Party-Line Politeness (disquiet0309) by Nate Trier

(warning: extreme volume changes!)

The assignment was to create a piece of music that referenced the concept of “five by five,” in which five “readability” levels and five “signal strength” levels are aligned in a matrix.

I decided to take the concept kind of literally, taking a spoken word "broadcast" and marring it with volume changes. Six "changes" seemed about right, so then I tried to find a poem short enough to read and process six times in this piece.

I ended up finding an old writing exercise - I only had the results of the exercise, not the prompt, so I have no idea where these words came from. I think the challenge was to take six random words and use them in a poem.

I read it six times in a row. From there, I used envelopes to make six "variations" on this spoken-word theme, according to the matrix.
* Increasing volume, increasing "noise"
* Same
* Random changes in signal strength and noise
* Increasing volume, increasing "noise"
* Decreasing volume, decreasing noise
* Decreasing volume, random changes in noise

At first I mapped this all out to make a magic square, but I realized I would end up with linear movements, and that's boring. So then I used a random number generator to put me at random points on the x and y axes of volume and noise.

To get noise, I ran the recording of the poem through a vocoder, using a glitchy jam session from years ago.

That felt a little boring, so then I ran it through SPEAR to figure out any pitches, and I wrote a piano part based on the pitches that showed up.

After that I felt like the glitchy jam session was a little too familiar to me (I've used this particular recording more than a few times), so I tried to also feed in some highly processed vocals into the mix.

That felt, conceptually, a little better (voice interrupting voice), but then I lost the noise that inspired the piano accompaniment. So I blended the voice in with the noise.

Not sure this is done (or particularly listenable?), but it got me writing again after a dry spell and made me challenge myself, which is good!

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More on this 309th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Military Matrix Mixer: Mix music according to a military standard for relative message clarity) at:

https://disquiet.com/0309/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0309-military-matrix-mixer/