Disquiet Junto Project 0578: Rabbit Spirit Ally

Disquiet Junto
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This post popped up at disquiet.com/0578 (thanks to the powers of automation) shortly after 12:10am Pacific Time on Thursday, January 26th. (I was asleep at the time.) The email containing those instructions went out via tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto later in the morning (after I woke), and then I posted them here, on the Junto Slack, and my Mastodon account, and Instagram, etc. And if you’re on Mastodon, please use the #DisquietJunto tag. Much appreciated.

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Disquiet Junto Project 0578: Rabbit Spirit Ally
The Assignment: Make music for Lunar New Year.

Step 1: Note that this year’s Chinese zodiac animal is the rabbit.

Step 2: Take the rabbit as your temporary musical spirit ally, and make music inspired by it. (Alternately, choose the Chinese zodiac animal of your birth year.)

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0578” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0578” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0578-rabbit-spirit-ally/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. No animals should be harmed in the making inspired by this project.

Deadline: Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 30, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 26, 2023.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 578th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rabbit Spirit Ally (The Assignment: Make music for Lunar New Year), at: https://disquiet.com/0578/

Associated public-domain cover image by Johann Daniel Meyer (1748).

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0578-rabbit-spirit-ally/

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The project is now live.

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https://soundcloud.com/user-507251108/siganus-rivulatus-disquiet0578

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Made a recording of a thumping rabbit the basis for a slightly janky drum beat, proceeded to add a few layers of synths and a mildly distorted, hopping bass. Finished it off with a skipping tape effect at the end.

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I started with the idea of following the white rabbit and the Disney scene in my mind, where Alice falls down the rabbit hole and things became strange. I took used stems from older tracks, selecting only weird ones, cutting and rebuilding them by hand and with some Puremagnetik and other FX, to what I felt was an acoustic funnel which hopefully sucks you in.

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Rather than use my Chinese year (the rooster), I stuck with the present and the rabbit as my inspiration for the prompt, coupled with a desire to continue working with Supercollider to compose my Junto pieces.

With SC, it’s business as usual and I’m still exploring the basics of SynthDef’s and using buses, as well as a liberal dash of stereo spatialisation. I’m coming along with SC, but ‘thinking in code’ with music composition and not having a GUI to guide me along is still a challenging proposition.

As for the rabbits, I composed this ominous piece by imagining the cavernous network of tunnels in a rabbit warren as the anthropogenic presence of many feet stampede overhead and electro-static frequencies permeate through the substrate. Well, that was the starting point, then I began getting images of David Lynch’s Rabbits shorts stuck in my head and, well…here we are.

Once again, I’ve popped the SC script up in my GitHub repository if anyone wants to check it out.

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I’m a Rabbit myself (de we say that? I was born in a Rabbit’s year) so this is my year I guess.
Actually I don’t know what that exactly means , is your animal-sign-year supposed to be a “good” year for you? Anyway, somebody told me that this is a particularly special year for me because, besides the Rabbit there’s the “Yin Metal” that matches my birth year. Again I completely ignore what that means.
I will research a bit today, promised.

So here you have ne of my unfinished grooves that I was working these past few days to share it next February.
I rushed it to be part of this week’s junto.

electric bass
fender rhodes
wahwah guitar
clavinet
drum program

Wish a great year to everybody here, cheers
dd

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Gear; small analog modular synth, sequencer Korg SQ-1 and a Tascam digital portastudio.

In the two “melody lines” I have mimicked the movement of rabbit. Jump-jump. Pause. Jump-jump… :rabbit:

The pitch is from the logistic equation (Klangbau Köln, RND Modul Logistische Gleichung). The logistic equation is used to simulate the growth of a population. Used for pitch to melody, bass and drum.

The wind sound is controlled by NLC Sloth modules. Filter cut-of and pan.

I record straight into my Tascam and use the onboard reverb. I mix and master (master type “natural sound”) in the machine. I upload the result without editing in the computer.

