Disquiet Junto Project 0450: Texture Analysis

[homeontheland]

1. We started by listening to each field recording to identify interesting textures and predominant pitches and overtones
2. Then we chose three - two from Machine #3 and one from Tool #2
3. We recorded Judith’s viola and Simon’s guitar not just to mimic the machine sounds, but to have a kind of conversation between our musical tools and those of Carlo Bernasconi AG
4. Acting as interlocutor are heavily EQ’ed versions of the field recordings that draw out the textures, pitches and overtones we selected in step 1

[Schemawound]

Looking through the source files I instantly locked on to a rhythmic loop and begun building on it and tweaking and layering ambience.

Fellow Junto Participant @Kiggler joined me on Discord to suggest rearrangements and changes that dramatically improved the flow of the track.

All sounds are from the provided source audio (except for the kick drum).

Created in Bitwig.

[TelevisionName]

This is a sort of procedural noisy drone thing done in Pure Data.

My process was to listen to all of the files and then just sort of play around with them in PD until I found some sounds I liked. I ended up with 6 different voices using 5 of the provided samples as audio/data sources.

Voice 1
tools02.wav is run through a lo fi granular timestretcher. The grain reader (not sure what to call the fast phasor) is poorly locked to a static frequency via a phase locked loop. The reader’s own frequency as well as various PLL parameters are modulated by “probabalistic” gates with the probability increasing as the piece proceeds. The gates are actually deterministic because instead of using some random value, they are taking samples from a slowly traversed tools02.wav. The audio file is essentially acting as the “score” for its own modulations.

Voice 2
machine02.wav is run through a lo fi timestretcher and filtered.

Voice 3
ambience03.wav is set up in a similar configuration to tools02.wav with a timestrecher and a PLL but without the modulating gates.

Voice 4
work02.wav is run through a timestretcher. It is slowed and pitched down to a sort of low rumble which is then filtered a bit.

Voice 5
work02.wav is run through another timestretcher. This one is connected to another PLL and used for some noisy “pitched” stuff near the end.

Voice 6
tools01.wav is pitched up and used as sample data for a synchronous granular synth. The frequency of the synth is controlled by an envelope follower which is being driven by a slowly traversed tools01.wav. This is another voice whose sound source is also its “score”.

Here is the patch if anybody is interested : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xYd9F-Ljp8oL7VRVK9Sv4LBD5YBPbRJT/view?usp=sharing

If you want to run it you will need to add the audio files to the /audio directory for things to work. (windows users might also need to change some file paths to have "/"s instead of "\"s in the patch itself)

[zoundsabar]

Gestreckte Naturstein (or Stretched Natural Stone) is a play with some of the more mobile sounds from the nicely recorded and very varied sounds from the stone factory, for which I thank @TobiasReber. All of the sounds in the piece are from this collection. There has been a lot of stretching using elastic audio in Pro Tools. It’s a five minute composition that was pieced together very quickly and intuitively, responding to the sounds and textures of the different recordings. There is a little delay on a few sounds, and a little (almost unnoticeable) reverb on a few others. Mostly it’s a musique concrete assemblage of sounds, which I enjoyed making.

[bassling]

Heh, I’d forgotten about that one.

[wasabicube]

Here I took the first three ambience tracks, the first machine track and the second work track and passed them through a Eurorack waveshaper, ladder filter and wasp filter then through a ring modulator before combining with the original tracks in Ableton. I then automated a Sinevibes Robotizer, Sinevibes Stream delay sequencer, Eventide Shimmerverb and finally an AudioThing Filterjam.

I wanted to get the sound of the force of rock being shaped. Possibly stretching to call it music

[VassilisP]

I started by experimenting with different samples, importing them in Lobster Quadrille (Agreiphontes Lyre)
Then used stems in VCV rack (Nysthi’s Sussudio, through SuperCell and some reverb).
Sampes of the output of this process were sequenced in Reaper.

[jks]

it’s been drizzly here so i basically spent a bunch of time when i wasn’t cooking or revisiting movies that somehow simultaneously vex and impress this weekend cultivating flickers, rattles, and drones out of @TobiasReber’s field recordings.

