Disquiet Junto Project 0330: Wax Off

[sevenism]

did a track with a prescient title yesterday so made sense to use it (cello samples in protoplasm)
i wanted to avoid erasing amplitude as that’s what i did in last week’s junto. was thinking about fx that take away but inadvertently replace artefacts.

in the past audacity noise reduction has been good for this. i laboriously applied noise reduction about 60 times so that it accumulated throughout the track, then played it back and there’d been no noticeable effect (thru speakers)

so i saved as a 8kbps mp3 which erased a lot of detail and hi freq. had this faded in as another layer so it both adds to and subtracts at the same time

[Hypoid]

Obviate(Revisited)[disquiet0330]
After reading the prompt, it seemed appropriate to rework last weeks piece and its theme of removal. The rhythm in particular seemed an interesting place to start. Having recently watched ‘Against the Clock’(the YouTube channel by Fact), the limitation of making a song in 10 minutes seemed intriguing and beyond my meager skills…so…what the hell!

I started by removing all but the rhythmic elements, a quarter bar for the kick and a eighth bar for the rim. I continued the same chopping throughout the entire song leaving traces of the melodic(?) bits when the kit disappeared. This was run through BramBos Kosmonaut in Cubasis for some multi-tape delay interest. The mixed down result was doubled in speed to 122bpm. This was duplicated on four tracks. The first is dry with no effects, the second is eq’d and panned hard left, the third is reversed, eq’d differently and panned hard right and the fourth is eq’d, has a linear 11 bit reduction and is panned 10 o’clock left. The reversed track is offset just a touch and gives some interesting rhythmic response, especially at the break. While the piece is short and not exactly song like, it has a fun movement and almost made the 10 minute challenge. +/- 5 minutes wasn’t too bad, I thought, and a small nod to the original spirit of the Junto, more of a sketch then a ‘masterpiece’.

[headlessacrobat]

This one worked out perfectly for me after last week!

I went back to last week’s track (the very noisy Box Fan and Guitar) and decided to see what I could get out of it (via erasure) using Adobe Audition’s noise reduction tools. Adaptive Noise Reduction removed most of the amp hum that was present in the original recording. I then used the Noise Reduction process to further clear out hums, buzzes, and extreme high end from the recorded signal. At that point I started to hear some interesting harmonics and movement between about 500 Hz and 2k Hz. To stick with the theme of erasure, I used a multiband compressor to push everything below about 470 Hz down in relation to everything above (no makeup gain, threshold around -40, gain reduction of 12-15 db). Once I hit a nice sweet spot, I normalized the entire track back up to listenable levels.

EDIT: As I continue to listen, the little “twangs” that survived the noise reduction are very, very interesting to me. They’re in the original track as well (sounding more like clicks). I’m not sure if the source is the guitar or amp, but they did come through the mic. I don’t know exactly what created them - I didn’t touch the guitar at all during the recording process, the box fan was the only source of resonance. Whatever the case, they ended up being much more interesting the second time around.

[fjna]

Hi all,

I took my Junto0325, the forgery of an old jazz song… In Audacity did noise reduction a couple of times and this is the result… I kept the song-length the same, but in the original song, the end of the song kinda fades out. Meaning that in the end of this song, there is 56 seconds of nothing at all. Might be handy for another Junto.

Take care,

Frank

https://soundcloud.com/user-242143924/wax-off-cylindersdisquiet0330

[timbamber]

Finally got around to submitting my first disquiet junto project been a while coming and glad I found the time for this one - great suggestion. Took an old field recording (https://soundcloud.com/timbamber/night-trio-for-electrical) and basically threw everything at it! Randomly deleted some elements detected by Melodyne using percussive and polyphonic algorithms, then lots of de-humming, de-crackle/clicking (also subtracting everything but clicks), de-noising, extracting harmonics, etc in RX and Audition, then divided it into freq bands and did lots of rhythmic amplitude deletion with LFOs (tremolo, essentially) in Iris2 and then a bit more cutting and deleting with the lasso in Audition. It is what it is!

