Disquiet Junto Project 0590: Concrète Roots

[disquiet]

Disquiet Junto Project 0590: Concrète Roots
The Assignment: Make music combining field recordings and feedback

This project is the first of three that are being done in collaboration with the 2023 Musikfestival Bern (musikfestivalbern.ch), which will be held in Switzerland from September 6 through 10. The topic this year is « √ » — as the organization explains: “the radical, or square root symbol and the power of its symbolism are central to the festival and these will be translated into music in multifarious ways.” All three projects will engage with the work of Éliane Radigue, who is the Composer-in-Residence for the 2023 festival.

We are working at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the fifth year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern.

Select recordings resulting from these three Disquiet Junto projects may be played and displayed throughout the festival.

Step 1: Consider two different techniques: field recordings and feedback.

Step 2: Combine field recordings and feedback in the development of an original track.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0590” (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 “disquiet0590” (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-0590-concrete-roots/

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.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, April 24, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 20, 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 590th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Concrète Roots (The Assignment: Make music combining field recordings and feedback), at: https://disquiet.com/0590/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0590-concrete-roots/

[disquiet]

The project is now live. Thanks, @TobiasReber!

[AlvaroDeCampos]

Been a while…

Have been meaning to join a Junto again for some time, but somehow, things kept getting in the way. I do listen to the Disquiet Junto playlist most weeks, though.
Anyway… Field recordings, feedback, Éliane Radigue… hard to resist.

I was in Paris last weekend and brought my recorder along. Our hotel was right outside of Gare de l’Est. The little four note tune that is at the start of the French Railroad service announcements was in the room about every two minutes, and so became somewhat emblematic of the trip. Also, there was this fluorescent tube light in the hotel bathroom that had a je ne said quoi sound. Perhaps it’s the sound of arriving in a work place — a garage, a storage space, a warehouse, a studio — in the very early morning, still dark, at an hour when no one who has any choice in the matter is not in bed, everything quiet, all alone, and then this tingling, almost glitchy tone as the lights come on. You don’t see/hear them as much as you used to.

So those recordings, together with a recording of a departing train, became the basis of this track.

The feedback aspect of the track is inspired by things I read in the llllllll cybernetic music thread. I suppose it is a take on work by Jaap Vink. The audio signal goes into a delay, is then sent through some effects (in Vink’s setup, a ring modulator and a filter, if I recall correctly), then a reverb, and then sent back to the input, with some form of attenuation that is controlled by an envelope follower. The result is an audio signal loop that keeps its feedback in check automatically.

In my case everything was made on an iPad, which is surprisingly good and versatile for creative audio routing. Instead of a ring modulator, I used an app that has a bunch of resonators that you can actually ‘play’ using a keyboard: playing a note on the keyboard will activate the resonator tuned to that note. Playing the resonators subtly, shifts/nudges the feedbacking audio into different parts of the frequency spectrum (in a way that is roughly analogous to what the ring modulator and filter do in Vink’s setup).

The whole thing was recorded – semi improvisationally – in a one-track-single-take, then edited slightly for size and finished off with a dash of compression and EQ. Et voilà!

Curious to see what everyone comes up with!

[xiiixxi]

Another track using the zero-input, self-oscillating Erbe-Verb as a source of sound. The field recording is something I had on my drive that I collected a few years ago for a website I built dedicated to allowing people to reconstruct and ‘record’ their own experience of ‘the hum’ - which I suffered from for a few years back in the 2000s ( … and no, it wasn’t wind farms, or aliens, or military deep-tunnelling - not in my experience anyway) … I digress. The field recording was made in some city somewhere - I really can’t find the documentation - but most likely from some sort of pre-runner to freesounds.

The track makes use of just the Erbe-Verb, a single oscillator, and the field recording warped through AudioThing’s Alborosie Dub Station. Reverb courtesy of VS’s MIRacle.

[Ausgesuchtestenohren]

An old fence, a gate making noises and the lawn mower of the neighbour. Field recordings with feedback in honour of Éliane Radigue.

[disquiet]

And the playlist is rolling:

[Glitcher]

Hi all So this one is a mix of a hydrophone recording of a small pond and feedback from modular. Koma field kit triggers a solenoid on a contact mic which goes into a delay and is then combined with an analogue oscillator inside a ring mod. The output goes into a feedback filterbank and LPF and then into a stereo reverb.
This is accompanied later by feedback from shakti module and a morphagene jam.

[Noimspartacus]

I took a couple of field recordings of birdsong and a tidal pool and created a Forester patch which used the raw material for looping and feedback and then recorded myself travelling down the different paths.

[rawore]

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Disquiet Junto Project 0590: Concrète Roots
The Assignment: Make music combining field recordings and feedback

——

Step 1: Consider two different techniques: field recordings and feedback.

Step 2: Combine field recordings and feedback in the development of an original track.

——
Gone Postal
—————
A video of US post office destruction was recorded. Heavy diesel diggers and grabbers at work.

Gone postal

The audio track in Ableton live was passed through a limiter and sent to a return. The track had an auto filter; envelope 44.6, attack 2.05 milliseconds,

Release 55.6 milliseconds. Using 12 stage filter.

