More remixes of my Disquiet Junto remix

The same Disquiet Junto project that spawned this wildly recursive remix also involved a few more people remixing my remix. Here’s a family tree of the three first generation source tracks, the seven second generation remixes of those tracks, and the three third generation remixes of the second generation remixes.

Junto metaremix flowchart

You can hear the three third-generation metaremixes below.

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Recursive remixes

Here’s a strange and interesting thing that happened to me. The assignment for Disquiet Junto project 233 was to remix three tracks. The assignment for Junto project 234 was to metaremix one of the remixes from project 233. One of the people whose remix I metaremixed was listening to my track and accidentally had it playing in two different browser tabs simultaneously. He liked how it sounded, so he did a metametaremix with two copies of my metaremix offset by a few beats. It came out amazing!

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Ethan’s Trax

Ethan’s Trax is an iTunes playlist I maintain that includes all of the music I’ve ever recorded. Well, more accurately, it’s all of the music that I care to be reminded of. I haven’t included every draft and dead end. But if a track has any artistic or sentimental value whatsoever to me, it’s in Ethan’s Trax.

Ethan's Trax

As of this writing, the playlist contains 477 “songs.” That’s a cumulative one day, thirteen hours, forty-seven minutes and fifty-three seconds worth of music. My self-described genres include: Blues, Classical (General), Electronic, Experimental, Folk, Funk, Hip-Hop, Jazz (Vocal), Mashup, Pop, R&B/Soul, Rock, Showtunes, and Soundtracks/Scores. The Electronic category is substantially bigger than all of the others combined. The recent high points are here:

The question is, how much of this music is actually “mine”?

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Diverge, converge, diverge, converge

Soon after I became a composer, Marc Weidenbaum made me a meta-composer. Which I guess makes him a meta-meta-composer? A hyperproducer? There isn’t a word for what Marc is, aside from “awesome.” The most concise way I can think of to describe what he does: he writes reviews of music that doesn’t exist yet and then gets internet strangers to make it. Each track on this playlist is a reading of my score called “Divergence/Convergence,” and each one is quite different from the next.

Here’s Marc’s version of the narrative behind all this music. In a nutshell: I was asked to write a score for the NYU Laptop Orchestra. They performed it. I got a recording of the performance and remixed it. Marc assigned the members of the Disquiet Junto to “perform” the score solo. I got to have the strange and delightful experience of hearing all of the diverse music that resulted.

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Music in a world of noise pollution

One of the great privileges of working at NYU is having access to the state-of-the-art Dolan Studio. Listening to music on top-end Lipinskis through an SSL console in a control room designed by Philippe Starck is the most exquisite audio experience I’ve ever had, and likely will ever have. Unfortunately, it’s also very far removed from the circumstances in which I listen to music in my normal life. It isn’t even an issue of the speakers or amps, though of course mine are nowhere near as good as the ones in Dolan. It’s more about the listening environment.

Pete Campbell drowns it all out

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Shared sample projects

My students at NYU and Montclair State are beginning to venture into producing their own tracks. There are two challenges facing them, the small one and the big one. The small challenge is learning the tools: remembering where the menus are and which key you hold down to turn the mouse pointer into a pencil, learning to conceive of notes and beats as rectangles on the piano roll, troubleshooting when you play notes on the MIDI keyboard and no sound comes out. The big challenge is option paralysis. Even a lightweight tool like GarageBand comes with a staggeringly large collection of software instruments, loops and effects, even before you start dealing with recording your own sounds. Where do you even begin?

The solution I’m using with my classes is the shared-sample project. Students are challenged to build a track out of a particular sound, or set of sounds. The easy version requires that they use the given sound, along with any additional sounds they see fit to include. The hard version, and for me the really interesting one, requires that they use the given sound(s) and absolutely nothing else. I was inspired in creating these assignments by the many Disquiet Junto shared sample projects I’ve had the pleasure of participating in. I’m trying out my own project ideas on MSU advanced audio production independent studiers Dan Bui and Matt Skouras, and will soon be giving shared-sample projects to my beginner-level classes as well.

The first assignment I gave Dan and Matt was to use eight GarageBand factory loops to build a track. They were free to do whatever processing they wanted, but they could not use other sounds. Also, they only had an hour to put their tracks together. Here are the loops:

Eight loops

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Internet blues

Recently, WNYC’s great music show Soundcheck held a contest to see who could do the best version of the 100 year old song “Yellow Dog Blues” by WC Handy.

Marc Weidenbaum had the members of the Disquiet Junto enter the contest en masse. I did my track, put it on SoundCloud, and promptly forgot all about it.

https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/green-dog-disquiet0125-junto360blues

A month later, I was surprised and delighted to learn from Marc’s blog that the contest winner was Junto stalwart Westy Reflector.

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Participatory music vs presentational music

In this post, I’ll be doing some public-facing note-taking on Music As Social Life: The Politics Of Participation by Thomas Turino. I’m especially interested in chapter two: Participatory and Presentational Performance. We in America tend to place a high value on presentational music created by professionals, and a low value on participatory music made by amateurs. It’s useful to know that there are people in the world who take a different view.

Turino divides music into four big categories:

  1. Participatory music. Everyone present is actively doing something: playing an instrument, singing or chanting, and/or dancing. For example: a bluegrass jam, campfire singing, a hip-hop cypher.
  2. Presentational music. There’s a clear divide between the performers and the audience. Audience members might dance or sing along, but they are not the focus. For example: a classical, rock or jazz concert.
  3. High-fidelity recording. A document of a live performance (or a convincing illusion of such.) For example: a classical or jazz album.
  4. Studio sound art. A recording that was constructed in the studio using techniques other than (or in addition to) people performing in real time. For example: a late Beatles album, or any pop song since 1980.

Turino devotes a lot of his attention to three examples of participatory music cultures:

Aymara ceremony

Shona witch doctor

Contra dancers in New Hampshire

This last group might strike you as the odd one out. Turino sees more commonalities between the musical experience of American contra dancers and participants in Shona rituals than he does between the contra dancers and audiences at, say, a jazz concert.

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Anatomy of a Disquiet Junto project

I participate in Marc Weidenbaum’s Disquiet Junto whenever I have the time and the brain space. Once a week, he sends out an assignment, and you have a few days to produce a new piece of music to fit. Marc asks that you discuss your process in the track descriptions on SoundCloud, and I’m always happy to oblige. But my descriptions are usually terse. This week I thought I’d dive deep and document the whole process from soup to nuts, with screencaps and everything.

Here’s this week’s assignment, which is simpler than usual:

Please answer the following question by making an original recording: “What is the room tone of the Internet?” The length of your recording should be two minutes.

Data Centre

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