Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 461

Disquiet Junto Project 0068: deriv.deriv.cc

Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate.

This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, April 18, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, April 22, 2013, as the deadline.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0068: deriv.deriv.cc

This is a shared-sample project. Create a single new piece of music by employing the selected material (see below) of each the following three tracks. All three were initially released on the new netlabel deriv.cc, and were posted to the Internet with a Creative Commons license encouraging derivative reworking. In fact, the impetus for the label, which was founded by C. Reider, was to draw attention to the intrinsic benefits of allowing for derivative works. Like deriv.cc, this project — one in an ongoing series of netlabel remixes undertaken by the Disquiet Junto — is intended to address the unfortunate popularity of “ND” (i.e., “no derivatives”) licenses among netlabels. Please only use the following material in your piece; you can transform in any way you choose, but do not introduce any new source material.

1: The final 20 seconds of “The Find Beauty, Even in the Mundane”:

http://deriv.cc/stream/d1/02.ogg

2: The first 20 seconds of “Immaterial Girl”:

http://deriv.cc/stream/d1/04.ogg

3: The portion of “Libertarian Entertainment Automaton” that runs from 1:10 to 1:30:

http://deriv.cc/stream/d1/06.ogg

Deadline: Monday, April 22, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your track should have a duration of between two minutes and five minutes.

Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto.

Title/Tag: Include the term “disquiet0068-deriv” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: Per the spirit of a Creative Commons license allowing derivative work, set your track in a manner that allows for attributed, commerce-free remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:

More on this 68th Disquiet Junto project, the intent of which is to draw attention to the benefits of a Creative Commons license allowing for derivative works, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/04/18/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

This track is composed from material extracted from three pre-existing tracks (“The Find Beauty, Even in the Mundane,” “Immaterial Girl,” “Libertarian Entertainment Automaton”) by C. Reider, all of which were released on the album The Conjuncts on the deriv.cc netlabel, and were themselves derived from the following: “Garden City” and “Ventilation” from Tulse Hill by Hannah Marshall; “LichenWall” from Gardening by Steve Moyes; “Eighteen Events” from Not One Nor by Daniel Barbiero; “Awkward Customer” from [m2012/30-09] by Restive; “cues two three” and “cue six” from Cue Sheet by Sighup; “Sending Dreams to She Downstream” from Pocket Suite by He Can Jog; “The Palsgraf Scale” from Weights and Measures by Gurdonark; “Bonus Track” from Pale by Leo Bettinelli and Pol Nieva; “Haunted Grace” from Haunted Grace on SoundCloud by Jess Lemont a.k.a. Be A Waterwolf; “Ochiita” from Gently Annoying by Xesús Valle; and “Once More With Intellect” from [m2012/30-09] by Restive.

Organ Drones in Cornwall

The dense, wavering drone that Robert Curgenven committed to tape when performing live in Cornwall at the Exchange back in August 2011 has been made available for free download by the great touchradio.org.uk podcast series. The drone consumes the listening space, but it is not the entire space. There are fragile elements within it, the static of what could be a crackling fire, high notes like a soloist from a robot boy’s choir practicing circular breathing, clusters of organ chords. Those latter elements are the highlight. Curgenven describes the material as “Unprocessed recordings of a 16 foot pipe organ – built 1861, standing in a 13/14th Century rural church in West Penwith, Cornwall.” Among the additional elements are “guitar feedback, unprocessed field recordings, ventilator and microtonal dubplates & turntables.” And the overall density is owed to room tones from “contained and reverberant spaces in the cities of Berlin (2007), Tokyo (2006), Sydney (1999), Milan (2008), Hamburg (2009) and Osaka (2006).” The original performance was an eight-channel set-up at the Exchange, which is in Penzance, Cornwall, as part of an exhibit titled An Urban Silence, which was organized by Blair Todd. This recording (MP3) was made by Martin Clarke, and then mixed and mastered by Curgenven.

Download audio file (Radio93.mp3)

Track originally posted for free download at touchradio.org.uk. More from Curgenven at his website, recordedfields.net.

Rhythmic Dissonance

Justin Buckley’s “Pong” and “0101” provide another pair of examples of how one musician’s experiments are a listener’s benefit. Both tracks are early tryouts by Buckley of, among other tools, the Cylonix Cyclebox, a “digital oscillator.” But the real experiment isn’t with technology so much as with aesthetic approach. Buckley is working toward something he calls “rhythmic dissonance,” which has an effect along the lines of the phase shifting we associate with Steve Reich’s work. Buckley defines this as follows: “can sounds which aren’t necessarily in sync actually work together in a composition.”

Tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/justin-buckley. More from Buckley, who is based in Berlin, Germany, at crumblereshape.com and twitter.com/crumblereshape.

