Disquiet Junto Project 0617: Haunt Scape

Raincat · 2023-10-28T11:19:25.398Z

There’s just something creepy about old fashioned prams.

I found a half wrecked one a while ago and took it home with the intention of taking it to bits to use parts of it in my sculptures. I haven’t got round to doing that yet so all the sounds I sourced are from the intact pram.

There were plenty of clangs to be had and some nice springs that make quite complex sounds. Wheels with spokes and suspension creaks are sounds I haven’t used before.
I used my fingers and some animal bones to make the sounds and it was recorded with a contact mic.
No effects, just the straight sound (with a bit of EQing).

RabMusicLab · 2023-10-28T16:41:40.079Z

I was unsure how to start, so I searched the Cubase Mediabay for sounds starting with “Gho(st)”, “Hallo(ween)”, “spo(oky)”. I found among others the three synth-sounds from the TAL Noisemaker, my own Padshop sound based on a foghorn and some samples.
I laid out a chord-progression and built a loop with all instruments to have this as base for an arrangement.

Then I had the feeling that vocals would be perfect. I chose an Icelandic poem on freesound, left that unchanged and adapted the loop to different sections of the poem. In the end I was very pleased with the track, but the Halloween-connection was lost: Skýldu mér [feat. Lalli Fraendi]

So I decided to start again from that result. I deleted vocals, drums and the appegiated melody and set the project to half speed. I added two “haunted” sounds and reintroduced drums.

DanSimpson · 2023-10-28T19:15:24.879Z

Unsettling soundscapes come easy to me for some reason, take from that what you will . This one came about through 3 instances of Plasmonic controlled by my LinnStrument 128 (with the low row acting as a mod wheel) and a Novation Launchpad X set up as an 8 channel fader bank controlling its macros. It was straight up improv with minor editing, mostly because I used Garage Band on a laptop and you can’t do anything complicated, which is part of its charm. As to process, I had no plan or preconceptions, just started playing sounds and manipulating them until I found something I liked and hit record.

Pineyb · 2023-10-28T20:50:07.970Z

Some enchanted evening in the haunted graveyard… you might meet a stranger thing.

fakeg3nius · 2023-10-29T14:18:43.144Z

Was watching the documentary Lynch/Oz and got some inspirational direction from it, using windy soundscapes and reverby clock-work mechanisms. Also added the chords from the Over the Rainbow song, but changed them into Phrygian and added a vocals-sounding melody, for extra haunting effect.

jstamm · 2023-10-29T16:16:11.739Z

This is my first submission to the Disquiet Junto project.

I wanted to incorporate elements from early horror movie themes, how composition was used before any advanced synth and effects were used. The bass motif hear throughout the track is base on the Spider Baby (1967) movie theme. I also tried creating creepy effects by processing percussion sounds.

disquiet · 2023-10-29T17:40:59.844Z

Welcome to the Junto, @jstamm!

Spanneut · 2023-10-29T18:09:30.686Z

Hey all, I’ve tried to compose a festive dark marching band…

pesky_human · 2023-10-29T19:53:20.020Z

Happy Halloween!

Here is some terror-flavored acid to make everyone feel a little less at ease this spooky season. This is a beginner test with the Octatrack that I just got into using. Some Digitone pads destroyed with tape sim, the trusty 303 and a couple of Legowelt’s filthy drum samples.

Enjoy!

markrushton · 2023-10-29T20:04:27.034Z

On October 1st, as the band “Ambient Matyk”, I released an album of Halloween-themed ambient music and sounds called “Inside the Graveyard”. It’s on the streamers and Bandcamp. This is an edit of one of those tracks, “Almost Like a Haunted House”.

Source instrument is a kalimba that has a line-out.

The sound was fed through my two Empress boxes (Echosystem and Reverb) and then my Electro-Harmonix Pitch Fork, but the Empress boxes did most of the heavy lifting.

Edit the file on the ends, some normalization, and that’s it.

I took the picture and processed the photo via thermal printing and acrylic ink. It’s an angel at Woodland Cemetery in Des Moines.

Bandcamp: Inside the Graveyard | Ambient Matyk

Spotify: Spotify

Artwork on a tote bag: Angel Of Woodland Art | Mark Rushton

jimkang · 2023-10-29T22:12:46.162Z

I started by making something ambient but ugly by using a web audio mistake I recorded and using a previous Junto piece as a sidechain gain controller for it to impart dynamics to it. I got the idea to add “vocals”, by which I mean a recording I made of a tub draining that I thought sounded like guttural death metal vocals.

It felt pretty sick at this point, so I decided to stick to not having any pulse or traditional riffs, but I decided to favor the goregrind ideal of making “sick fucking shit,” as it is called, and let go of keeping it ambient. It’s code-generated noise, field recordings, and a little guitar low in the mix, but I feel it has a certain goregrind disgustingness nonetheless.