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hello.

i felt like i didn’t really make my best effort with last week’s project, so i decided if this week’s was something i felt i could do, then i’d try and make something really good, and put my whole heart into it.

i have been listening to a lot of ambient music lately so that was at the forefront of my mind. however given the somewhat ambiguous prompt, i didn’t readily have an idea.

i did a little bit of research into the chinese zodiac but this was of no avail in coming up with a concept, interesting though it was. i have a good friend who is studying chinese language but he wasn’t responding to messages at the time i started working on this piece, so i wasn’t able to ask him about it. i’m intending to share the finished track with him, though.

anyway, i did what i’ve often done when stumped by a prompt, and went to freesound and searched various terms from or relating to the prompt or project title. as i went through various sounds, i began to think about how they could work together and an idea began to coalesce.

once i’d downloaded all the sounds i wanted to use, i brought them into bitwig studio and started to make an arrangement. it turned out that not all of the sounds really fit together, there were a few that i really liked in isolation but they didn’t mesh well with the rest of the piece. oh well, i can maybe save them for a future project.

i decided that this time i was going to go relatively light on the effects and processing, whereas for previous weeks i’ve sometimes had big effect chains that dramatically change the original sounds. i felt like i’d got hold of some good source material this time so i didn’t want to change it up too much, while at the same time i wanted my piece to have its own character and not just be a mishmash of samples. it was a bit of a balancing act.

it all came together rather smoothly and sounded pretty good to my ears. i’m actually really happy with how this one has come out, especially as i felt like last week’s attempt was rather lacking.

title from word association, artwork from nightcafe studio, as per usual. i hope people here enjoy this piece, once again i’ve made something quite long but i hope you’ll find it worth the time.

wishing you all a happy and prosperous new lunar year.

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“You said a moment ago that everybody you look at seems to be a rabbit,” says the doctor to his patient in a cartoon by James Thurber. “Now just what do you mean by that, Mrs. Sprague?” Meanwhile, Mrs. Sprague recoils in horror at the vision of her therapist’s enlarged, leporine head.

There is a rabbit who lives in the underbrush just behind Suss Müsik headquarters. We’ve named her/him Clover. Clover has grown to be fairly large and tends to regard humans with more curiosity than fear. Still, Clover can still easily escape from predators when compelled. Perhaps Mrs. Sprague could take a leaf from Clover’s book.

The rabbit is viewed in Chinese tradition as a calm, gentle yet crafty animal, whose energy emphasizes balance and intelligence. The phrase jiǎo tù sān kū (狡兔三窟) loosely translates as “a cunning rabbit has three burrows and more than one means of escape." With the arrival of the Lunar New Year, this is the approach Suss Müsik took with this week’s Junto.

The piece begins with a gentle piano arpeggio, broken into three fragments that randomly shift cadences like a tone poem. A fake fretless bass moves things along until a DIY synth glitches things up. Brief stabs of percussion interrupt the calm, gentle atmosphere, yet the overall feeling is one of balance and crafty intelligence (or whatever the Suss Müsik equivalent would be).

The piece is titled Jiǎo Tù Sān Kū. The image is based on an etching owned by The Welcome Collection, the use of which is covered under Public Domain Mark (PDM) terms and conditions.

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The playlist is now rolling:

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What a great “Kafka goes to the shrink” moment…
Or is it “Kafka the Shrink”?

What a lovely piece, bravo.

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Hey All,
I chose my birth year animal “The Monkey”. It seemed to suit my mood more than a rabbit.
I started with some monkey sounds from freesound which I pitched down and played with. The sounds then reminded me of a scene from the movie “The Square”. I don’t remember much about the movie but this one scene where this guy came in acting like a monkey and wreaking havoc while they are having a fancy fundraising dinner. I really dug that scene.
I decided to make a quick video using that scene.

here is the original

For the playlist

Hope all are well. Peace, Hugh

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Rather than go with the rabbit, I selected my birth animal, the horse. I started to work on a piece that morphed into a loose western-style theme a few months ago, but stopped and put it on the back burner since I wasn’t sure how to proceed. Figured this assignment was a good opportunity to finally complete it. The slightly off tempo percussion, reminds me of soundtracks from old westerns depicting horses walking along dusty trails. I’ll probably create a video with this music at some point.

