Category Archives: disquiet

disquiet #0067: odysseymachine

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Last week’s Disquiet had us perform another set of random processes to determine which Line from which Book of this translation of The Odyssey (well, technically Ulysses… this version uses the Roman names). We were then to use speech synthesis and processing to render the line we had chosen:

This is from Book 7, Line 24:

But ere he enter’d yet the pleasant town,
Minerva azure-eyed met him, in form
A blooming maid, bearing her pitcher forth.

Minerva is, of course, what the Romans called Greek Athena. Goddess of Wisdom. And here she is, shape-shifted into ‘a blooming maid’ to welcome him to this podunk town he just made landfall near, and to make sure he gets to the local boss-man in one piece so he can get a proper meal and some rest. (I didn’t read much further than that, so I can’t tell you what happens next).

I also note that Athena/Minerva is translated as ‘azure-eyed’ several times in that Book. In English, azure is ‘the color of the sky on a clear summer’s day’. Yet I’ve also read that the ancient Greeks had no specific word for ‘Blue’. A little searching tells me that they had the word glaukos, which (I hereby guess) is probably what is being translated as ‘azure’ here… but that word could also mean grey, green, yellow or even bronze.

Bronze-eyed Athena. Grey-eyed Athena.

No, ‘Azure-eyed’ does sound much better.

Disquiet Junto projects 62 & 63.

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Between dayjob demands and dealing with a seemingly non-ending stream of weekly blizzards, I’ve been lax at updating. Here’s the last two Disquiet Junto projects I participated in.

Last week, everyone built a piece using three sine waves as the building blocks:


And this past weekend, folks were asked to use a source track (Italian monks in a Gregorian chant), re-record it in a reverberant environment, and use the result as the basis of a new piece. (With neither field recording equipment nor a convenient space available, my ‘reverberant environment’ of choice turned out to be a metal canister, adorned with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and the rest, that had once held caramel corn):




Process details for each piece are given on the Soundcloud site.

disquiet: i, io.

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I had started last week’s disquiet project, but then nature intervened with three feet of snow.

That said, this week’s project had us using our own voices for raw material. This worried me (singing is not exactly my forté), plus I intentionally forced myself to use Audiomulch, which I barely know, as part of the exercise. But here it is:

I’m going to continue working with Audiomulch, for awhile. I haven’t been able to configure it to use MIDI events (like a key press) to trigger/start/stop clips as easily as I can in Ableton Live, but I expect this problem to be solvable. Others have solved it already.

Meanwhile, I listened to Tubular Bells for the first time today, on the drive into work. The album’s almost as old as I am, and I had bought this CD set back in 2002, but there it sat in a box all this time.

No impressions yet (when you look at something 40 years past, ‘impressions’ degenerate into ‘historicism’ so I doubt I’ll even bother to go there). But I do note the whimsy. All that English Musical Whimsy, even back then.

let me tell you… (phonemetransmit)

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Disquiet #0057 had us working with voice samples from three languages. Pick four words from each, and do something with the twelve.

The full set is posted here.

In other news: Laurie Anderson interviews Brian Eno in this article. And some Boston organization I’ve never heard of before is asking for funding to have another concert season.

I also found this beast in my attic closet: realistic_mixer
Someone moved and gave us some old stuff several years ago, I had just put it somewhere out of the way and forgotten about it. Price tag of $69.95 still on the box, probably from the late 1980s. It’s basically a standard two-turntables-and-a-microphone mixer, without the crossfader. Or EQ.

I’m wondering if the phono preamps in it are any good…

woodpecker summons time (disquiet0056-matteroftime)

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This was last week’s Disquiet, I wanted to post it here before I forgot (busy week):


Process details are over there, no need to repeat them here. Used a simple drawing tablet as a ‘controller’ (ie pen) for Live. The pen doesn’t work well at all for adjusting volume/effect/etc controls, but those are already mapped to the nano-kontroller. The tablet did seem a more fluid way to launch and stop clips. Especially when compared to the MPC nanopads I’ve been using to trigger clips. The pen was also, if not optimal, much better than the trackpad or the mouse in editing and manipulating the audio waveforms in Live’s clip editor.

Not really eager to spend gobs of money on better MIDI controllers, so I’ll keep using the pen and tablet for awhile and see how that works.

That’s it for now.

update (release notes, basically)

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Haven’t had much time to write on here. I had to skip last week’s Junto, but managed this week’s (even with Arisia over the weekend).

This week’s exercise (disquiet0055-twoscrews) had us rework two pieces (Do and Re) from Nils Frahm’s Screws:

Done with Ableton Live (yes, still stuck back in 5.2.2) and Audacity. Project details over at disquiet, or via the above SoundCloud widget. No need to repeat them here.

In other news, decided that I want (need?) to take a break from working with the old 2002 material, and decided to just hurry up and finish the almost-done EP-thing from 2007 (enoch is the title, I’ve decided). The first track is called, appropriately enough, enoch:

The stem of this piece was made in Ableton Live in early 2007. Some of the sounds date back to 2003. Remixed, remastered a little with my current setup. This is actually the last serious drone piece I did… because every other drone piece I’ve tried to make since has sounded just like it. (I’ve started to refer to this as my Drone Wall, because I need to break beyond it eventually).

The second piece, march, is from the same session but completely different:

At least one of the sounds in this (the core guitar sample, my own) dates back to the late 1980s (though it doesn’t sound much like itself here). It’s probably a Peavey.

I still have the Live Sets for these two pieces, intact. I could even play them again (roughly), if I ever had to. There are two more for this collection/EP, and that batch will be done.

Medium-term, my goal is still to get the 2002 and 2007 stuff finalized and posted to SoundCloud and bandcamp (as ‘name your own price’ albums). With the already-posted outside, that will place anything made post-2000 online.

As it should have been, all along.

the boatman’s dream (at year’s end).

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My second attempt at a Disquiet Junto project. I had to sit out last week’s junto as that called for a ‘musical diary’ using work from throughout the year, and I’ve only been doing this again since June. Embarrassing, that. Fortunately, there’s no pressure, so I’ll just do it as I can. So, for this week:

Project parameters are here. We were asked to take samples from three specific songs published under the Bump Foot netlabel (link saved for later reference). I won’t go into process details here, it’s all over at the SoundCloud site. It was good to jump into Ableton again. I hadn’t really touched it since 2007 (I’m still using v5.2).

In other news, I’ve been playing around with Pure Data in the background for a few weeks now. I’ve looked into the Max/AudioMulch/Pd way of doing things for over a year, and decided to just go with the free option for now. I’m currently struggling with how to best draw mathematical expressions in Pd, it’s not (yet) intuitive to me how Pd does it. There’s an ‘expression’ object, but its use is discouraged for most cases for reasons I don’t yet understand. So you end up drawing ‘math tree networks’ with individual operators to get the result you want.

But it’s been fun to play with oscillators and such again. Meanwhile, through a comedy of Christmas errors, we ended up with an ‘extra’ USB drawing tablet in the house. Before sending it back, I decided to hook it up to my machine, and quickly found that it was perfect for use with Pd. So I’m keeping it.

New year in a little under 10 hours. Good luck to us all.

never again (disquiet junto)

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I’d been lurking (and listening) to the Disquiet Junto group over at SoundCloud for a few weeks, and finally grew the stones to post something:

This week’s assignment had us generating a core rhythm using an arbitrary phrase, put into Morse code, and then building on that. The bar’s pretty high over there, but I think I did… at least ok.

The entire project for the week is here.