Disquiet Junto was started in 2012 by Marc Weidenbaum. It's an open community centered around weekly tasks. Participants make music individually to a common prompt. The idea is described in detail on the Disquiet webpage, so please visit there for more details: https://disquiet.com/2012/01/27/the-disquiet-junto/ — loads of inspiration for people wanting to animate a community online.
Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code. Rewinding the soundscape.
First two sentences of Disquiet's 5-part tagline are: "Listening to art. Playing with audio." Very nice, however, the rest of it shows that the technology is a key theme of Disquiet, and suitably the Junto project leans towards modular synth and studio activities, quite often requires working with a provided sample, or with a specific found sound. Yet, in this recording-oriented frame, many themes of interest to Games for Music are also explored, like graphic scores or cognitive limitations. What's more, the activities are quite challenging because the time constraint is tight. Celebrating Creative Commons licenses is a regular motive too.
Notable prompts
Interesting prompts (from the perspective of this wiki) include:
31. Ono's Match — an open interpretation of the Lighting Piece — details
67. Odyssey Machine — check the dice rolling — details
73. Faulty Notation — read a map of the San Andreas Fault as if it were a graphic notation score — details
120. Readymade Rhythm — Write a song based on the heartbeat of Marcel Duchamp — details
121. Math Rock — Music as a jigsaw puzzle — details
171. Oblicardo — Rework a pre-existing field recording in response to an Oblique Strategies card — details
174. Glove Songs — Play something on your favorite instrument – wearing gloves details
230. Design I — a never before performed graphic score by Glenn Sogge from the mid-1970s — details
298. Dungeons & Drum Machines — Make a track with two rolls of a 20-sided die — details
320. Table of Contents — a bit more serious Fairy Tale — details
327. Time Zoned — Create a piece of music that is simultaneously in 3/4, 2/4, and 7/4 time — details
342. In Sea — Record a piece of music in tribute to Terry Riley’s In C using only samples of water sounds — details
Prompts for live performance
Below you may see cues that are suitable for live performance in a more typical music game fashion. These cues might be extracted from a longer, more complex instruction or they might be an officially provided summary of it.
3. the expanded glass harp / 497. Benjamin's Glass — Pay tribute to Benjamin Franklin and his armonica
16. sandpaper and dice — Explore matters of background and foreground
18. relative prominence — Construct three simple, self-contained sounds (or sonic elements) that are distinct from each other
41. Dirty minimalism — Dirty minimalism
45. Sherlock Sawyer — Combine […] Sherlock Holmes and Tom Sawyer
59. Vowel Choral Drone — Make music from three randomly assigned vowels
91. Walking music — Explore the musical qualities of footsteps
137. Old-Time Electronica — Old-Time Electronica
163. Layering Minutes After Midnight — late-night ambience
186. My Name — Explore the sonic contours of […] your name
187. Three Strands — Shift between three renditions of the same melody
221. Morning Music — [Play] music that you’d want to wake up to — music you’d like to imagine other people would want to wake up to
274. Broken Sound — Broken sound
282. Berio's Bach — [Play] with a clear sense of which parts are “structurally significant” and which are “decorative”
291. Lantern Effect — Make music that suggests the way a paper lantern filters light
310. From Memory — Recall — and then recreate — a favorite sound
323. Music for Meditation — Music for meditation
344. Careful Symmetries — Explore palindromes in musical form
375. Despite Yourself — [Play] music that sounds as unlike you as you can accomplish
384. Breath Beat — Explore breath as a resource for rhythm
439. Hybrid Self — Combine the styles of two musicians you admire
459. From a Distance — Make music intended to be heard from afar
461. Goldilocks Zone — Navigate a sonic space between the hospitable and the inhospitable
Editor's notes
This entry is due to a celebration of 500th edition of Disquiet Junto. Congratulations to the initiator and the participants! :)
Quoted content from Disquiet Junto webpage should not be treated as Creative Commons (rather as fair use).
See also other prompting initiatives:
- Music Weeklies — online community with "music for listening" style and VGM connections
- The Daily Create — frequent cues for different media
23 cues from this source
Random scores with cues from this source:
A Single Random Cue ♢ GOTO Score ♢ Bubbles ♢ Horizontal Vanilla