Disquiet Junto Project 0535: Jigsaw Disjunction

melondruie · 2022-04-01T19:14:11.631Z

The prompt seemed like something up my alley so decided to see if I could make it work in VCV Rack. I used the main theme from Elgar’s Cello Concerto as the starting melody and proceeded to mangle it real good.

I don’t know that the technical details are very helpful since it was very scuffed, but the highlights … Used Seq++ to load midi file and recorded into Simpliciter. Sliced and diced the recording and used Chances to randomly select individual slices. Ran the output through a filter and Supermassive. The result is a bit glitchy and disjointed and probably not worth the effort but it was a good learning exercise.

krakenkraft · 2022-04-01T20:06:59.521Z

When in doubt, decide for Eric. These are the first 24 bars of Satie’s Gymnopedie #1, MIDI cut into bars, then repuzzled and then rearranged, mostly by ear.

gis_sweden · 2022-04-01T20:25:16.399Z

Thought of many ways to do this. In the end I used the Korg SQ-1 sequencer. Fx from Zoom MS-70CDR

tetkik.ve.tedavi · 2022-04-01T20:33:13.875Z

I started by searching for public domain music and when I encountered “Moonlight Sonata / Beethoven” in the hits, I thought to give a try since it’s well-known and I also like it a lot. Recording from scratch in a few days would not be possible for me so I used a MIDI file which did not come with any information whatsoever (from www.bitmidi.com).

I’ve been learning Supercollider these days so I first tried to read the MIDI file into SC and do interesting stuff with the pattern functions I have been learning. I only succeeded in shuffling the entire set of notes which was uninteresting.

I wish I had the live looping skills and equipment but not quite; I rarely work with loops. So, I switched to a DAW (Waveform 11) and begun chopping up the MIDI. I thought it could be more interesting if I chopped from different parts of the song, mostly 1 bar or close (half a bar, 1.5 bars, etc.) and shuffled them without hearing what is going on at first. I looped some of the chopped clips while leaving the rest mostly alone and ran these two sets (looped versus non-looped) into different instruments in UVI Mello. The only MIDI editing I did other than this was to transpose some of the notes of the looped clips just to mess things up a bit.

I was curious how it would sound with synths so I also took these two tracks to Bitwig 4 and ran them into different synths with some effects. I’m running Bitwig in demo mode so I can’t save or export, therefore I recorded the result into a walkman and recorded that back into the laptop. It sounded okay but the Mello sounds were too nice to give up, so I placed the synth version underneath the Mello tracks.

This could have been a lot more fun and interesting if I had better looping skills (or if I spent more time on it). But it helps to push myself and see what I need to learn.

ray_cobley · 2022-04-02T10:25:05.541Z

lazenbeeindustries · 2022-04-02T13:23:41.917Z

I like this, makes me think of Basinski or what Eno did to Pachebel’s canon.

ossimuratore · 2022-04-02T16:05:12.931Z

L’invasor Una Mattina Bella.

Ostinato variation over a traditional italian Resistance song called Bella Ciao.

Made with NI Maschine+ and ASM Hydrasynth Explorer, thinking to the victims of all current wars.

RandomShuffle · 2022-04-02T22:50:06.077Z

I thought of Whiskey In The Jar, not Thin Lizzy’s best song, but everyone knows it.
Recorded in SAMPLR
Played the licks from the intro
Rerecorded in ableton
Have fun!
The name of my track is an anagram

RPLKTR · 2022-04-03T18:12:50.487Z

With apologies to Miles Davis.

What if “Nardis” was written in the bass clef?

Same sheet music, different meaning.

Nardis theme with the wrong clef1356×1538 160 KB

Jigsaw Disjunction?

“Nardis” is one of my favorite melodies ever. I spent the weekend trying to resequence it thinking in terms of bars, notes, or phrases. In the end, none of it was satisfactory. But I really did try:

Failed attempt at resequencing in "Logic"3381×877 255 KB

Jigsaw Disjunction!

I think if you squint hard enough, this still qualifies as “breaking the melody into pieces”. I just broke the sheet music symbols into pieces and thus rearranged the piece wholesale. Then I applied different chords to the melody, learned to play it on the piano, and added fretless bass and strings (all three from Yamaha CP300). Drums from Ableton Live.

To me, this sounds like a sketch by the Beatles.

Forelight · 2022-04-03T23:49:55.587Z

from the introduction of the rite of spring, taken into ableton and quickly chopped up using Vector Grain instrument, where i jammed the patterns using keys. Some FX (Driftmaker and RX9)

celaeno · 2022-04-04T05:51:28.115Z

How exciting, this is my first disquiet-project! After playing around with the Ode to Joy theme from Beethoven’s Ninth and not coming to a satisfying result, I also defaulted to Eric Satie (thanks to the @krakenkraft motto “When in doubt, decide for Eric”). I used the “Vexations” theme, chopped it up and shoved it around between some MIDI instruments. (Not too happy with the piano sound, but I ran out of time). I’m sure there’s still a lot to find by playing the new melody/melodies on an actual instrument, so I might give that a try later on.

rshaddox · 2022-04-04T07:20:52.385Z

“Bare for Every Storm That Blows” is a reworking of Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More.” I played the song into Logic Pro, cut the MIDI and reassembled it, and then replayed it as best I could (my keyboard skills are remedial at best). I kept clustering repeated bars, and it ended up sounding almost fanfare-like to me. The title is from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens and refers (like Foster’s song) to the vulnerability of poverty.

wasabicube · 2022-04-04T10:12:29.651Z

I took the almost ubiquitous Canon in D by Pachelbel, divided it every second bar and reversed the notes. Then replaced the three violin parts with Spitfire Audio’s LABS Ondes Musicales. This was given some room reverb and Eventide Blackhole before being passed, appropriately, through AudioThing’s Gong Amp collaboration with Hainbach.

