#35

“We become what we behold,” wrote Marshall McLuhan. “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

The Suss Müsik library contains two distinct books titled Technostress, each written by completely different authors, and it would not be a surprise to see yet another book with the same title appear before too long. Whether we’re reading Craig Bod’s account published in 1984 (!) or the 1997 tag-team effort by Michelle M. Weill and Larry D. Rosen, the message is the same: technology = bad, if we’re not careful.

Technological determinism is the theory that human thought or action is influenced by our societal embrace of digital tools. McLuhan famously believed that the method of communication influences how messages are received. The cultural and societal impacts of technology make for a fascinating debate, but there is little argument regarding the effects of the Information Age on our physical health. Poor posture, degrading eyesight, mental fatigue, searing headaches, neck pain … even substance abuse and clinical depression have been blamed on our increasing exposure to computer-dominated work environments.

For this short and excessively strange piece, Suss Müsik sought to capture technology’s effect on physical instrumentation. Two quotes were pulled from the original source, resampled in various permutations and configured as a base rhythm. It took a few attempts to locate something “musical” from this arrangement. The same process was then applied to two guitar phrases. Lurking in the background is a bit of electronic noise passed through two glitch re-synth modules.

The piece is titled McLuhan. The image is an 1894 photo of a “typical figure showing the tendency of student life — stooping head, flat chest, and emaciated limbs.” Apparently even pencils and paper have a detritus effect on the human condition.

Suss Müsik extends sincere appreciation to Wm. Wolfgang Allen, who played the guitar, and to Jon Phillips for initiating such an inspiring Junto project.

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#36


I live in Winnipeg, Canada, and had no idea of Marshall McLuhan’s connection to St. Louis.
Meanwhile, the fact he grew up and went to university here is as much a part of the local mythology as Neil Young’s high school years and Terry Fox’s days in grade school. Place is linked to both the medium and the message, and this is certainly a place all its own.
I made this sound collage awhile ago by mixing news footage of Winnipeg’s claim to slurpee fame with sounds from The Guess Who. Remixing with out-of-context sound clips from Eric McLuhan brings it all together.

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#37

Audio to MIDI madness featuring Izotope Vocal Synth, Drumvolution, Synthi V and Valhalla Delay

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#38

a faintly aggressive working through each of the 12 available samples, a self-conscious attempt to make 12 different sounds that go some way to confusing the vocal and the machinic, i guess.

This sort of obliterative fuss is something i’m kind of inclined to tbh; an affection for strange buzzes, non-verbal mouth sounds, the textures of * tape * and the strange alien textures that can be extruded from * normal * speech…

I’d like to side eye the idea of * this one-time artistic, non-commercial purpose *; the non-commercial’s no biggie, but the one-time seems to suggest that we’re not able to make our contributions available for derivative works in future [have i got that right, Marc?]. I’ve always understood this to be a pretty fundamental aspect of how the Junto works as an ecology, & it’s certainly a not insignificant part of its attraction to me…

& hey, whilst i’m fussing, though i get the point being made in fragment 10, the leap from a metaphor of drowning to the analogy of the imperceptibility of our environment/air seems… clumsy, right? I mean, i know i can’t articulate a coherent point, without wild and confusing lurches in tone & punctuation, but still, seems to me, if you want to make the information sea point, it’d be best to either stick with water as your base metaphor or opt for something like, uh, carbon monoxide, maybe? Like, i figure - though thankfully have no direct experience so this is pure conjecture - that when you’re drowning your environment is pretty damn perceptible, y’know?

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#39

Hi. Thanks for mentioning this. It’s always preferable that people make work reusable by others, but it’s only listed as requested not required in the standard Junto instructions. The way it’s usually worded is as follows:

Download: Consider setting your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

This time it was a request by the McLuhan Institute, which provided the audio. I respect that they’re shepherding that legacy. If we’d had more time I would have requested to discuss loosening the requirement, but the project came together very quickly to coincide with that St. Louis event, and in the end I would have deferred to their request.

The main time the “Consider setting” is reworded to required is when a project is part of a sequence specifically created to encourage serial, asynchronous collaboration.

