings (violin) and myself (piano) there's some Audacity pitch change going on and I'm keeping this week's @naviar-records Haiku Challenge as sparse as possible, with organ stop shifting and very low growling Garageband string ensemble. The picture is from a sunset this week in Margate.

without a voice
the heron would disappear –
morning snow

Widely regarded as one of the most important female haiku poets, Fukuda Chiyo-ni was a Japanese poet of the Edo period. She started writing haiku early in her childhood and was strongly influenced by Basho’s poetry (probably because her teachers were his students).

The fundamentals in Basho’s poetry include: sabi (detached loneliness), wabi (poverty of spirit), hosomi (slenderness, sparseness), shiori (tenderness), sokkyo (spontaneity), makoto (sincerity), fuga (elegance), karumi (simplicity), kyakkan byosha (objectivity), and shiZen to hitotsu ni naru (oneness with nature). Fukuda Chiyo-ni was particularly interested in the latter, since most of her poetry deals with the realm of nature.

Seven days to make music in response to the assigned haiku: to participate visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/about/naviar-haiku

Deadline: 26th October 2022

haiku by Fukuda Chiyo-ni http://haikukan.city.hakusan.ishikawa.jp/english/about/index.html

morning snow (naviarhaiku459)

Electronic sequences created in Pure Data & edited with Audacity, the 2nd & 4th sections one octave higher.

More on this 564th weekly Disquiet Junto project – Octave Lept (The Assignment: Work an octave leap — or more than one — into a piece of music) – at: https://disquiet.com/0564/

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-0564-octave-lept/

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “octave leap.”

8 - Up (disquiet0564)

for the disquiet junto //

arrangement of a classical piece, in half time, with an octave leap

Floating Through

[disquiet0564] Floating Through

The EuclRhymic Chromaticon | Octave Leap

The Euclidean Chromaticon | Octave Leap - disquiet0564

The one instruction for this week's Disquiet Junto assignment was to use an octave leap, which is something I quite often do anyway. 

So, I just set about writing a new track without thinking too hard about the brief. I actually started with the percussion that shows up later in the track.

The root on the opening part steps down an octave before introducing the next chord in the progression.

A two-note synth part is just the minor 7 on two octaves (with a major 6 once for colour - still fits the Dorian mode but is pretty HELLO when it shows up imo).

A second synth part doubles the guitar harmonic sounds, coming in via an opening low-pass filter. That synth part has its pitch modulated by a little step sequence, so it steps up one or two octaves, and the rate at which that's happening in shifting about. That part then runs into a delay (Valhalla Delay) which as a descending octave shift in the feedback patch.

A synth bass part arrives later that is just sustained notes following the root of each chord, but an arpeggiator steps up and down an octave. Kind of like with the pitch modulation on the other synth, the tempo of the arpeggiator is being modulated by an LFO, then quantised, to make it less synth disco / Girls & Boys.

More on this 564th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Octave Lept (The Assignment: Work an octave leap — or more than one — into a piece of music) — at: https://disquiet.com/0564/

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-0564-octave-lept/

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “octave leap.”

[disquiet0565] Octave Leapt

Jet Jaguar - Sound 1 [disquiet0564] (Free download)

Disquiet Junto Project 0564: Octave Lept
The Assignment: Work an octave leap — or more than one — into a piece of music.

I used a track on which I was already working on and added automatic tools to randomly add or substract up to two octaves to all tracks. The probability was chosen so that the octave jumps should go unnoticed.

--

Track cover based on image from Dall-E2 prompting "Sudden jumps, not too hefty, edward hopper". This tool is so much fun!

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More on this 564th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Octave Lept (The Assignment: Work an octave leap — or more than one — into a piece of music) — at: https://disquiet.com/0564/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0564-octave-lept/

Krakenkraft-Disquiet

Sudden Jumps, Not Too Hefty [disquiet0564]

[disquiet0564] Royal Road

Midori: processed bass
Nekbhet: pianos
Syntania: vocals
Crampdread: tom-toms, agogo bells
Cramphand: upright bass
Crampmail: clavinet
Crampmeet: synth horns
Crampmeat: feedback
Sinny: vibraslap, sticks, bulb horn, slide whistle, synth knocks
Tooth: electric guitar

More on this 564th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Octave Lept (The Assignment: Work an octave leap — or more than one — into a piece of music) — at: https://disquiet.com/0564/

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-0564-octave-lept/

King Tut Strut (disquiet0564)

The word “folly” is an English term to mean foolish or lacking good sense. In French, the word “folie” emphasizes aesthetic beauty over practicality to the point of being extravagant, whimsical or silly. This is an egregiously unfair way to denigrate the need to enliven our surroundings with objects and structures that enhance one’s life experience.

