Make a Sonic Palindrome (Disquiet Junto 0252)

mode.analogue · 2016-10-30T17:51:24.941Z

https://soundcloud.com/radiohummingbird/disquiet0252

this is ¶radio hummingbird’s contribution to this week’s disquiet junto with the serial number 0252. in short, the requirement for this contribution was to record a piece of music which is inspired by the palindrome, which refers to a word or phrase which can be used forwards as well as backwards without losing it’s meaning.

this piece has been created using my special little travel synth kit (the modules used were: Koe 2.0, Radio Music, Disting mk 3, Uloop, Spring and Polivoks ADSR)plus the SQ1 and a looping pedal. a burnt out light bulb, as well as an empty glass bottle with it’s plastic lid and a used up pill wrapper. nothing else. the only post-processing applied was LANDR for mastering the recording.

please enjoy what you hear.

Mtt_Nx · 2016-10-30T18:30:52.834Z

https://soundcloud.com/mattnix/and-back3

Just guitar, and ableton’s stutter-y time stretching
I did the Brian Eno thing where you bounce it out, then decide it should be half speed

now to listen to everybody’s submissions!

gregory.bell · 2016-10-30T19:56:43.232Z

This is a simple structural palindrome (A, AB, ABC, AB, A), composed in Ableton - with an El Capistan guitar pedal processing the keyboard voice. The juxtaposition of ethereal choir and police radio clips is… unsettling.

https://soundcloud.com/kind_sir/direct-order

apatchofnettles · 2016-10-30T21:16:28.595Z

Thanks - it ends up being a track that will sound quite different if you reverse the audio … but come out the same if you reversed and re-ran the arrangement/scoring in the DAW (used Reaper).

Hypoid · 2016-10-30T22:20:14.447Z

Happy Halloween,

https://soundcloud.com/user-651760074/kurbrukdisquiet0252

When the email came for this weeks project, I had just started reading this blog(below) about Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”, which suggests along with hidden meanings there was a concerted effort to mirror key parts of the film relative to timeframe. So I thought Halloween, Shining, Kubrick, mirroring and palindrome…perfect right? Turns out it is exceptionally hard to create perfect symmetry/mirroring in any project, let alone a full length movie…who knew Well I did my best given limitations of time and patience, starting with a patch in Nave for the low frequency parts. After cutting the bits I liked, they were set over a dark acoustic kit made in Patterning. A field recording of a perpetually slamming metal door was cut and added to the Nave pattern for rhythm. Made a dark patch in Magellan, then stretched, pitch shifted and layered for the fluctuating pad running throughout. The palindrome/mirror/symmetry is there, but unlike Kubrick I couldn’t get the timeline too work, ideally it would have been 66.6 bpm(is), 3:33 min long(isn’t), deeper(isn’t) and creepier(kinda). The usual suspects Nave, Patterning, Cubasis 2, Magellan and Zoom H2.

jonnys53.blogspot.com/2007/06/what-y…have-seen.html

Craig_Wharton · 2016-10-30T22:31:50.475Z

https://soundcloud.com/ohm-research/aire-disquiet-0252

When I was young, my grandmother had this Heetaire Fan Glo space heater
that would keep me warm while drying off after my bath. I used to enjoy
flicking water off of my fingers to hear the sizzling sound when the
drops contacted the red glowing heating elements. Probably not the
safest thing to be doing, but what did I know when I was 6 years old? I
just liked the sound. After wrestling with my modular all weekend on a
mission unrelated to this project, it finally yielded this piece. It
reminds me of the oscillating sound of the fan in the space heater. I
can still smell the hot metal of the coils. I recorded a stereo pair, then split that into two mono tracks. I made a reverse copy of each track, then recombined all 4 tracks. Crude, but hopefully effective.

abalone · 2016-10-30T23:31:17.988Z

cool sounds

disquiet · 2016-10-30T23:40:10.008Z

Yeah, when posting a url, just copy the url and paste it into the message field here at llllllll.co. Make sure there is a full line before it and a full line after.

ioflow · 2016-10-31T00:33:36.571Z

it’s been too long since i last participated in a junto project. i’ve really been looking forward to revisiting the palindrome concept, so i recorded a layered improvisation for keys, modular synth, effects, and field recordings, making use of the sudden rainfall as afternoon drifts toward evening.

https://soundcloud.com/ioflow/20161030a

i wanted to have the song begin and end in the same manner (ABA metastructure), and to have individual palindromic sections in between that contain their own mirrors, with little variations throughout. the shifting pads created with the modular were another way of adding symmetry, in the attack/release envelopes.

modular notes: a few tracks of mangrove, played by earthsea and grid, running through ripples and clouds (and then through el capistan and bluesky), with just friends and peaks providing amplitude envelopes.

plusch · 2016-10-31T03:03:10.200Z

I generated a two-bar MIDI sequence with Obscurium, then mirrored it
horizontally to get my four-bar palindrome. This was used to drive five
different custom Aalto patches, all treated with delay.

Paul

YaWha · 2016-10-31T04:34:47.049Z

Noodled out a provocative four-bar vocal part, into a free Soundfont that pytchblend pointed me at (<-- no better man!) - it’s the Irina Brochin soundfont from Papelmedia.

