My husband plays the trumpet

Disquiet Junto 0452 Let’s Scream

The Junto this asks we work with a scream and, since I didn't feel like screaming, I found a famous scream to include.

It's the "Mendoza!" yelled by McBain in The Simpsons, used in Iris2 as a synth patch.

When you're closing apps

 

naviarhaiku346 – pause pause pause

After noticing a similarity in the projects this week, I've reworked my Disquiet Junto track for the haiku shared by Naviar Records.

It uses alternate takes and layers up the guitar parts, running all the MIDI parts through an icy pad and keeping four guitar lines.

Noise musicians / sandwich enthusiasts / kinksters

 

Disquiet Junto 0451 Ursula’s Silences


The Disquiet Junto this week asks how this line by Ursula K. Le Guin might be applied to a musical composition: “For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.”

I've incorporated silences into the track through including pauses before different sections.

To do this I built up the scaffold of the song by playing the drums along to this song I've been enjoying recently.

Then I settled on a handful of notes on the bass, which led me to decided they were part of a Phrygian mode.

Today I added a guitar part to fill out the song and attempted a melody.

Disquiet Junto 0450 Texture Analysis

The Disquiet Junto activity this week involves "field recordings made at Carlo Bernasconi AG, a company that has been working in stone for over a century. The sounds range from machines to manual tools to spatial ambience."

These recordings were made by Tobias Reber and the project is a "collaboration with the 2020 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 2 through 6 under the motto 'Tektonik'" -- which I used for a track title.

Participants are invited to "listen for aspects of the recordings that attract your ears" and  "create a piece of music combining elements from as few or as many as you chose".

My ears gravitate toward transients, and the tool sounds in particular were useful for creating percussion.

Most of the sounds I've used at their original pitch, but I did transpose one down for the kick sound by an octave and a half.

I looped a few sounds and added Ableton Live's Beatrepeat effect to a couple.

One of the sounds of distant machinery was also looped and I added a sidechained compressor linked to the kick, so it would be heard near the end of each bar.

To the percussive loops I've added some sounds of machinery, particularly where the pitch shifts, which gives a further sense movement in places.

Then I've added more of the tool recordings, as well as machinery.

The latter has been gated using Beatrepeat and I added a little distortion and delay to make that more dynamic.

Finally, I created busses for reverb and stereo-panning, as well as some more saturation.

The video shows copper smelting and comes from the Prelinger archive.

I searched for "mining" and thought this section looked like it might relate to the sounds heard.

This is my 233rd video response to a Disquiet Junto prompt and the full playlist can be found here.

Music I play for friends

 

Disquiet Junto 0449 Page Machine



The Disquiet Junto assignment this week is to "Read a page of text from a book as if it were a musical score."

I settled on page 18 from the introduction to Matsuo Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

The layout of the page appealed to me, as it looked like it might be a drum intro and it was 8 August -- so I thought I should use 808 samples.

My process was to tally the syllables, since the text was largely haiku, as well as capital letters and punctuation.

The syllables became high-hats, while the capitals denoted kick drum and the punctuation triggered sound effects from the M-Tron Pro VST.

Then I decided to add a riser to convey the interpretive text, as it kinda serves to raise the rest of the writing.

And, finally, I flicked back to the contents page and took that last entry's page number to be the tempo.