Dishwasher Meets App (MP3)

Mike 88 has taken one of the most ubiquitous examples of domestic generative music, the sodden rumble of a dishwasher, and turned it into something intentionally musical. His light reworking emphasizes the originating material’s jerky, cyclopean rhythms while filtering the sample through the wonders of the music app at yello.com.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/mike-88. Mike 88 is Mike Dayton of Minneapolis, Minnesota, more from whom at twitter.com/dayton_mike.

Gentle Swells (MP3)

Al Hill’s “Prisms” is, if not glacial, then at least what is often referred to as molasses-like in its pacing. Gentle swells of synthesized sound rise up, hold for a piece, and then settle back, leaving discernible gaps — not silences, but deep lulls, when everything is reduced to a baseline tone. It is the hum of general electrical activity. And it is out of that foundational hum that everything else appears, so that even as the various components change from one to the next, they all sound rooted in a singular originating sonic petri dish. So warm is that underlying tone, that you might miss the deliberate nudging of percussive patter, which arrives late in the form of steady, rhythmic glitches.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/sundog70. Hill is based in Brighton, Britain.

Cues: Oliveros Listens, MoMA Limelight, Arup Acoustics

◼ Bill Forman interviews deep-listening legend Pauline Oliveros at csindy.com:

Q: I’m wondering what advice you might have for people who think of more experimental music as, you know, quote-unquote difficult. What sorts of things should they be listening for, in order to better appreciate it?

A: Well, I think the best thing to do would be to get something that disturbs them, and play it over and over again, until they’re no longer disturbed.

Q: You’re not gonna get many people to do that.

A: Well, you know, it’s up to them. But the experience is worth it. Because you find out quick that the more familiar something becomes, the more interested you are.

◼ New York’s MoMa is doing a big sound art show later this year. “Soundings: A Contemporary Score” will run from August 10 through November 3, per nytimes.com. The show’s curator, Barbara London, made a comment in the New York Times piece — “Sound has come into the limelight” — that is either synaesthetically coy or, more likely, a prime example of how sound continues to labor in the, shall we say, shadow of the visual.

◼ The following conversation appears in a flashback between the title character in the CBS TV series The Good Wife (Julianna Margulies‘ Alicia Florrick) and her deceased client, Matthew Ashbaugh, played by John Noble, who played Walter Bishop on Fringe. Like Bishop, Noble’s Good Wife character has an emotional and obsessive association with recorded sound. He carries with him little speakers that play back the same Bach piece over and over:

Florrick: “You travel with your own soundtrack?”

Noble: “Yes. Don’t you?”

The episode was titled “Death of a Client” and first aired March 24, 2013.

◼ The global engineering consultancy Arup has launched arupconnect.com, a website-as-magazine about its endeavors. Arup has a large acoustic practice, with a particular emphasis on performance spaces. In a post from late last year, Anne Guthrie, who works in the New York office, explores the idea of “acoustics for musicians,” which is predicated on the observation that much work by acousticians focused on the needs of the audience, at the expense of the needs of the performer: “Today, acoustic technology is faster and more complex, allowing us to recreate the entire experience of playing in multiple halls in a single room. In Arup’s SoundLab, several acousticians — including Iain Laird in Scotland and Terence Caulkins, Kathleen Stetson, and me in New York — have been working to develop a system where musicians can come into the lab and play in any hall or room in real time.”

◼ Amon Tobin has posted an example of the nearly hour-long audio that the recent shows on his ISAM tour have been playing before the curtain rises. It’s streaming-only, over at soundcloud.com/amon-tobin. Found via amontobin.com/news. In a note, Tobin explains that Jamie Harley (“long time friend and collaborator in sound”) has been mixing this music live:

◼ C. Reider has launched a new netlabel, focused on supporting work that employs a Creative Commons license allowing for derivative works. Great URL, too: deriv.cc.

◼ Over at newyorker.com, Ian Crouch explores the “dunnhhh” sound that is in so many movie trailers these days. Correspondence on Twitter between critic Geeta Dayal and Echo Nest’s Brian Whitman rightly questioned some of Crouch’s language, in particular the phrase “accursed bass drone.” One thing Crouch doesn’t mention is how sound in the Prometheus trailer linked the film back to the original trailer for Alien.

◼ The One Hello World project by Jared Brickman, whose hour-long ambient piano work served as the basis for the 65th Disquiet Junto project, has been awarded a 2013 Webby for “net art.” This is the One Hello World project’s summary: “Leave me a voicemail and I’ll write music behind your narrative. Call it a soundtrack to your thoughts.”

◼ The great io9.com website has posted crazy images from the Japanese album of the Lost in Space soundtrack and, separately, asks, “Why do so many electric things hum?”