This was done in Ableton Live mainly using Slate+Ash Choreographs along with some simple notes from a SX2 lap steel guitar. Palomino photo by Colt Parent on Unsplash. Hope everyone has a healthy, happy and fruitful Lunar New Year.

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Patch on my palette system that ‘jumps’ between two different states, affecting properties like voice pitch/brightness/timbre, granular density/pitch. Loosely inspired by rabbits skittish/jumpy behaviour - and thumping.

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@DeVis

Really interesting use of loops. Was the trumpet triggering the generative aspects here? - i.e. transition states, start/end point of loops.

@fakeg3nius

Strong Amiga/early 90s IBM-era vibe from this! The stab bass and skittery rhythm works really well with the flurry of arpeggiated tones.

@krakenkraft

Vertigenous and really engrossing. I enjoyed how prominent tones and resonances were gradually coaxed out of the dense weave of sounds.

@DeDe

Well, that’s irresistibly funky. Love the use of the clavinet, and oddly the groove reminds me so much of David Sylvian’s Nine Horses release from 2005, Snow Borne Sorrow. Very much in the vein of a smooth, chilled-out jazz style.

@ray_cobley

I like the homogeny of this. Immediately I started thinking of the animated version of Watership Down. It could be general (a)tonality of the pizzicato, but it certainly wasn’t one of the few whimsical scenes that came to mind.

@gis_sweden

I remember learning some logistic equations and regression theory when I was studying data science a couple of years ago, so the pitch principle behind this already had me intrigued. I think it works beautifully with the movement that you’ve tried to express here. I also really appreciate the use of space too with that wind texture wafting around.

@Aethyr

Such density going on here. Really appreciate the attention you’ve applied to blending such disparate sounds and directing the action throughout the composition.

@SussMusik

Really beautiful piece. The pacing is especially great - a steady filling of spaces with an array of diverse instrumentation and treatments. Especially dig the bongos.

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Thanks for your comment, loved “Snow Borne Sorrow” when released, bought the CD and played it a lot that year. I will have to check it out again, it’s unfairly buried with all my compact discs …

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So …

This is an actual Euclidean Chromaticon - hot off the C++ press. It was an adventure but it is finally working as it should. Four Euclidean sequencers, switchable to affect pitch, rhythm or both, fed into a 16 step sequencer which can change direction and length, or have notes in the row muted or killed. The pitches can be quantised, or fed through a Subharmonic prism - or mask, depending on what is required. They can also be transposed, inverted about a movable point, and the range can be either exploded or crushed. All parameters can be saved, recalled and fully automated.

This is a live jam using the Fibonacci series which just plays around with the rhythm mostly - something that was too difficult previously using independent plugins.

At the moment it just runs as an AU midiEffect in Logic as that’s what I have to test it. I will try and do a stand-alone version when I’ve had a bit of a break as I’m eager to get back to music now.

This feeds into Arturia’s Buchla Easel V emulation.

The Euclidean Chromaticon S
The Euclidean Chromaticon S829×803 88.2 KB

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Here’s my rabbit song. I had been working on this when the assignment came in and thought this made sense for it. I added in some guitar noise, as I was thinking of rabbits burrowing in their warrrens. I don’t usually have a particular idea for what I’m doing but I thought this one worked as it was kinda creepy sounding, and I find the idea of living underground kind of off-putting, especially the idea a ferret might come after me down there!

I used Augustus Loops, Dexed and LABS, along with electric guitar. I used one version of the guitar with a lot of effects, and then one PaulStretched.

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