Filter: freq 138 hz, resonance49%

LFO: amount 17.6, random stepped shape, rate 1.39 hz, spin37%

The audio track and the feedback track were played simultaneously and recorded using resampling.

"Sound design with feedback in Ableton Live’ by ‘seed to stage’ provides a quick outline of variants for feed back using a return.

Sound Design with Feedback in Ableton Live - YouTube

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Not used here, but an interesting exploration of methods in iPad AUM
By Jacob Haq

AUM | Feedback Sound Design is Awesome! | haQ attaQ

—-

Another experiment via AUM setup using audiodamage discord4 pitchshifting delay with slight offsets. Not submitted to this junto project

—-

[Kitzmann]

A walk through my mother’s parking garage; a short elevator ride; snippets of a preacher’s sermon; radio static; mysterious voices and glorious feedback from an Enner and a PolyD. This and more found its way into my Polyend Tracker and then into Logic with a few feedback loops using a bus trick I learned from Youtube. Hallelujah!

[he_nu_ri]

I used a montage of iPhone field recordings of ambient sounds during a visit to Disneyland (Anaheim, California) in August 2022. The audio was then processed and slowed down 3.5x in Ableton Live using PaulXStretch. Reverb and feedback were added using Arturia Rev INTENSITY plugin.

[DeDe]

Thunder field recordings by Mike Koening
Wind field recordings by Chris Watson
Epiphone Sheraton electric guitar strums by me
I copied the guitar feedbacks and manipulated it a little bit.
Recorded today, Friday 21st April 2023 during the early morning, in paris , france.
Photo by David Moum

[gis_sweden]

Horses moving around in a riding hall is a lovely binaural sound. It’s soft. Swooshing. Sweeping. Noting you can capture with a mobile phone. But that’s what I did. So that’s my field recording. The voice is the trainer (feat. Niclas).
I wanted my feedback sound to match the swooshing sound of horses. So, the sound is driven by white noise. I used my modular to create a feedback sound/feedback patch.

Now I have two sounds. I wanted the horse sound to move around in the stereo field. And I wanted to reflect the moving horses. I use ChucK to randomly selects pieces of the sample and the script also randomizes pan and playback speed.
The feedback sound is centred in the stereo field and acts as a rhythmic foundation. More or less.
This is my tribute to old school musique concrete.

[ray_cobley]

[tendigits]

Fieldback - disquiet0590

In this entry, I ended up with something that felt like the doorway between two experiences. The harshness of processed feedback vs the gentle field recordings of birds. That led me to extend this into video, where b&w vs color further emphasizes the switch between experiences. I’m 100% happy with the process/learning from this week’s exercise, and maybe 40% happy with the results - but that’s ok

Patch notes are in the video description.

[DaveSeidel]

I took a brief portion of a field recording I made several years ago of high tide in Provincetown Harbor (Provincetown, MA), and subjected it to a process inspired by Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room”. I iteratively processed the sound through a convolution reverb using an impulse response (IR) from an empty concrete nuclear reactor hall, Each successive generation re-applies the reverb so that eventually we hear only the resonant frequencies in the space from which the IR was derived. This was a manual process, as I wanted to preserve the ever-increasing reverb tails, and also to control the reverb level to avoid digital distortion (which can be cool, but not what I was after).

When I assembled the segments into a single track, I decided to reverse the order so that the most highly-processed segment comes first, and the original recording is only heard at the end of the piece.

Made in Reaper using the Waves IRLive Stereo plugin. The IR is from the OpenAIR Project: www.openair.hosted.york.ac.uk/?page_id=626

[Forelight]

local riverside sounds merged with electromagnetic squalls

[Hugh_G_Twatt]

Hey All,
I went with recording myself drinking a seltzer water. I pitched that down 8 and 16 steps unwarped. When I think about feedback I think about the thats loud and the one on an echo fx. I used a delay and I whisted a part to sound like feedback. Hope all are well.

NON-SUBMISSIONS-check it if you want to.
I did a dance version

and a distorted noise version

Peace, Hugh

[dandante]

Fourteen centuries ago, the archivist Bungul captured the stylings of Hatband MacFahrquar with a tape recorder the size of a mountain.

Distortion from the Van Allen belt (at that time a mere sash) vaporized both performer and archivist, and can be heard on the later part of the tape, which alone survived.

[RabMusicLab]

A great project to guide me to unknown territories, many thanks Marc!

I started with my “new” gear, and recorded our dishwasher with the two second-hand dictaphones. Then I played these recordings and recorded them into Cubase. I added a third fieldrecording I made last year of a brook.
Then I tried to overcome the very strict feedback-blockage of Cubase and fed the output of my audio-interface into its input. I had inserted effects (Multitap delay, Chow Matrix) and regulated the feedback with the input-gain knob. But I avoided getting a strong feedback. With this approach I re-recorded all three audios separately.
I applied some EQing to the now six audio-tracks. For the final track I automated the mix between the six tracks to keep the ambiance interesting.

I really like the outcome, although this is not the kind of track I normally create . And I learnt that feedback can help to gently enhance the sound…