Disquiet Junto Project 0371: Concrete Ambience

[howthenightcame]

hello, and welcome to the team

[zoundsabar]

Thanks! Nice to be part of it.

[abalone]

cool sounds, and words(story)

[bassling]

I’ve sampled a video of my son playing a concrete xylophone that was outside the Questacon in Canberra (and used for a Junto project last year).

It came to mind to represent the concrete part of the project this week.

Then I decided, since wallpaper has a repetitive pattern, my track loops once and could do so again.

I was also thinking on how upbeat music encourages patrons to eat faster, so the speed would be perfect for a ramen place to keep customers turning over.

To keep it lively I’ve added a little delay.

[Andrulian]

Concrete ambience

Considering the nature of concrete, you would usually consider the finished product that is a hard, dense material. However, it starts as a slurry and sets but the finished material despite being hard and dense is prone to corrosion, granulating and crumbling.

This entry considers all of these properties of concrete, the difficulties in the creation of concrete wallpaper, how would you hang it? and what concrete wallpaper music sounds like.

I’ve created a live recording using the Joggle samplers (speed and gain controls) in Usine Sensomusic Hollyhock 3 to massively slow down a kick drum sample and two samples from my Kalipheno sample pack. I’ve processed them with Subvert, Fracture XT (Glitchmachines); SpecOps (Unfiltered Audio); Frostbite, Type A (AudioThing) and altered sampler and effect settings during the recording.

I’ve then added some mid/side processing in MuLab 7 using FabFilter Pro Q 3 and mastered using Magnetite (Black Rooster Audio), Stage (Fiedler Audio), Elevate (Newfangled Audio) and Youlean Loudness Meter.

[manu-b]

Hello,

Here is my piece of music. It’s a krell patch on eurorack. It goes through 2 different filters (one on the left and one on the right) and through 2 different reverbs (one on the left and one on the right).

I think that it describes pretty well the small irregularities of the surface of concrete.

[digital_mornings]

[Calytrix]

When I think concrete I think Brutalism. In a vacuum, Brutalist structures are beautiful, especially in the later stages of their decay, but with social and political context Brutalist structures are anti-human. The closest analog to that in music is probably noise. So I listened to a bunch of Pedestrian Deposit then put together this patch!

Broadly, the patch consists of 3 parts, all heavily modulated. Mangled waves from the Cs-L and the Bateleur were spatialized with Nearness then piped into 2 parallel processing chains. Chain 1 is the Supercell with single grains being triggered by Marbles, and occasional bursts of grains from envelopes from Stages. Chain 2 is Morpheus into Chronoblob 2 in Ping-Pong mode. The mid and side signals were extracted by an LRMSMSLR and routed back into the FM inputs of the Cs-L.

After a few hours of tweaking, it was surprisingly well behaved! I got this recording on the first go without any major surprises.

[mdh]

Made with @Elisa-room237 in my apartment in Amsterdam Oost.

Concrete wallpaper conjures up an image of being stuck in a prison of my own making. I imagine sitting alone in a bare and cold room, with nothing to do but endlessly throw a ball against a wall and be trapped within my own thoughts.

We took quite a while to get to a satisfactory point, but I’m quite happy with the final outcome
There isn’t really much movement in the sound as wallpaper tends to be static, but we added some jarring metallic noises in to increase the menacing feeling.

Recorded in Reaper and using Quanta granular synth VST, digitakt and 0-coast.

[yobink]

The idea made me consider identity. What is the real composition of the wall and why does it (or someone) want it to appear as something else? Am I covered in concrete wallpaper? Maybe I am. I am today, no doubt.

Ableton Live 10 one shots, loops, Korg Mono/Poly, Kaivo

[krehg]

https://soundcloud.com/ohm-research/c3s-disquiet0371

[morgulbee]

Considering all the attributes of wallpaper that looks like concrete, I created music with repeating synthetic elements, with the occasional hole or tear to break up the monotony. I recorded background noise at a restaurant Thursday night (with real brick walls, not fake concrete), added some repeating synth parts and a drum track, and carved a few holes in it.

For the cover art I shot some photos of a concrete wall on Friday and turned them into stained wallpaper.

[krakenkraft]

A friend of mine built a mobile piezo preamp for recording sounds directly into my Zoom H1n. For this disquiet, I tried to record stones.

