#23

Process:

Voice sample stretched with Akaizer into a low drone that sounds like some kind of throat singer. Tape loop of backyard field recording pitched down. Simple sequence on Waldorf Blofeld in the same key as my “throat singer”.

5 Likes
#24

had samples 7, 10 and 11 running thru protoplasm, and an arpeggio in helm.
tried to open another instance of helm but got an error message that live would crash once i closed the error message. so i didnt click ok. opened audacity and managed to record a minute before the end (live couldnt restore the session either)
repeated the end at the beginning so the slightly more interesting bit is in the middle.

4 Likes
#25

OUTSTANDING!! (Now I’m thinking free jazz is the pattern of everyday speech.) Thank you so much for this great piece :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#26

scrambled sounds from several places, including some shortwave radio sounds i found here:

This one is a long slow burn, i tired to achieve the texture of old plastic radios from when i was young its a little bit tinny and flat in sections.

As far of the media ecology the environment i was studying was my own workspace. It occured to me that i could take it further by using all the sound generating equipment i have available but the size of the task in an already bloated piece made me primarily use my PC as base of operations, as that is the center of the universe, the nexus of all things… hehe - or something like that

Sorry it’s so long I hope some of you take time to enjoy

7 Likes
#27

Thank you for the suggestion… This is the style I’m going for in my next project (Dante’s Inferno), so your idea of having quicker starts is useful because it should help bring in some musical variation… not that Dante’s hell itself is in need of more variety!!

2 Likes
#28

Cheers Everyone!

Got a little out of hand, back in few…
tmi (disquiet0382)
Interesting reading McLuhan, heard the quotes and heard the name but never put the two together.
Why punk? Couldn’t muster the metal chops I was looking for. It still worked…at least for me.
Contents:
One line from #10, Eric McLuhan’s “Sea of information”
One noisy straight ahead kit
One distorted bass
Three noisy guitars
Sloppy playing, sloppy production and sloppy amounts of grind and distortion.
Started in GarageBand and sent to Logic.

9 Likes
#29

I was particularly taken with the clip about us drowning in a ‘sea of information’ - I think it’s a very accurate summary of our current environment - and layered multiple versions of this clip to create a verbal ‘sea’.

4 Likes
#30

I had “19” on 45 back in the day. Dig it.

3 Likes
#31

Hey All, Interesting person to learn about. My kids are growing up in a totally different world, not better or worse IMO, but my 9 year old daughter is all over the damn Instagram with her older brother’s classmates and I kinda worry about that, but that is their world. I was a chaperone on a school trip to DC and I set up a group chat for my charges and man oh man did I learn about chatting. It is like another language but it is a totally absurd language but one that once I learned the lingo was actually kinda of fun. I was the king of GIFs by the end of the trip. I went with just the audio with some fx added at the end. Hope all are well.

Peace, Hugh

4 Likes
#32

I started with “The medium is the message” in my mind, and while playing the files in my sampler, I heard the Minions. ANd this is their message :wink:

3 Likes
#33

Interesting thought!

2 Likes
#34

I chose the “new media, new things” quote. I loaded it into the iDensity granular synth and made 2 loops featuring particular words and sounds that I liked. I then effected these loops and slowly faded from one to another.

I like that this is a form of synthesis that couldn’t really exist in this form without a computer…it invented a synthesis thing that IT could do!

5 Likes
#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.

7 Likes
#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.

5 Likes
#37

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

6 Likes
#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?

4 Likes
#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.

3 Likes
#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. ; )

2 Likes
#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.

3 Likes
#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.

2 Likes