◼ Also via i09.com, this is (streaming-only, no download) an “auditory representation of the Big Bang” by physicist John Cramer, who “produced the audio by mapping sound frequencies to the changes detected over time in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation”:

◼ SoundCloud had a pretty funny April Fools joke in the form of “the dropometer” (blog.soundcloud.com):

◼ If you use SoundCloud and have an about.me page, they now play together well. Unfortunately, for the time being, if you also have a blog whose feed you want to include, as I do at about.me/marc.weidenbaum, then you have to choose between that and a SoundCloud embed.

◼ And this is pretty nifty. The official help page on soundcloud.com about the Groups functionality uses the Disquiet Junto as a visual. (Thanks to Guy Birkin for letting me know.)

A Half-Day MP3

The Rain netlabel gets true to its name with The Sixth Dreaming, a virtual torrent, file-sharing jokes aside, of audio from the prolific figure Aairria. Working with field recordings of waves — that is waves as in water, not waves as in sonic waveforms — produced by freesound.org contributor digifishmusic, Aairria has produced an enormous track that lasts almost half a day. The MP3 weighs in at 1.5 gigabytes, and the piece, titled “Frolic in brine, goblins be thing,” is just shy of 11 and a half hours long (it is 11:18:25). A sample on the releasing netlabel’s website, rainnetlabel.blogspot.com, includes lush water sounds, though the first chunk of the proper MP3, over at archive.org, is all space-station HVAC drones, at least for the opening half hour. Slowly, water makes itself hear, like it is beginning to seep in and puddle on the craft’s floor. And as if the music were not ominous enough, the title comes from the Ring horror films.

Download audio file (Aairria-The_Sixth_Dreaming_-_01-Frolic_in_brine_goblins_be_thine.mp3)

More from Aairria, who is based in Warsaw, Poland, at aairriamusic.blogspot.com, aairria.bandcamp.com, and about.me/aairria.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

Birthday party for three-year-old? Slide whistles! http://t.co/8qHTDT2nvV ->



Got my ticket to see @robert_henke and company Sunday night in San Francisco: https://t.co/79VCS7y1TF ->



Six years after moving my site to WordPress I realize there is a dashboard plugin to display a list of scheduled posts. ->



50+ @djunto acts broke a 1-hour @JaredBrickman track into parts & added their own music. Then he pieced it together: https://t.co/lnkO4JT0Nq ->



So glad you could make it. MT @ambienteer: My contribution to this week's poignant @djunto project with @nofi: https://t.co/dyolJ29o1L. ->



Thanks to @kenmistove for coding the browser-based tool that sorted out which @djunto musician would do which @JaredBrickman segment. ->



Name a dog: "To help the puppy distinguish its name from ambient noise, choose something with a sibilant consonant": http://t.co/7T9zDOzHMk ->



I always play the "Who's the most dangerous person in the café?" game in my head. Today: giddy guy in red CERN T-shirt working on a netbook. ->



The week's @djunto honoring @nofi is wonderful, but I can't stop thinking it won't be last time we do such a thing: https://t.co/eK4AFScM6I ->



At @Robert_Henke show in San Francisco. Mistook bartender's martini shaking to be part of opening act's set. ->



Lebbeus Woods' Alien fan art (1988, at SFMOMA). http://t.co/NABwvPVfQy ->



Watched new Mad Men. Nice image of Draper’s aural memory of Hawaii surf, not to mention the Koss client, not to mention transition between. ->



Spent 20 minutes yesterday at The Clock (4:25-45). Will return, and maybe pitch in on this wiki: http://t.co/RnvqnQPZko ->



Pretty sure the Tuesday noon siren set off the birds in my yard. ->



That's what I call echo. RT @janeshin: @disquiet We tried to play your recording in the office at the same time. We'll try again next week. ->



“You are now a developer!" ->



What’s the obverse of retro-futurism? “this puts the Met at the forefront of early-20th-century art”: http://t.co/amuj5HN9jr ->



I am loving Android 4.2.2. That said, it’s weird that the “Sound on keypress” option is (only) under Keyboard settings, not Sound settings. ->



Steve Reich covers Radiohead, Alva Noto tours with Depeche Mode, SFMOMA celebrates Christian Marclay. I like this millennium. ->



Today in sound class: what sound looks like. ->



Anyone using iAnnotate PDF on an Android tablet (4.2.2) having trouble with it failing to save highlighted text? Thanks. ->



And soon enough: Keep Calm and Keep Calm and Stop Using the Keep Calm Meme RT @JaredBrickman: Keep Calm and Stop Using the Keep Calm Meme. ->