Originally intended to keep in the Viola and Cello parts but found the mix too cluttered so pared back the instrumentation and some of the effects I felt I’d slathered on too heavily.

As an aside, we used the 1968 Orchestre de Chambre Jean-François Paillard recording as part of our wedding ceremony.

Thanks to the LYCO Sheet Music Archive for the MIDI file this is based upon.

Rprecht · 2022-04-04T15:49:01.391Z

This piece is vaguely inspired by the harmonies of The Beach Boys. I used Native Instruments Playbox for the pad and vocal effects.

RabMusicLab · 2022-04-04T19:18:24.549Z

The song “Der Mond ist aufgegangen” was my favourite song as a small child. I was deeply touched when I heard the song again as part of a theater performance two weeks ago. Therefore this melody immediately came to my mind when reading this very inspiring prompt.

The text is a poem by Matthias Claudius published 1779, the melody is by Johann Abraham Petter Schulz (1790). There is even an english wikipedia-entry: Der Mond ist aufgegangen - Wikipedia

I started with the Midi-data from https://ingeb.org/Lieder/DerMondi.html
First I thought of working with phrases, but then I followed the great suggestion of @disquiet to break the melody into bars - resulting in much more freedom since the former phrases are broken up.
I stuck to the notation in wikipedia. I took the first 7 bars (including the first offbeat that I considered as whole first bar) and the last bar (since bars 8 - 12 are identical to 2 - 6). And then I started building a new melody by shifting the midi-blocks around. All 8 bars are used at least once.

When I had finished I used - for the first time - the capability of Cubase to show the notation of a Midi-track, and played the new melody with my keyboard.

I wanted to keep that deeply melancholic and peaceful ambiance (that is at least how I feel about the song), and built the ambiance around the melody. I used again Olafur Arnalds Stratus and Evolution for start, bridge and ending, the new Cubase Verve, and other sounds from different sources (pianobook, BBC Orchestra, Hauschka Toolset, LABS, decent samples…).

fakeg3nius · 2022-04-04T20:59:22.158Z

Because I wasn’t sure about the rights thing, I first recreated the score in Ableton with orchestral instruments, then sampled that & chopped it up, ran it through some granular synthesis, added drums and a bass line. I’m probably not exactly following the instructions, though.

threedaymonk · 2022-04-04T21:09:36.578Z

Like @celeano, I also chose Ode to Joy, but I had a bit more success. I started by transcribing the melody in Lilypond, and rearranged the bars. Then I reharmonised it: as it’s in G major, I started with the relative (E) minor, and went from there, throwing in a bit of Japanese-inspired key fluctuation because I watched a video about that the other day.

I did most of the arrangement in Lilypond, generating MIDI and listening using a generic GM player. When I was happy with the parts, I pulled the MIDI file into my MPC One, assigned instruments, finger-drummed some drum and bass beats over the top, and arranged it a bit.

It’s a bit silly, and it was great fun to make.

ntrier · 2022-04-05T01:37:59.705Z

I only had a little bit of time to do this, so I took the old hoary classic Misty, which I know very well, and rearranged it into a new track.

EDIT: I suppose I could talk about the process! So, I recorded the melody as MIDI to a click track, then I cut up the recording into one measure each. Then, I used Ableton’s Follow Actions to make the measures play randomly. I generated an 8-measure A melody, repeated it for A, made a new B section, then repeated A again at the end, in homage to the AABA Tin Pan Alley format. I made a few tweaks to the melody, sometimes to clean up my own timing or ornamentations. From there, I tried to throw together chords that sounded interesting and unexpected. I differentiated the sections mainly using different instruments. The drums are a mix of my own programming and loops.

I’ve been on a lo-fi hip-hop vibe lately and also trying to get more adventurous with chord voicings, so that’s pretty much what you get here. I recorded the whole process (except for ear candy and rough mixing) on Twitch, which you can watch here - Twitch

SinnySounds · 2022-04-05T03:23:53.695Z

I decided to select a song from Kevin MacLeod, a prolific musician who has thousands of songs registered in the Creative Commons. With nearly six million plays on Spotify as of April 2022, “Sneaky Snitch” is MacLeod’s most played song.

While I am a lover of synthesizers, I am unable to play anything sophisticated on the instrument, so I searched for a midi track of “Sneaky Snitch” to mangle, eventually deciding on one created by Jacob Morgan and George Burdell.

The melody was split up into 22 sections and were all rearranged. Within those 22 sections, I nudged nearly every single note around to place in a new location to create a new melody. I switched the instrument patch from a pizzicato string ensemble to a celesta. Even after all those changes, the song still resembled “Sneaky Snitch”, so I dragged some of the midi tracks down to some percussion patches, one pitched (a timpani) and another unpitched (blocks, gongs, wind chimes, etc). After this was completed, some notes were deleted to make room for an ambient synth.

Cryptohelix · 2022-04-05T06:29:19.790Z

Sliced and diced a MIDI rendering of Ave Maria into Mary Avenue. Came to terms with my music theory chops being trash bc I could not line up the backing chord blasts with the melody shifting up a couple keys. My approach here was to rearrange measures to get new melodies that are almost familiar.

I nixed an earlier idea of mixing and matching disparate parts of pop music choruses, over copyright concerns. Parts of this reworked public domain piece work, and some are a little discordant.