“Humankind needs structures and tools that are enriched beyond the severely utilitarian,” wrote Victor Papanek in his timeless book Design for the Real World. “Delight, balance, and that pleasing harmony of proportions that we project outward into the world are psychological necessities for us.”

For this piece, Suss Müsik took inspiration from the contemplative “stone face ruins” of Chanticleer’s public gardens. The "ruins" are not ruins at all, but rather a hardscape of three ornamental ‘rooms’ evoking a sense of mystery. One room in particular warrants mention: from the bubbling, deep black depths of a 24-foot reflecting pool surrounded by lush succulents, polished marble faces gaze upward in repose.

Suss Müsik created a soundscape using custom devices built from the “ruins” of old computer hardware. Two contact mic-inputs are passed through a Meng Qi Wingie2, which was controlled by a handmade MIDI input. One channel was refactored as an arp sequence; the other provided a vaporous coloring agent when passed through heavy reverb. A fourth device controlled three synth voices with grain modulation playing the same arp sequence. Here’s a video of the performance: https://youtu.be/mnPiy5d9gCs

The piece is titled Papanek and was recorded live in October 2022. The image is taken from a summer 2022 trip to Chanticleer.

More on this 565th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Musical Folly (The Assignment: Make a piece of music inspired by this architectural concept) — at: https://disquiet.com/0565/

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-0565-musical-folly/

Papanek [Disquiet0565]

Krill City

När kravet står på skin
Jag vill ha mer
När kravet står på skin
Jag vill ha mer

Där allt är gjort så gör jag mer
Där allt är gjort så gör jag mer
Där allt är gjort så gör jag mer...


Chatting Foxes

All here, in reality, are works in progress and are therefore apt to change at any time. All those except XIII Sisters and RAW which, as many of you may have done, I literally gave away in return for their placement in a library. Something I won't be doing again any time soon. If you have a use for something you hear here please just ask.

 .ooO -------------------------------------- Ooo.

ChatGTP said of AI Music...
'Creative AI tools can be seen as sophisticated plagiarism software, as they do not produce genuinely original content but rather emulate and modify existing works by artists subtly enough to circumvent copyright laws'

Sometimes it takes a dispassionate, independent view to actually see the truth of it ...

 .ooO -------------------------------------- Ooo.

There are links to XiiixxiQ below. Your mileage may vary as to whether it decides to work on your system or not. It only runs on a Mac because I really don't have time to do all the necessary work to make it compatible with anything other than my 2015 MacBook Pro :-(. It is still being developed (for my own use) and improved, and I may yet get round to doing another release if I can find the time to tidy it all up.

My 33 1/3 series book about the Aphex Twin album <i>Selected Ambient Works Volume II</i> was published in 2014. The book was one of the top 5 bestselling titles for the calendar year, and in 2015 was ranked by Pitchfork as one of the "33 best" of the 100-plus books in the 33 1/3 series. It has subsequently been translated into Japanese (2019) and Spanish (2018)

Since 2012 I have moderated the Disquiet Junto group, which began on SoundCloud. More at disquiet.com/junto. 

I've written for Nature, Pitchfork, The Wire, Down Beat, Boing Boing, NewMusicBox, Red Bull Music Academy, Art Practical, the website of The Atlantic, and many other publications. 

I've exhibited sound art at galleries in Los Angeles (Crewest), Manhattan (apex art), and Dubai (DUTAC), and I had a audio-visual installation at the San Jose Museum of Art as part of its 45th anniversary.

And since 1996 I've run the website Disquiet.com about the intersection of sound, art, and technology.

The Euclidean Chromaticon | Octave Leap - disquiet0564

x i i i x x i

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