This week I got working sooner rather than later. In this case I tried to take a quite literal interpretation. I took the concentric shapes to be various musical parts where distance from the centre reflected pitch, width of segment reflected amplitude, length of segment reflected the length of the looping phrase and the piece played in a radial manner.

Though the approach was fairly formulaic I quite enjoyed the result. I feel like it had enough movement while still feeling strongly repetitive. It also has something of a celestial tone to it. I originally had a very strong sub bass which I filtered out at the last minute: hopefully that didn’t impact it negatively.

As for gear it was the usual suspects (Bass Station, Volca Bass, Microfreak, Peak) for the 4 lower voices. The top voice is from the Korg NTS1 with a free Karplus strong oscillator loaded. The effects were my usual Boss 500 set. Nothing much of note to report other than it being another fun week: thanks!

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Great prompt this week!

In the first instance, I decided to approach this with a graphic transcription of the crop circle image on graph paper. Once I had a decent representation, I divided up sections of the pattern and thought about ways I could interpret this musically.

I must admit I tried several different approaches before I arrived at the finished piece. The previous attempts seemed too constrained. What worked was to apply a simple principle from the score - e.g the ‘block’ shapes in the green band represent the main bell pulses. This gave me the structure I needed. From there, I interpreted the score more impressionistically - the bass follows the bells/organ; the synth follows contours of the lines, etc. Everything else is for the sake of texture and so forth.

Funnily enough, this week I’ve been absolutely besotted with John Cage’s late ‘stone’ works, where he drew inspiration from Japanese stone gardens…their rocks, patterns in the sand. Beautiful work. Especially Ryoanji.

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The crop circles in the photo made me think of cymbals, so I gave mine such a bash that I broke a drumstick.

The central circles seemed to confirm I was looking at drums and I’ve interpreted them as a kick-kick-snare pattern.

I gave them a crushing treatment, using compressors and saturation.

Then I set about adding harmonic interest, recording a quick chord progression.

I used that MIDI information to drive a couple of synths, using space-themed presets.

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Hey All, I was looking at the picture and was kinda amazed how many things you could use in this pic. The shapes,the people and the lines going through it like a musical staff but I just went with the shapes and penciled it on a midi roll as you see in the artwork for this track.It was originally much faster but I slowed it way down and applied many different midi fx. Because they are the same midi notes I think it helps all the instruments stay together though they are doing different things. What I really liked was how it made the drum kit sound.I also used different scene launch tempo changes to add variety. I dig these notation assignments Marc. They really attack the ego imposing too much but still give structure whatever the hell that is supposed to mean.

Peace, Hugh

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Finally, scientists unpacked the signal in Crop Circles, and amazingly they found encoded audio. The sounds were released Feb 21, 2076. Is it noise? It it speech? Is it an alarm? No-one knows, but the entire world is listening, rapt, to the strange and mysterious sound - a thrum and an unsettled whistle - trying to understand what it is that we have received. In the bar at the teleportation station which we last visited in disquiet0414, the night band sits silent, trying with everyone else to garner a glimpse of meaning. And then the pianist realizes the sound is an invitation to cooperate, a lead from a song that we have to write together across space and time. That some alien, deep in the past, was looking to sit in on the session and make music, and sent us that message as a pile of compressed wheat fields. So turn to the keys - pluck out a hint of a sympathetic melody. As the rest of the group joins in, the bar looks on, thinking: “No. No, that’s probably not what the signal means. But let’s listen and order another cocktail anyway.”

This week is my 11th disquiet. As I’ve done with several others, I wrote some code and some music and some words. This time I used python to extract 2 dimensional signals from the wikipedia image, turned slices of those signals into one dimensional signals, turned those one dimensional signals into midi cc, and pulled about 2 minutes of lots of midi control into Logic. I made a feedback-y Surge patch controlled by the CC, and then played along on piano. Nicely, as I was playing, I realized I was returning to the sound palette of disquiet0414, and so I wrote the above little micro-story in my head. And voila.

With that, I hope you enjoy “Space Sits In on The Last Number (disquiet0425)”

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Like @bassling, the circles reminded me of cymbals, but exp(jωt) is also generally on my mind. Hence: 7-bit sine waves fed to a metallic resonator, pitch contour following the circle centers, lengths following circle radii. Resonator’s tuning increases as the “cymbals” ““shrink””, but it’s continuous so pretty much destroys any cymbal semblance. Oop. Fixed for each note would be better(?).

Synth pad for the straight lines, ducked by the circles, as they are visually.

Modulation (square wave) for the nested-circle-ish shapes. Also kinda reflected by the back-and-forth of the voices.

Right-hand side being cut off at an angle => resonant HP filter sweep for the ending.