Flipped the Midi in Ableton (learned how to do that using Midi Stretch Markers!) - and used Ableton Follow Actions to play the forward midi, then the reversed, and back around again…

Added some chords by playing back the midi from the vocal part and recording on a new track thru an Ableton Chord device, with some edits to the midi notes after, And added a bass line part that agreed with the piano part.

Added drums into Ableton Session Drums, midi from a Groove Monkee pack. Some sonic treats are added thru the track…

Half-way thru the track, I started a copy of the vocal part, offset by four bars. Both vocal parts interplay nicely together, further highlighting another nature of pallindromes - not only can backwards sound good after forwards, but backwards and forwards together can agree like a pair of gloves…

One final variation on the original vocal midi was a hum-type tenor vocal part in the closing stages, closing out the track,
Faded the track out by mixing into Audio Damage EOS on the master bus, automating the Mix level from dry to fully wet in the final bars.

That’s what you see in the track photo there - the pallindromic ‘mirroring’ of the vocal midi notes, symmetry in the horizonal, and also, a translation in the lower offset vocal part…
Reminds me a bit of the Arecibo Message sent in 1974 to the globular cluster M13, some 22,000 light years away, which inspired the Track Title.

en.wikipedia.org

Arecibo message

The Arecibo message is a 1974 interstellar radio message carrying basic information about humanity and Earth sent to globular star cluster M13 in the hope that extraterrestrial intelligence might receive and decipher it. The message was broadcast into space a single time via frequency modulated radio waves at a ceremony to mark the remodeling of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico on 16 November 1974. The message was aimed at the current location of M13 some 25,000 light years away b The n...

Very pretty indeed.

Don_Stanley · 2016-10-31T05:48:49.932Z

https://soundcloud.com/user-696185036/he-saw-i-was-ehdisquiet-252

Made some sequence of midi note I thought was interested, then progressed it (according to my impression of what that means) I IV ii I ii V I, which I thought of as a palindromic progression. The middle I is kind of inverted. Then I did the same with what I thought of as the retrograde inversion of that. Then did a harmonic series up and down, and progressed it according to the same cord progression, then did the same thing with the inversion and retrograde of the initial sequence of notes. In the second half I also added the drums playing backwards (meaning I played the same drums together with their midi samples played backwards).

BennDeMole · 2016-10-31T09:35:46.907Z

https://soundcloud.com/benn-demole/to-hive-2-disquiet0252-sonic-palindrome
When first thinking about this project I had two ideas. One was to use
Photosounder to make an ambient piece that was identical forwards and
backwards, maybe using the image with this weeks challenge as part of
it. The other was to write a simple melody that would sound good
forwards and backwards. Taking “Never odd or even” as a palindrome would
mean that the spaces between the letters (or notes) don’t have to be
the same, which gives some space for creative interpretation of the
melody.
In the end I used both ideas.

Paul · 2016-10-31T14:05:31.196Z

So it had to be a square wave, because it would sound the same backwards. And then the melody should be a palindrome and be the same backwards and forwards. This is the first part. Then I added some breakbeat and played with the loop lengths.

https://soundcloud.com/paulchristophrose/disquiet0252

Paul · 2016-10-31T14:12:51.162Z

Trippy! Love it. Could be a great soundtrack for a documentary movie about the arecibo message.

YaWha · 2016-10-31T14:55:25.560Z

Thanks Paul! That’s very good of you to say so…

Love your own one too! Wonderfully busy, but with simplicity at its core.

dude · 2016-10-31T16:45:28.743Z

dang, these last handful of uploads have been awesome. incredibly engaging.

minorshores · 2016-11-01T00:26:53.447Z

https://soundcloud.com/minorshores/junto252-mixdown1/s-sAPyu

A very literal take on the brief, I suppose, but I thought of the process and was curious to find out what would come out of it. I tried to construct a track that is structurally consistent whilst being identical when played backwards.
Process : each track was constructed by taking a motif, duplicating it and reversing it, and panning both forward & reverse on opposite sides. Main motif is 12 bars long and every other motif’s length is a denominator of 12 so that they all eventually align. The second half of the track is a copy of the first, reversed. As such the track is a stereo mirror image of itself when played backwards (I think). I’m doing a terrible job of explaining this and confusing myself. It’s late.

Formant · 2016-11-01T06:21:27.698Z

Here’s my contribution for the week. Musical palindromes are hard!

The plucked melody is a palindrome in structure. Each phrase by itself is the same backwards and forwards. The entire melody is then reversed starting around 1:10.

I took a few licenses with rhythm to make it overall more musical, which resulted in the forward section
being in 3/4 and the reverse in 4/4. The synth/cello counter melody is not a palindrome, though the string pad mostly adheres to the palindrome structure.

I’m not sure it’s musically completely satisfying, but I resisted the impulse to fix it to keep the palindromic structure
intact.

The title is also a palindrome. (I thought “Elk Rap Song No Sparkle” was another great palindrome option, but it just didn’t quite fit the piece…)

https://soundcloud.com/alt-formant/drawn-onward-disquiet0252

Paul · 2016-11-01T11:52:18.964Z

Listening to my own soundcloud account yesterday after uploading the first version I realized that I actually once had decided to use a reduced set of sounds when composing in ableton. Basically the electric guitar, the bassguitar and the flute from the mellotron, plus drumloops. So I switched the sounds from the first version into this instrumentarium and did some additional changes and edits. It´s a bit more funky like this. Isn´t it?

https://soundcloud.com/paulchristophrose/disquiet0252-guitar-and-flote