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#40

Thanks Marc! Totally appreciate that recombinant shareability is not a requirement of any given Junto, but, i do think that the project[s] lean[s] that way for all sorts of SCARE QUOTES ecological SCARE QUOTES reasons (uh, very much including my own biases)…

& to be earnest albeit still a little wry, it is intriguing to me that in a project that encourages us to “consider the theme media ecology”, we’re then obliged to actively work against the implicit ecological biases computers & their analogue precursors have seemed to encourage in music making and cultural data flow more generally… s’like, ｔｅｎ ｔｈｏｕｓａｎｄ ｓｐｏｏｎｓ ｗｈｅｎ ａｌｌ ｙｏｕ ｎｅｅｄ ｉｓ ａ ｋｎｉｆｅ or something. ; )

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#41

I hear you. It’s not my preferred mode, the restriction. The request came at the last minute, after everything else was in place, and the irony isn’t lost on me about media ecology. I like when the outreach involves collaboration and sources like this, but I need to think about what’s right in the future. I’ve always respected that some participants may not want to use a CC license or set their work for free download or allow for subsequent reuse, and I need to think more about whether that is also the case for the provider of the prompt itself.

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#42

https://soundcloud.com/ohm-research/nudd-disquiet0382

Inspired by my introduction to La Torture Des Ténèbres by my son Todd. Appropriately, Marshall McLuhan was from Canada.

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#43

After much chopping and toing and froing,

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#44

Here it is, Just a little audio manipulation with Ableton Live, with added scattered beatz and noises, and heavy use of Unfiltered Audio Byome.

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#45

I’ve been wrestling with a bad cold combined with allergies, so after I read this week’s prompt I took a bunch of cold meds and fell asleep listening to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. What a great piece of music! I love the way the repetitive parts phase against one another and seem to move around the stereo field. I thought, could I somehow reproduce that sense for this weeks Junto?

To take a stab at it, I loaded the audio into five separate buffers and delayed each slightly against the others, increasing the gap on each repetition, from two different starting points. Then I overlaid some beats from the famous Apache break (programmed to randomly pull off sub-loops that speed up and/or repeat). Here’s the video:

And here’s the code:

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#46

For this, my second disquiet submission, I continued working with Reaktor Blocks (as was suggested in the last assignment). This time using two instances of the third-party developer Toy Box’s granular sampler module. All the modulation (no pitch mod used) comes from my Buchla 200e box with their CV to MIDI module to go from analog cv to Reaktor inside Logic. Minimal editing was done in Adobe Audition. Enjoy!

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#47

hahah, since I’m home and I can’t do anything physical, and had another epiphany, I made another one.
The same fragment from the previous one, but autotuned and pitchshifted into a choir, and passed thru a comb filter progressively more aggressive. Plus Valhalla Shimmer. I could make this last for hours, but I thought that maybe I’m the only one who loves it. :smiley:
Anyway, here it is.

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#48

For my friend Jimmy and all the other Junto rebels >:-D

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#49

I imported all samples as single tracks, distributed them over three minutes and added a bit of knowledge into the free spaces. Some paulstretch for a chanting mood.

enjoy!

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#50

Samples of Eric McLuhan reordered and repurposed for the attention span of the modern media age. I used the modular a bit, then did some manipulation in ProTools.

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#51

(Haha, regarding your variety joke) Yeah - I don’t mean to say the intro isn’t really nice to hear, too. I just mean in the mechanics of a piece and how a listener might interact with it.

For your larger Dante piece: (First off, what a great concept!) maybe just try cropping the intro/outro of each piece in Itunes. That way you’re not editing the song itself, just messing with where it stops and starts. I like to make playlists in Itunes and try editing the start point and end point of each track to see how they juxtapose. (Under Edit: Song Info and Options and Start) - I’ve found just entering in fixed numbers like “20 seconds” without care for where that is, can release the composition on a piece and allow you to find different entrances in your tracks. Happy chopping and rearranging!

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#52

hahaha. :100:

has the pleasing collateral effect of suggesting a universe where juvenile foghorns form punk bands…

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#53

For this week, it felt appropriate when considering the topic that the entirety of the piece would be constructed/deconstructed solely of the samples. The artwork also seemed like a natural representation for what I wanted the sound collage to represent.

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#54

One thing I love about this project is the familiarity with the source material that happens when you’re making something with the same exact components that dozens of other people are using. Those restrictions are interesting and have provided some lovely examples of the elasticity of this community’s creativity.

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