[SussMusik]

Suss Müsik began with a piece created for Disquiet Junto Project 0264. The brief that week was time travel, which makes perfect sense for thematically exploring the idea of erasure. If Suss Müsik were to go back in time, after all, the first thing we’d do is eliminate all the stupid mistakes we made over the years.

“I think of sound architecturally,” said composer Maggi Payne in Tara Rodgers’ excellent book Pink Noises. “I’m sculpting the space so that it becomes a tiny point source, a huge trapezoid, stretched diagonally, coming from the ceiling in the hall, coming from the top of your head … it’s always clear that the apparent space is being morphed in some way.”

There is nothing more apparent to a space than having something removed from it. What is left behind but the spatialization of our memories? That’s the approach Suss Müsik took with this week’s Junto.

For this piece, Suss Müsik recorded the finished track from 0264 directly to 8-track, randomly cutting the volume at various points. What you hear in the background are fragments of the original recording session: a bit of reverb electric guitar here, some homemade metallic percussion there.

The piece is titled Tram, a root of the original title Trammel named after a word to describe something that restricts one’s freedom of action.

[Ethan_Hein]

https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/rez-meditation-in-a-cold-sweat-disquiet0330

A subtractive remix of “Rez Meditation” (https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/rez-meditation-disquiet0323). I planned to remove frequencies from the track using some kind of automated EQ or filter. Then I thought, what better automated filter is there than a vocoder? So I used my source track as the carrier, and loops of “Cold Sweat” by James Brown as the modulator. (This required me to transpose “Rez Meditation” down a fourth to be in the same key as “Cold Sweat.”) I used a Max For Live LFO to slowly sweep the Depth parameter of the vocoder back and forth, and voila.

[George_Smyth]

https://soundcloud.com/glsmyth/looking-for-planes-disquiet0330

A little over a year ago I offered Looking For Planes – Looking, the first of a three part piece for two pianos that dealt with my granddaughter looking for airplanes flying overhead. I completed the other two parts and make them available.

The original three part piece, Looking For Planes, was written for two pianos. I had started working on a single piano arrangement but set it aside because of the difficulty. When confronted with this week’s junto project I decided to get back to work and complete the erasure of one of the pianos in the original version.

This version of Looking For Planes was written for piano.

The score is available at http://bit.ly/2HS24rQ

[Autogeneric]

There’s a joke here somewhere about a Vince Clarke remix but I don’t have the time for that nonsense.

I grabbed an earlier piece of music from my archive, 2011 I believe, and judiciously removed various frequencies using the 4MS Spectral Band Resonator, whilst using various eurorack modules to modulate the frequencies left behind and their volume.

[ninjadru]

Found an old piano based sketch. I eased the sounds by eqing out the body of the sounds. Made a few loops, loaded those into my modular. Did two takes into ableton live mixing the loops with some effects. Made a few minor edits.

[disquiet]

The playlist is now rolling:

[Don_Stanley]

Started from C9vTSM(disquiet0264)

User-696185036 – C9vtsmdisquiet0264

Thought of “erasure” in two or three different ways.

1. Take the original piece considered as a piece of raw rock, and sculpt it down.

2. Erase over original piece by smudging stuff. Like what happens when erasing a blackboard, parts of what you erase get carried by the eraser to other parts.

To implement this we sent the track to 4 Abelton send tracks, with varying volume (so that it is like sculpting). EQ8 which is some kind of direct erasing of sound, resonator which kind of smudges the harmonics of the sound, and beat repeat and simple delay which kind of pastes over (like maybe white out) sound that occurs later with sound that occurs earlier.

We applied that process once and the took the output sound file, and put it through the system of send tracks again (with the same automation) to get the final track.

[Yasha]

The preexisting track that I used was my submission for the April 2018 Contest at KVRAudio: https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=7064683#p7064683 (I don’t believe I’m going to win.)

I decided to erase different multiple sections of the frequency spectrum over time by using the Image Filter room in Metasynth 5. Wow, you can get lots of fun timbres by filtering piano and drum samples!

[CarlMikaelBjork]

Starting from my #sixtysecondsong “AI”, I used phase inversion, filtering, bit and sample rate reduction to erase various parts of the original track.

For the final mix I’ve combined the three of these erasure processes to remove stuff from the original recording. I’ve both played and drawn automation in Ableton Live. The results are musical, emotional build ups as well as rhythmical changes to the timbre.