Creatures_Once · 2023-10-29T22:55:00.308Z

I don’t always enjoy the scary things, but I really enjoyed making some scary music. I jammed for about an hour on some hardware gear with this prompt in mind. Later that night, I walked around the house recording my creeky wood floors and rusty doors. Then cut for length and added some effects and edits in Live.
While I was making these sounds, my wife Monica created this digital collage image. We enjoyed this simultaneous creative process and plan on doing it again. She wrote about this here: waxingphotopoetic.substack.com/p/circle-…edium=web

LilySloane · 2023-10-30T01:35:15.015Z

Lucky me, I’d already created a spooky track a few days before this prompt showed up in my inbox. I turned my entryway into a Victorian spirit photographer’s haunted darkroom. I even built an imitation of an old box camera using stuff around the house and my neighbor/friend’s 3D printing skills.

This loopable track doesn’t quite match the level of intricacy I had in my head but I think it totally did the trick for my Halloween party Friday evening and will work just great for trick-or-treaters Tuesday.

The little clip of a woman’s voice is from a movie I discovered while searching for films about Spiritualism called “Séance On A Wet Afternoon”. One thing I would have done more of if I’d had more time was find more eerie clips like that.

The soundscape was created using some synths in Logic and improvising on the piano because you can’t go wrong with a creepy de-tuned piano under ominous, atmospheric tones.

Raincat · 2023-10-30T12:03:00.821Z

My cats did not like this track

SamPlair · 2023-10-30T14:07:15.097Z

The uninvited.

I’ll admit, I went full cheese. No melody in sight. A blacklight haunted house full of local teens playing chainsaw maniacs, while scattered boomboxes play sound effects. What have I done?

But seriously I’m so grateful for this supportive forum. The work by everyone is so inspiring and fantastic I have to really fight imposter syndrome just to post every week.

Process: Samples from old sound effects CD’s, YouTube, freesound.org: wolves, zombies, bats, doors, whispers, shifting dunes, sky trumpets (that’s a rabbit hole). A mechanical opera record warped with Morphagene, modulated with Pams and Ripples. Guitar swells through Erica synths black hole sampled and reprocessed with an ISD sampler. Assembled in Ableton with LFO modulated EQ’s and reverbs. Compressed and Ozone stereo on the master.

ksa · 2023-10-30T16:05:33.679Z

I did a eurorack improv that sounded like some kind of horror soundtrack. Then I mangled a recording of a howling dog for some extra haunting sounds.

bassling · 2023-10-30T20:17:43.897Z

I got my wind organs ready for a southerly, but by Monday evening I hadn’t recorded anything.

Here’s my streetscape at dusk, dominated by a blackbird and the usual Leeton hum of the rice co-op.

There’s a moment when some galahs come to roost and, as it ends, a neighbour walked her two dogs and stirred the yapper across the road.

Funny thing is that just after midnight on Monday, as the calendar ticked over to Halloween, I woke to the wind banging doorways but decided to go back to sleep.

Kitzmann · 2023-10-30T22:05:13.303Z

Spooky sounds on the Terra, with added reverb and distortion. Now all I need is a fog machine.

Marco_Marongiu · 2023-10-30T22:33:02.306Z

The Halloween celebration, in Latin and Mediterranean culture countries, is not very popular.
In recent years we have begun to take an interest in this event, mainly for questions of fashion and trend. So, to be inspired by something somehow close to the spirit of the holiday, I chose to look at elements that have a certain analogy, the Silly Symphonies (the skeleton dance, 1929), the “dance macabre” or the medieval “totentanz”.

The result is a piece with an ironic/playful character, almost a mix between the more “candid” soul of a Tim Burton and the much more disturbing mind of a Stephen King.

Thank you for listening.

PS.: unfortunately, due to current logistical issues, I cannot do the usual upload on SC. The only platform available is Bandcamp

ntrier · 2023-10-31T00:00:42.890Z

I wanted to make something a little more uptempo in the “Spooky Scary Skeletons” vibe, so I pulled up a xylophone sample and started experimenting. The chord progression I came up was in 6/4, which was pretty cool, so I went with that! (The middle section is 4/4 and then the chord progression arpeggios show up again, but in 5/4 this time for some reason).

In terms of timbre and sound design, Synplant 2 is all over this track - I figured this was a good chance to run it through its paces. Whenever I got a sound I liked, I would evolve it in Synplant to get a slightly weirder version. A lot of the sounds are two weird evolutions paired together. For things like crashes and fills, I drew an envelope to slowly increase the mod wheel (which changes the sound) over the course of the whole track, so the sound would be a little different every time time it appeared (not sure it’s audible in a busy track like this, but it’s there!)

The intro and outro emerged from experimenting with a synth sound, and I thought it might make a nice contrast to the intensity of the beat-driven sections of the track.

I also took this as opportunity to create a very short track.