#9

Sometimes I resonate with a certain poem by Bukowski, concerning creativity, and all the excuses we make to ourselves about why we’re not creating. It ends with this:

“baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
and don’t create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses”

Exploring this sentence, I ended up with this small piece.
It involves some 8dio samples of chanting, NI tabla’s and a bit of the new Spitfire library by Lea Betucci (Acoustic Shadows)… I love it :slight_smile:

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#10

A piece of music inspired by one sentence from a John Cooper Clarke poem.

‘When a cyborg chef served up moon beams
Done super rapid on a laser beam’

Full poem johncooperclarke.com/poems/i-marrie…om-outer-space

Instruments used - Soft synth ‘old piano’ and Arturia keystep. This follows the metre of the words with an arrangement of notes playing in my head.

Virtual ANS https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nightradio.virtualans3 This creates a nice Sci-fi vibe and is also used for the sound of the creation of the moon beams at 2:31

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#11

My starting point was the fact that sentences have structure at multiple levels (sounds, words, phrases…). A good part of my day job is figuring out how these structures are processed in the brain, and a partial answer is that different structures correspond to distinct brain rhythms, or oscillations (for example). So, I decided to try to isolate the distinct structural rhythms in a sentence from the beginning of Alice in Wonderland:

And what’s the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversation.

Since timbre is just rhythm at another time-scale, I use that too.

all the weedy details

I start with a clip from the audiobook of Alice in Wonderland at librivox.org.

Sound structure is represented by the intensity contour (the acoustic envelope, more or less). I use the contour in two ways. For rhythm, I take the top three spectral peaks in the waveform and scale them against a constant into reasonable BPM rates to generate three phasing beats. For timbre I treat the contour as a waveform whose envelope is triggered by the beats.

Word structure is represented by converting each of the words to a 100-dimensional word embedding (word2vec, pretrained on wikipedia). These are concatenated to a single vector. Again, spectral peaks define rhythms and the vector is also treated as a waveform. The rhythms are scaled to be ~1/2 as fast as the sound structure.

Phrase structure is represented by counting the number of phrases that are completed at each word. The step-function from these counts is another contour that is treated as a waveform and whose spectrum defines a rhythm (scaled to be 1/4 as fast as sound structure).

The pieces are combined in VCV rack along with filtering (vult lateralus) and gentle reverb (valley plateau). Playback position for the waveform is modulated with S&Hs, kind of like a wavetable, and filter cutoff is modulated by the audio envelope at 1/2 speed.

In the recorded take, the sound, word, and phrase contours are played sequentially for about 20 seconds each, and then they are brought in together.

The result is a sort of quasi-rhythmic drone… very different than I expected! How wonderful :slight_smile:

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#12

“So what hovers along with the general unhappiness of everybody with things as they are?”

That quote is by the American poet Robin Blaser, spoken as part of his July 1992 lecture on the nature of belief and doubt in politics. You can listen to the entire digital transcript at the Naropa Poetics Audio Archive.

“Inside that sense we may positively read the future,” Blaser continues. “And as a consequence [humankind] becomes one of the pieces of the puzzle … to try to make a difference.”

Suss Müsik finds this idea both relevant and fascinating. One almost imagines current events operating as a sociocultural trompe l’oeil, a layer of ornamental unrest necessitating our advancement as a kinder, more empathetic species. One hopes so, anyway.

Suss Müsik original’s attempt was to translate the cadence of Blaser’s voice into notation, something like Steve Reich’s excellent Different Trains. Suss Müsik is not Steve Reich, however, and what you hear are various sonic fragments in major pentatonic scale played on fake strings and woodwinds. One of these fragments comprised a four-chord piano phrase, which marks the transition to a synthetic wash approximating the same cadence.

Suss Müsik was struck not only by the content and inflection of Blaser’s sentence, but also the raspy quality of his voice — cavalier, droll, almost indifferent to the importance of his question. For this reason, Suss Müsik accepts Disquiet Junto demerits for including it in the final piece.

