Thought about how a river starts, as a small stream somewhere and grows in size, energy. When combining that with a town that grows, in size, supported by the river, with the inevitability of time, measured by clocks made by men. Bridges, a river and a clock. Activity. Then fade out.
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Very cool and retro-looking and -sounding. Has an 8-bit Nintendo look and sound. I mean that as a compliment. The one thing I would change would to be to have a less abrupt ending, if only a fade-out.
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This is all a bit contrived but here goes: I took a map and overlaid an 8 x 8 grid. I then divided the grid into four 4 x 4 grids, which I numbered from 1 to 16 each. I then determined which of the squares intersected with the Aare. These were encoded then encoded into four binary arrays.
Then I created a sequence of random numbers between 1 and 16 (corresponding to the cells in each of the four 4 x 4 grids).
Next I wrote a Go program to iterate the sequence and, taking each of the four 4 x 4 grids in turn, determine whether a note or a rest should be played and, if a note, a calculation of a note in the C minor scale based on the sequence value and the current grid number. The program also calculated a velocity based on the current position in the sequence and the sequence value with a MIDI value between 64 and 127. The program then wrote out the resulting 18 bars of notes to a MIDI file. The 18 bars represent the eighteen bridges that cross the Aare in Bern.
From there I imported the MIDI file to Ableton and used AudioDamageâs Quanta with a Hainbach preset (Bubbles, appropriately), Puremagnetikâs Verv to provide backing strings, SonicLABâs Fundamental (another Hainbach influence) and Puremagnetikâs Extreme for watery noise and Korgâs M1 for bass. There was a little Eventide Blackhole for reverb thrown in as well.
I used Cableguysâ Shaperbox to pan the upper frequencies of the Quanta in the rough shape of the path of the river.
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This is my first contribution to the Disquiet Junto community. Araris (disquiet0445) is an ambient sonic landscape that uses a field recording of an Estonian Ice Breaker (near my home) along with samples created using Native Instruments software. The series of sound events follows the slow and sinuous movement of the beautiful emerald Aare river.
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that seems like a very intense process - thank you for sharing your track here
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I created a bed using the third map in Photosounder, added some Oboes, English and French Horns playing some chords then recorded some silver flute whilst imaging my self busking on the Bern bridge KirchenfeldbrĂźke as I viewed it on StreetView.
Thank you.
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Hi!
Modular only this time.
Gletscherwasser means: Eau de glacier, Glacier water, etc.
[ No need to say the environmental perspective I had on the topic, considering those three maps and the birth of numerous rivers⌠]
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This track is a dreamy landscape 
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This is really good. minimalistic and discordant yet subtly beautiful, really nice.
Can you talk about this a bit more? Very interested in your process here. Thanks @samarobryn
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Beautiful sense of deepness. Your âlittle blips and blorpsâ sound like microbiotic life⌠Amazing!
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Composite and unexpected, you know the value of silence. Your piece is a wonderful answer to the assignment. Cheers.
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Having never been to this region or the River, I decided to use a water based sound material for an imagined tribute. First, I created a crude tracing of the Rivers outline, then folded and traced again. Where the points crossed over was where an event would create a gradual change in the sound piece. I rotated the tracing and overlaid it on graph paper to create a plot. The length was determined by each square on the grid given as 30 second periods. Ironically, when I looked up the length of the River it was 295km in length (in Britannica). My plots originally indicated 270 seconds so I have made the piece approximately 295 seconds representing a second per km (see below). I used a Hydrophone recording from around 2016 (Chicago) and manipulated this using granular synthesis. By using the plots I manipulated the density of the grain in real-time as a loose guide. Overall this gives a broadband range sound which is added to a synth patch that was also manipulated in a similar fashion based on the graph plot. The two were then composited to give a what I hope is a feeling of travel underwater.
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This track was made using a combination of visual synthesis and process composition.
I took the map of Bern and cut-away everything but the river itself. Then I used dRAW optical synthesiser, by @riccardomarogna, to create an instrument that âplaysâ the sound of the riverâs course. The sound evolves as the synthesiser LFO scans along sections of the river to use as its sound source.
The melody of the track is procedural with A (for Aare) as zero. Each subsequent note is calculated using numbers from the coordinates of the riverâs source (Unteraar Glacier) and mouth (below Koblenz) as intervals. Therefore we have two distinct melodies, one for the source, and one for the mouth. I used probability features within Ableton to create constant movement between âsourceâ and âmouthâ melodies, like the flow of the water.
The rhythm of the track is similarity procedural, with the spacing of the kick / bass drum calculated from 0:00 using intervals from source and mouth coordinates to calculate beats from origin. The rhythm also uses randomised automation to flow between the source and mouth.
The aesthetic is overwhelmingly dark, despite the classic picture of the Aare as a scenic visitor attraction. This just happened, but made me also consider the icy black water at night or the experience of those 20-30 people who will drown in it each year.
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This is my first posting at Disquiet Junto. I started just by examining the maps, letting them speak to me in form and in image. I lived in Europe along a river, so it certainly informed my day-dreaming. I then let the images become movements on the keyboard which was loaded with symphonic ensembles. Then the harp, which I used to play, many years ago became my forward motion. Choral music, also a big part of my past, carries us from past to present. This was as much a journey backwards as forwards. Using maps one and two, and traveling from south to north. The river is represented by the repeated harp and celeste, the spirit of the river by the voices, the etherial quality of the arterial by bells and woodwinds. This was largely an emotive exploration of old and new (jazz chords at the end, map 1 and map 2) connected via the river.
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Imagine eight voices independently pacing up and down the banks of river Aare. Starting at different times and locations, they moderately change auditory attributes due to their whereabouts and encounters with each other. Even though the voices follow the course of the river they respond to the bends differently with each one following their own rules. The piece consists of automated software as well as improvised hardware generated movements.
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Quite late and short (mostly because of missing time), here is my contribution. I put a keyboard map as layer over the picture and used it as the key range. As the flow direction of the river should be South to North, I also started with the keys at the bottom going to top. So pitch goes from low to high and then back to low. Done entirely in Ableton Live with built-in orchestral samples and Pianoteq.
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Disquiet0445
Aare Accolade
⢠Key: A minor BPM: 100 Time signature: 4/4 DAW: Reaper
⢠Instruments:
⢠Plug-ins: Iannix https://www.iannix.org/en/whatisiannix/
⢠Used Iannix to draw on top of map #3
⢠Rerouted the midi output from Iannix into Reaper for processing
⢠Mixed and Mastered
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I did 3 tracks, one per map, with 3 different instruments, that somehow for me alluded to the 3 different time periods represented in the maps (viola for the first, violin for the second, beats in ableton for the third). Then I played them separately in sonic pi, trying to slice them into bits and recorded them into 3 new tracks. I mixed them back in audition and edited the result, modifying volume, pan and effects for variety, and tried to thin it out, since the mix initially sounded awfully crowded. I am not sure I am happy with the results, because I realize now that I would like it even more thin and streamlined, and not so busy, but I tried several things that were new for me and it seems like a good place to start. It was fun!
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I prepared an image to import into Metasynth by tracing over one of the Google maps. I painted the river with yellow (stereo center) and I painted the pinned locations in red (stereo right) or green (stereo left) depending on the pin colors on the map. This was rendered in Metasynth using a vocal multisample in a microtonal scale. Three versions were made: an A version (as is), an R version (flipped left-to-right), and an E version (flipped top-to-bottom).
Over a looping sample of river noise (I believe itâs the Elbe river in Dresden) that is playing an AAS Chromophone drum via WIDI audio2midi, the A section is played twice, then the R section, and finally the E section.
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