Ethan Hein

Data gathered for an experiment I did in the Psychology of Music class at NYU. I recorded twenty people clapping in whatever way they felt was most musical over a set of breakbeats and studied results. The subjects were recorded one at a time, but played back all at once. Read the study here: www.ethanhein.com/wp/2013/friends-dont-let-friends-clap-on-one-and-three/

This week’s Junto project is about earthquakes. We each received a distinct section of a map of the San Andreas Fault, and were challenged to treat it as a graphic notation score. My title refers to a darkly hilarious film I saw in my college intro to geology class, “San Francisco: The City That Waits To Die.”

My idea was to make my colored blocks in Ableton’s Arrangement view more or less resemble the map segment I was given. I arbitrarily assigned colors to my various sounds and laid them out according to the map. I put big entrances and exits at the fault lines. I tried to follow the map as best I could, though for the sake of musicality I rounded everything off to four-bar chunks.

In order of appearance, the sounds I used are: a lightly randomized 909 drum machine from Ableton, a synth from Figure with some postprocessing in Ableton, a heavily Auto-tuned and distressed vocal sample from Babsy Singer, a recording I made of running a wooden spoon over a sculpture with a bunch of nails sticking out of it, some more drums vocoded through the aforementioned nails thing, a pulsating tone from a Buchla synth, and finally, at the very end, a dramatic piano chord played by Eric Wubbels.

More on this 73rd Disquiet Junto project, which involves reading a map of the San Andreas Fault as if it were a graphic notation score, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/05/23/disquiet0073-faultynotation/

This project was conducted as part of a course of study led by Geoff Manaugh (BLDG BLOG). More on his research at:

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2013/01/san-andreas-architecture-for-fault.html

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/