The piece is titled Atrococo, a mashup of the words atrocity and rococo. The image is an overlay of Suss Müsik’s attempt to map Blaser’s sentence to some form of notation.

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#13

Rules are meant to be broken so the sentence I chose is in the tune. In fact, it’s the centerpiece of the composition. However, since it’s but a program for vocoding the Subharmonicon, and the recording is time-stretched as well as drowned in reverb in Ableton Live, it’s no longer easy at all to decipher it.

What’s the sentence? One of my favorite quotes by one of my favorite scientists.

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#14

‘The impeded stream is the one that sings’
-Wendell Berry from the poem ‘Our Real Work’

A phrase that colours much of my thoughts on art and life. Song created using a tape loop of part of a badly played banjo recording of ‘Cripple Creek’ - because what’s an impeded stream but other words for a cripple creek. With background rain because a storm just rolled through.

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#15

I chose the following sentence by Buckminster Fuller: “So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.”

I was drawn to the repetition and symmetry. I interpreted it as three parts in the form A-B-A’. (“So we have inspectors of inspectors — and people making instruments — for inspectors to inspect inspectors.”)

I wrote some synth lines that mimicked the rhythm of the sentence. Afterwards, I started playing with ideas around imitation and multiplication, but ran out of time before I could get that working.

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#16

By obscure reasons I choose “All joy wants eternity” from “Zarathustra’s roundelay” …

Made with Ableton Live, u-he Zebralette, Sonic Couture Thunderdrum plus recordings from my own noiseboxes. At the end of the day it may be somehow off topic to shape and cadence, though an exploration of tone and content of the sentence (and of ‘Eternal Recurrence’ as an idea that is maybe not unknown to looping ambient musicians) (hence the lenght of this single sentence ;-)).

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#17

I took a sentence that is an aphorism from a famous German philosopher, about how you only learn when you actually do, appropriate I thought. I used the rhythm and inflection of the words to arrive at a melodic pattern, after which I just kept adding sounds that I thought went well together.

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#18

Around the time the Junto direction arrived, I read a poem that uses musical terms and decided that it might be considered a long sentence.

Today I had some time to record myself reading the poem and used Ableton Live’s MIDI mapping function to compose the music, then added drums.

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#19

Hello everyone, finally had some time and energy to contribute. I’ve been meaning to reread Chaucer for a while now… But, instead, I recorded my guitar into my phone, then added EQ and compression in Ableton. You can hear the traffic and the birds outside my window. Take care, htnc

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#20

Dry clash’d his harness in the icy caves

And barren chasms, and all to left and right

The bare black cliff clang’d round him, as he based

His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang

Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels—

And on a sudden, lo! the level lake,

And the long glories of the winter moon.

– From Morte d’Arthur by Alfred Lord Tennyson

This passage evokes the mountains and lakes of North Wales and my childhood there, walking in the mountains with my late father (whose birthday it would have been today, coincidentally).

I threw the kitchen sink at this one. There’s all sorts of reverb, echo, shimmer, drones (courtesy of SonicLAB and Hainbach’s Fundamental), Paul streching, and various pitch modulations.

[Cover image has been processed from an original, public domain, photograph of Llyn Cwellyn by jon57 off pixabay.com and downloaded from Needpix.com]

Sorry, Marc, I’m a little late this week (it’s still Monday in two-thirds of the world!),

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#21

Hey All, I went with one of the most popular lines in modern poetry T.S Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.

It was the first lines to pop in my head and I thought it would lend itself well to interpretation. I don’t really agree with Eliot on many things. I do think he does diagnose real problems but his ideas for solutions are shit but then maybe there are no solutions so I can’t blame him for trying.
The repetition of the first line is great so I thought that could be the build up but my whimper at the end is not wimpy enough but it does leave things unresolved so it does that at least. Hope all are well.