This week's @djunto project will employ the human voice, and poetry, and text-to-speech. (Attn: @alln4tural) ->



The space where text-to-speech and epic poetry overlap: http://t.co/KO5RCjsTVP https://t.co/dyolJ29o1L. This is @djunto 67. ->



At water-themed group show at gallery at Sonoma State's library, audio of two different videos (water drops, Orbison's "Crying") overlapped. ->



For National Poetry Month the @djunto is scoring brief fragments of Homer's Odyssey using text-to-speech: https://t.co/zTjAv4L9Yg. ->



Morning sounds: bus breaks, bird song, students walking to school, refrigerator, typing, ice squeaking as it thaws in glass of black coffee. ->



RIP, Don Blackman (b. 1953), played with Parliament, Ayers; widely sampled (Jay Z, Jazzy Jeff, Madlib): http://t.co/CXd7GP0MH6 ->



RIP, Tim Carr (57), “guy who’s stealing the Beasties from us,” as described by Lyor Cohen in Dan LeRoy’s 33 1/3 book: http://t.co/KGGWUwdYVq ->



#eavesdrop MT @qDot: Looks like the Hearing Voices Auditory Hallucinations conference tomorrow will be streamed: http://t.co/kcrwe1huZO ->



Thanks for this! MT @SoundCloud: Compose music for Homer's Odyssey for National Poetry Month, a @djunto project: http://t.co/IGSR7GRJkR ->



Anechoic-chamber porn from @io9: http://t.co/itHeD18KG5 ->

Disquiet Junto Project 0067: Odyssey Machine

Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate.

This assignment was made in the mid-afternoon, California time, on Thursday, April 11, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, April 15, 2013, as the deadline.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0067: Odyssey Machine

This week’s project is an adaptation of the ongoing National Poetry Month project at SoundCloud. The Junto will, collectively, produce new fragments of The Odyssey of Homer. A die and access to text-to-speech software are required. There are seven steps.

These are the steps:

Step 1: Roll a die twice (or two dice once) and add the results. This number will tell you which of the first dozen books of The Odyssey by Homer you will be working from.

Step 2: Roll a die three times (or three dice once) and multiply the results (i.e., if you get a 3, a 5, and a 6, then 3 x 5 x 6 = 90). This will tell you which line of the book from Homer’s Odyssey you will be working with.

Step 3: Locate that line in the version of The Odyssey at this URL:

http://archive.org/stream/theodysseyo...

Step 4: Select the phrase that begins at your assigned line and ends with the next full stop (that is, with the next period) in the text.

Step 5: Record the selected text as audio using an automated text-to-speech tool. You can alter this text in any way you choose, but make certain that it remains inteligble.

Step 6: Record a new piece of background music for the spoken text. The sole source material for this background music should be the audio that resulted from step 5. You can transform the source audio in any way you choose. You can add up to three full seconds at the beginning and end of the spoken audio to allow for the music to build up and to fade out.

Step 7: This is the final step. Combine the audio from steps 5 and step 6 into one track, adjusting the relative volume levels as necessary.

Deadline: Monday, April 15, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work will be the length of or a few seconds longer than the track that resulted from step 5 above.

Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto.

Title/Tag: The title of your track should be formatted as “National Poetry Month: [Your Name] (disquiet0067-odysseymachine)” — with, needless to say, your name in place of Your Name. Dispense with the brackets, too. Also, please additionally tag your track with the “oneliner” tag, which is part of National Poetry Month project.

Download: Please consider setting your track in a manner that allows for attributed, commerce-free remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Also: Please consider doing this as well: Join the group at https://soundcloud.com/groups/nationa... and share the track there.

Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:

More on this 67th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/04/11/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

This project was inspired by the National Poetry Month event at SoundCloud, more details on which here:

https://soundcloud.com/groups/nationa...

The source text for this project is William Cowper’s translation of The Odyssey of Homer, available here:

http://archive.org/stream/theodysseyo...

Image of Homer up top from wikipedia.org.

“Ambient Hip-Hop” …

The SoundCloud interfaces provides tracks with the opportunity to be associated with an array of tags, to be situated amid a veritable cloud of tags, but one tag is always selected for its primacy. “Warm Fog” by Patrick Ellis gets “ambient hip-hop” as its main flag to fly, and the enticing semi-neologism provides appropriate sonic triangulation for what Ellis is up to. The music in “Warm Fog” is background material, and not in the pejorative sense. It’s piano, lulling and looped, alongside a trap-set beat. A deep tone and a substantial amount of vinyl surface noise rise to bridge the gap between the elements, to render them whole. At less than a minute and a half of running time, “Warm Fog” demands to be played on repeat, and at least one commenter has asked where the loop button is.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/patrick. Ellis is based in Seattle, Washington.