I went long 'cause [a] there was a lot of stuff to play with and [b] something about texture invites duration, in my head; like i feel you’ve got to spend time with the thing to know its texture… i can’t decide how wrong-headed this is; overly literal? or maybe fallaciously abstract? i really dunno, but it’s how i get to thinking, fwiw

so yeah, i made selections from most of the recordings - i used a couple more or less fully - and tweaked some granular delays to extrude pieces of them that walked the tightrope between recognisible and transformed… i collaged these together as i went, initially planing on coming in under 5 minutes, slowly accruing sections that pleased me until i was over twice that length… only used 14 or so of the original tracks in the end too… i imagine the piece as slowly working through a number of panels somehow; for every abrubt shift there’s an extended fade…

thank you for your patience, always.

[BennDeMole]

My ears heard a tone in an early ambience, which I isolated and made into an instrument using Iris2, found a chord progression I liked with that sound. Found a rhythm in Tools 1, isolated it and set the tempo by it, found bassy sound to add some heft to the Tools. Then Machine 1_4 wanted to join so I let it. In Tools 2 I heard a bell, again using Iris2 I isolated it and played it in. Then when searching for a bass sound the grinding of Machine 4 asked me to slow and lower it down that became the place in which all else existed.
Have a good festival Tobias!

[GerardParesys]

Thanks to Tobias for the stones, the ambiences, the rhythms, the tools, the textures, the machines …
I use:
ambience04, machine01_2, machine01_3, machine01_4, ambience04, work01, work02.
Audio transformations (filtering, compression, expansion) are done with a Pure Data patch:
http://gerard.paresys.free.fr/WithPureData/Flt-LP-Pow-Reverb3.zip
Mixing and editing with Audacity.

[project-dirigent]

Disquiet Junto Project 0450: Texture Analysis
The Assignment: Create a piece of music from sounds related to working with rocks.

Improvised on a small modular synthesizer (twice) using Morphagene, Plaits, Marbles and Ripples. Recorded and edited in Audacity.

[disquiet]

Hi, folks. A great turnout this week. The playlist should be up to date now, but if your track is missing, let me know.

[melondruie]

Listening to the samples, I had an image in my mind of standing at the bottom of a dark quarry surrounded by chiseled rock and abandoned mining equipment so I tried to create that mood.

Technical things.
Most of the samples had background noise included so I went with a droney approach. Used several of the ambience samples, a couple of the machine samples, and two of the tool samples. Messed around with filtering, pulling the high side off of most to create a darker, colder sound. Lots of stretching and further filtering. I feel like I sort of captured what I was going for, but not completely.

[Joule]

This short piece was assembled from several stone processing sound files from Carlo Bernasconi. Short segments of the files were played back at different speeds in Supercollider to generate the tones used to create this sequence entitled Metamorphica. Thanks to Tobias Reber and Marc for this very interesting Junto project challenge.

[Bigtime_Snacks]

I’m a little nervous to share as this is the first piece of mine which I’ve ever thrown out into the public. I’ve been a percussionist for the past 25 years, but have only started digging into the tech side of music in the past year and a half or so. I only started learning Ableton over the past few months. Anyways, I came up with a sort of Autechre-ish piece. I chopped up the provided recordings work02, machine03, work01, tools02, machine01, machine02, and machine01_3 to create this piece. The only effects besides EQ and compression which were used was some of the Valhalla Room reverb. I feel like I could have spent a ton more time on the composition and especially with the mixing, but the perfect is the enemy of the good enough (I hear). I would love to hear some feedback on it!

[bb_r]

For this piece I wanted to take a narrative approach to highlight the sonic journey of what I imagine to be a huge rock, then to a stone, to then some sort of honed piece of a 3 dimensional puzzle or a simple inscription made into a rock.

I chose to piece together these files for their tones, there stillness or their active qualities:

Ambience 05

Machine 01_3

Machine 04_2

Tools 02

Work 02

So it is, from the loading bay, the Sawyer to the Carver! (at least this is what I have imagined)

As rock and stone have been created through huge forces over thousands of years, I wanted to also slow time down to exaggerate what it takes to physically, and manually shape these impressive rocks. In this piece time slows down. Those long drawn out strikes into the stone from the Bankermason make audible what would physically be impossible at the speed it was played back at. A small and humble homage to the great skills and crafts that have been passed on for generations. No manipulations were made to the original files, only cropping and slowing down of the speed.

[vgmrmojo]

[unsociable_hours]

[RichieWitch]

When I saw this project, I just knew I had to find the time to participate. The genre for this track is Darkwave, in the style of the artist, Dusty Kid. 100% of the sounds in this track were extracted from the Bernasconi samples.

[NickVander]

And now, when I go upload the Disquiet cover I see that this project is about textures… Was a long day, Is too late now, I need to sleep… Good night everbody. Hope you all are doing well…