Samples from Gemini IV mission from https://archive.org/details/Gemini4/1306.wav . Aside: Happy early 91st birthday to Jim McDivitt!

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(Never done one of these before.)

I took the graphic notation to guide mouse pointer shaping of graphical elements of the Ableton interface. Operator waveform, MIDI note arrangement. Since the orientation of the pictured circle is ambiguous I used the axis of symmetry to organize my thoughts. Of course that still leaves ambiguity vis a vis which way is up. Presets and effects chosen thematically–lots of randomness, and sci fi sounds abound.

Basically, we’re talking four Tin Bowl Operator presets with manually altered waveforms attempting to depict the four shapes present in the picture, with the MIDI arrangements attempting the same. Lots of random MIDI effects to make that less boring, run through a vocoder on the master track to make it sound less horrible/slightly more musical. I justified it because aliens probably use vocoders all the time.

Also I carved out another representation of the pictured crop circles from the Arrangement view which breaks it up a little bit.

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@Paul_Reiners

Sounds great with the numbers transmission. Adding those gaps was a good idea, I wish I’d thought of doing that with mine.

@tristan_louth_robins

This is lush. Feels like a soundtrack. I like that buzzing that fades in and out among the instruments.

@DetritusTabuIII

Kinda chaotic. Love the way my brain tries to make sense of the relationships between the instruments.

@euclidian

This could be an X Files theme! Sounds about right. How did you interpret the notation?

@baconpaul

If I hadn’t read your story about the alien, I would’ve thought this sounded like the wind blowing through the field as the mothership departed. The band are very responsive.

@nonsmeddy

The whistle of the metallic resonator is kinda atmsopheric. Quite a gentle piece, which was enjoyable.

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Sometime in July 2004, two crop circle formations were discovered in a Wiltshire field. What was striking about these patterns is how they appeared to represent the chakra system of the human body, generally depicted as circular wheels along the spinal column.

The fourth primary chakra is called anahata, the Sanskrit word to mean “pure, clean, stainless, unhurt and unstruck.” Joseph Campbell reminds us that anahata is the point “where sound is heard that is not made by any two things striking together.” (Suss Müsik mental note: no percussion for this piece).

What’s intriguing about the crop circle used for this week’s Junto is its concentricity: ovals overlapping and repeating, like a gigantic Spirograph drawing. The design also serves as a visual depiction of sonic echoes bouncing off hard surfaces before returning to its origin.

For this weird piece, Suss Müsik rendered the Junto-supplied crop circle image to “pure, clean” flat art. An audio scan was then processed create a series of major pentatonic tones in the key of A. Cyclical phrases for organ and piano were then added, using the graphical notation as reference.

The piece is titled Anahata. The image is the source notation used to create the piece.

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The playlist is rollin’:

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I´ve tried to look at the circles as euclidean instructions for both notes, beats and modulation of a soft Buchla and some drum-machine sounds. Trying to get results, that could interpreted by human ears, the alien messages embedded within the crop circles turned out to need some additional effects - as reverb, granulation etc. … but then this emerged…

For the euclidean fun I used the strokes and weights M4L tools from https://www.congburn.co.uk/strokes

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Nice assignment. I thought of a number of possibilities for this but ended up with a long sequence surrounded by a number of other shorter ones… seemed like circles to me.

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For this assignment, I cracked out Iannix - a graphical, open-source sequencer - and drew the crop circle featured on the Wikipedia page in the program. Then I added some triggers, hooked Iannix up to Ableton and let it play itself.

Here’s four minutes of a crop circle automation :slight_smile:

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I’m traveling so this was done on the iPad. AUM, Ripplemaker, Animoog, Mozaic…

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Great - perfect use of Iannix!

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Thank you! Took me a while to understand how to use Iannix, the instructions are a bit…esoteric for me :wink:

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Although it was immediately inspiring, this ended up being a difficult one to tame. Anyway, I took the image from wikipedia, posterized it and reduced it to a very small resolution, turned it into ASCII. Then I had some code interpret it and try to turn it into midi. Next, pulled everything into Ableton, made 3 different versions of the midi at different resolutions, with a different bell sound for each variation. Finally some drums and sprinkling of synth.

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Love the atmosphere.

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I had the feeling crop circles must have an iterative, drop-like structure. No VCO should be involved, because who knows, if the crop circles are ‘made’ or just ‘spontaneous phaenomena’ …

Two different soundscapes from the Koma FX were used in Reaper, both created by self-oscillation of the digital delay with no input. Plus some FX, modular and VST. Deep low frequency bassdrum via contact mic. You may hear the approaching UFO checking the mysteriousness of the crop circles …

I don’t know why but I like it.

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