I made a shaker from a pill bottle and some mung beans. I started off trying to make something percussive, but that didn’t go very far. I discovered that the shaker made some great textures when rolled around a stereo mic and fed through a non-linear reverb, then drowned the whole thing out with drones from my Elmyra.

More on this 577th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Make That Money Shaker (The Assignment: Make a simple instrument and put it to use), at: https://disquiet.com/0577/

A composition for Disquiet Junto Project 0518: Out and In (Co/Exist 3 of 3)

The Assignment: Combine sounds of nature and civilization.

I was inspired by Diana Deutsch's speech-to-song illusion and by the idea that we tend to hear rhythms in any repeated sound. I wanted to try to bring out rhythms and melodies that are already lurking, so I set myself a few additional constraints:

- no effects except low/high cut

- no other sounds

- no pitch shift or time stretching

- the whole piece should be around 3 minutes

I made this on an MPC One. I build a percussion loop out of Benn DeMole's train recording, chopped a little for a fill every four bars, and built up multiple layers on top of that. Then I pulled it out to three and a bit minutes in length, brought voices in and out, and tweaked it a bit.

Some sounds are single hits, but most are a bit longer so that they have some kind of inherent rhythm in them.

It came out sounding a bit like a carnival rhythm, so I named it "Carnival of found sounds".

More on this 518th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Inside Out (Co/Exist 3 of 3) (The Assignment: Combine sounds of nature and civilization) — at: https://disquiet.com/0518/

Credits:

https://soundcloud.com/gerard-paresys/train1

https://soundcloud.com/benn-demole/train-inside-benn-demole-disquiet0517

https://soundcloud.com/lazenbeeindustries/civilisation-disquiet0517aiff

https://soundcloud.com/caustic_gates/disquiet0516-sunrise-22-november

https://soundcloud.com/howthenightcame/disquiet0516-outside-in-1

https://soundcloud.com/infdb/river-stream-disquiet0516

https://soundcloud.com/33per/disquiet516

https://soundcloud.com/wasabicube/denatured-disquiet0516

https://soundcloud.com/morgulbee/chatters-and-honks-disquiet0516

Artwork generated by wombo.art with the title as a prompt

This is part of a field recording I made a few weeks ago. I passed a couple getting out of a taxi and wheeling their suitcases along the street. The wheel itself feels symbolic of civilisation, but so do the things the wheeled suitcase represents.

More on this 517th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Inside Out (Co/Exist 2 of 3) (The Assignment: Record a minute or two of civilization) — at: https://disquiet.com/0517/

Artwork cropped from https://www.flickr.com/photos/sloalan/10271752763/

Waves crashing onto the Thames foreshore in Rotherhithe

More on this 516th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Outside In (Co/Exist 1 of 3) (The Assignment: Record a minute or two of nature) — at: https://disquiet.com/0516/

My submission for Disquiet Junto 0515: Write music for a psychotherapist’s waiting room.

In my imagination, there is some pleasant music playing – we hear snatches of processed kalimba – but my own thoughts, played here by unquantised and fractured euclidean ostinatos, intrude. In the distance we hear a voice, from the only known recording of Sigmund Freud.

More on this 515th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Talking Cure (The Assignment: Write music for a psychotherapist’s waiting room) — at: https://disquiet.com/0515/

Cover image from https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/367312

Written for Disquiet Junto 0514

This piece travels from Am9 to Dm9 through the 35 possible different 4-note chords that can be formed from the notes in both (i.e. the C major scale spread over two octaves), changing only one note each time. After trying various mathematical ways to generate a sequence that met these constraints, I ended up resorting to a brute force algorithm picking pairs at random.

I used SonicPi to play the sequence using the 4-voice Minilogue xd. The music is accompanied by sounds from a field recording I made along the Thames Path in Rotherhithe a few weeks ago.

The code used to generate this is here: https://gist.github.com/threedaymonk/de5896d76dd456fef47f3ab91a13e8e5

More on this 514th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Chord Channels (The Assignment: Take two chords and connect them over time) — at: https://disquiet.com/0514/