But trying to get sound out of stones turned out to be futile. They may sound, but not as “stones” (whatever I expected stones to sound…). Nevertheless I added my since some weeks favourite Riviera Hyper-Room Reverb VST in different tracks of recording takes.

Spoken in analogies, the result is more a concrete wall (of huge, cosmic, stable sound), which tries to cover up that it’s just a thin wallpaper (of poor contact mic stone recordings). The pads are just some wallpaper paste to glue paper and wall together …

Please consider commenting with links to better stone recording!

[howthenightcame]

Rocked Out

Amazing “stone” track by @dnealelo

[dnealelo]

Thanks! I had some thoughts about doing something for this junto with some of the samples from Ringing Rocks. Ended up caught up in other projects on non-musical weekend tasks.

[gentil]

This one was a mix of a few ideas, mainly inspired by the words “wallpaper” and “concrete”:

• wallpaper as the background of a home: I recorded the background noise of my home.
• wallpapers often have repetitive patterns: I looped three different tracks.
• I’ll always have in mind the tacky photographic panorama-style of wallpapers, specifically the european/north-american autumn forest landscape: the forest is in klankbeeld’s field recording
• about the tackiness: reuse of 90s pop/musak from Kmart background music à la vapourwave
• material and decay: paper ripping by TheScarlettWitch89
• I couldn’t get the band “Japanese Wallpaper” out of my head when thinking about wallpaper, so sampled a tiny bit of their track “Between Friends”
• the word “concrete” meant I had to reference musique concrète and its repetition of (often industrial) found sounds. Construction works fitted the bill perfectly, so I used nebulousflynn’s sound.

Thank you goes to people sharing sounds for others to reuse.

[samarobryn]

Sneaking this one in! Also glad to be back on board with the Junto, been away the past few weeks

For a while, I’ve seemed to associate the words “walls” and “concrete” with tinnitus. It must be because my tinnitus is most evident in the quiet moments before bed, when I’m encased in the four walls of my room waiting to sleep and the only appreciable sounds I’m hearing are coming from within my ears.

I’ve always heard the weirdest amalgamation of noises - I remember reading somewhere that the brain tries to interpret, as best it can, the meaning of a frequency. So I’ll hear what might be a vague bell or piano, or what might be a siren, or what might be static…all layered
and interwoven into this one, fluid entity.

Which fits in with the idea of “wallpaper” - it’s all in the layering

[joyneski]

Key stages on the route of my usual faffing about: -

1. Have the idea that the individual components of concrete are soft and/or fluid.
2. Equate this concept to running short occasional stabs of a blackbird’s song through a randomised pitchshifter and a long reverb in ‘Freeze’ mode (the opening sound). (This is also tied in the thought of concrete music = musique concrete.)
3. For the wallpaper, I wondered - what if the concrete tried to sing to make itself more attractive?
4. On this basis, I fed some of the drone from the previous step through Waveshape and Freq Shift in Absynth, modulating FS using CCStepper to make a sort-of tune, then added a rumbley bass using a similar technique.

[Hypoid]

Cheers Everyone,

After a long and unexpected Junto absence, I’m sort of back at it. Since both time and ability have been in short supply around here, I had to settle for some noise.

The thought of concrete wallpaper seemed a bit absurd to me, the appearance of substance without the mass, weight or longevity.

The only sources this week are recordings from two pieces of paper being torn. These were cut and pasted together forming one continuous tearing sound. This was pitched down, doubled in length and run through eq, Replicant 2, Adverb 2 and Kosmonaut. The resulting mix down was copied to three other tracks and run through DLYM, Mani chorus, more eq and Roomverb. The mix down was also sent through the original four effects again. The resulting mess was then partnered with an odd rhythm kit made of concrete hits (a kit made for an earlier project).

Meant to be an exercise of inversion, substance from paper rather than paper without substance…or something along those lines…if that makes any sense :-/

Out of practice in both explanation and music. Oh well, it’s a start

[Peter]

Responsive to the brief in some subliminal way. I had a lot of considerations about repeating patterns, and ‘outlining’ or embossing the lines of the design. That ended up turning into the structure of the piece, a simple AA form. Percussion and synths in Logic, and the guitar is run through SuperCollider, with a pitch detector running the notes through a simple patch, glitching out a little at the end.