[Will post a vlog/tutorial on the process no later than Wednesday May2nd. youtube.com/carlmikaelscabinetofcuriosities]

Vlog is up: https://youtu.be/1ILXfAj9AQU

Original track: https://soundcloud.com/carlmikaelbjork/ai-002

[krakenkraft]

“Take an old track and make it new by erasing things from it.”

I took Steps from the early nineties (uploaded for reference and sentimental contemplation) and duplicated it to half a dozen layers or so in Reaper.

Three layers got scratched off by diverse EQ VSTs, so that they had only low, mid, hi frequencies.

One layer had been “noised reduced” (but I decided to use the noise instead the cleaned material).

I also did cut all these layers into small pieces, so that sometimes you can only hear one, sometimes some, sometimes all layers.

Another layer got partly erased of with methods like “declicking” and “voice removal” in Audacity, I did cut off parts of the stereo channels here.

An additional layer works quietly as a “faded image” in the background (which can’t be scratched off completely, so to speak) in order to glue the thing together and to be able to do it without reverb/echo/bla.

So this track erased the original in dimensions like time, frequencies, stereo.

[DetritusTabuIII]

Hey All, I tried several different attempts. I don’t know why but the idea of erasing magnetic tape was the idea I settled on. I used boo koos of filtering fx they come in over time.Cool idea for this week. Defintely something I should pursue more often in the future.

Peace, Hugh

[beckmesser]

Hi all,
The preexisting track that I used is ambient tape.
The PO-33 was used to record the samples and for the composition too. I used the internal microphone which is quite terrible (remove details) to record some chunks (remove parts) applying an external low pass filter (remove frequencies) to keep the noise out. Puredata was used for some granular sound and the final noise was recorded into a cassette (remove details).

[morgulbee]

I chose the music I created for Disquiet Junto 0327 called Deep Thought. That piece involved creating three lines of music: one in 3/4 time, one in 2/4, and one in 7/4, played simultaneously.

I applied several kinds of processing to the audio of that piece to create this new piece, called Shallow Thought. I used several spectral filters to subtract different ranges of frequencies to create four tracks containing different spectral subsets of the original music. I used a Max for Live filter called Max CutHacker, which randomly cuts out pieces of the audio in time with the beat, applying it to three of the four tracks using different parameters. The volume of each track varies throughout the piece, removing different portions of the spectrum at different times.

One of the more interesting things to emerge was a percussion track that did not exist in the original music. The percussion sounds were an effect of applying the Max CutHacker filter on a very low frequency track where the pitched frequencies were almost totally removed.

I’m not sure this music is really “listenable” except in the context of comparing it to the original piece. It works in small doses, but two and a half minutes is a bit much for my ears. It was an interesting exercise and I will surely use the techniques I learned here in future music, but perhaps a little more selectively.

[bassling]

Whoops, I didn’t read the Junto instructions properly.

However, the error seems to fit the theme.

When looking for a track to erase, I settled on ‘Lame Brain’ from Junto 322.

I figured I’d erase the MIDI viola and cello, then use the original guitar parts.

When I opened the project file I found I’d erased the guitar parts.

As a result, I went back to the recording and created a new arrangement.

It’s about a minute shorter than the original, which is probably for the better.

[rrizzi]

It’s been a while… more that that, I guess?
However, I still read and often listen to the projects as they occur, so I feel I’m still a part of this great community. 330 phew, that’s an accomplishment!
This time I had to participate, and it so happened that I had Monday off, Yihaw!
I reworked a recent piece - this; https://soundcloud.com/rizzi/hvac-drone-slide-and-a-little-piano
It is what the title suggests, field recordings from my trip to Japan last fall, and a little leftover piano bits from another composition.
I’ve been thinking about how to go about the task of erasing sound since receiving the email.
I decided to try with M4L´s Spectral filter, and it did exactly what I thought it would. I then tried a bunch of other stuff, but kept going back to the beginning, so I left it at that, as it did what I wanted.
https://soundcloud.com/rizzi/disquiet0330-hvac-drone-slide-and-a-little-piano-rauchenberg-erased