Peace, Hugh

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#22


I decided to use a passage from Edward.T.Hall’s ‘The Hidden Dimension’ and used the language form as sonic material to create the piece. The sentence chosen has amongst other things unvoiced consonants that would right now bring anxiety to most people as these are sounds that the mouth makes by passing air, not through the vocal chords. More details are within the upload. Look forward to hearing the other contributions and any feedback.
Kind regards,
Andrew
Personal distance Plate 6
Plate 6: from The Hidden Dimension. Image by Edward.T.Hall

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#23

I have a question, so would breaking a sentence into syllables and then having a musical note for each syllable fall under your phrase structure definition ? Just curious to know if there is a term for this…

1 Like
#24


Asimov’s first law of robotics: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

The music I created is a simple arithmetical derivation of that sentence (or rather, the first 64 characters) performed by a modular synthesizer. Each letter A-Z maps to a voltage 0.0 to 2.08 in 1/12 volt (semitone) intervals. I programmed Teletype to play the melodic sequence on a wavetable synth module (E352), with higher pitched notes having shorter durations than lower pitched notes. To complement the melody, the Teletype sequence repeats some of the notes as a sawtooth bass line (Rubicon and Ripples) and minor chords on a wavetable chord module (Chords V2). Separately a simple rhythm sequence is playing (Basimilus Iteritas Alter, Pam’s New Workout). Several random sources are used for subtle modulations of the percussion and melody sounds. The audio is processed by Mimeophon for delay and reverb.

I hope my robot’s jazzy-spacey performance does not injure any humans listening to it.

3 Likes
#25

The syllable structure is most aligned with the intonation contour (syllable nuclei tend to have high acoustic energy). Treating syllables as notes, perhaps with syllable length being quantized to number of beats, would be another very interesting way to go! (If you are looking for terminology, this probably most closely aligns with metrical phonology). The phrasal contour comes from the grammatical structure of the sentence.

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#26

The sentence that inspired me comes from Mammals: A Guide to Familiar American Species (A Golden Guide) by Herbert S. Zim & Donald F. Hoffmeister.

“GOLDEN-MANTLED GROUND SQUIRREL, a handsome rodent, is more chipmunk-like than its relatives, but has a heavier build and lacks the stripes which chipmunks have on the side of the face.”

I’ve always found this sentence to be ridiculously musical, and once used it as the outgoing message on my answering machine. For this piece, I played two parts using my EWI and Imoxplus Respiro, each with randomized harmony: one part echoing the phrase “a handsome rodent” and another echoing the entire sentence. (Unfortunately, I am very out-of-practice on the wind controller.)

The drum beat comes from a snare drum march loop that was sliced to a drum rack in Ableton Live, then played with a Numerology Pro drum sequencer with much randomness, with distortion from Izotope Trash.

My original concept was majestic brass and snare drums, a stereotypical soundtrack for the American West, but the timbres ended up sounding more medieval.

3 Likes
#27

https://soundcloud.com/vonna-wolf/beware-the-jabberwock-mysononeline-disquiet0442 I am glad I got this one. In I used the line “Beware the Jabberwock My Son!”-Lewis Carroll One of my favorite poems for vocal warmups. I sequenced the Roland DJ 808 to the cadence of the lines. I then played the Push2 and Akai Rhythm Wolf into a looper. I then recorded for what could provide backing for the entire poem Jabberwocky-Thru the Looking Glass.

4 Likes
#28

New to Disquiet Junto challenge concept and need it. Noodling aimlessly for years.

After visiting George Floyd Memorial over July 4, composed

Northern Flight · Through All TIme
based on the quote:

As a nation of free men, we must live together through all time, or die by suicide.
A. Lincoln, 1838

It hopefully represents the quiet, reflective and tense nature of both the quote and the place. Used primarily Spitfire Labs freebies but there’s also one track each Reaktor and Kontakt.

1 Like