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Serendip [Disquiet 0305 - Three Princes]

from Disquiet Junto by Michel Banabila

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Disquiet Junto Project 0305: Three Princes
Explore chance by exploring the roots of the word “serendipity.”

This week’s project explores the concept of serendipity. I was unfamiliar with the word’s etymology until I recently read the book Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, which I recommend. Those language origins figure into this project’s formulation.

Step 1: The word “serendipity” has an interesting origin. Its coinage is credited to Horace Walpole, who apparently made it up based on a Persian fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip.” In turn, “Serendip” is itself a Persian word for another place entirely, Sri Lanka, or Ceylon. To explore the nature of serendipity, we’re going to apply randomness to samples of Ceylonese music.

Step 2: Choose three tracks — one for each prince in the fairy tale — from this collection of music from Ceylon.

There’s a lot of it, 138 tracks in all, so it might help to employ chance routines to select both the the tracks you’ll use, and which segments you’ll extract from them.

Step 3: Extract a short piece of audio, between two and seven seconds, from each of the three tracks you selected in Step 2. Each extract should be of a different length from the other two. Again, you might do this by ear, or you might do it based on some sort of chance routine.

Step 4: Create a roughly two-minute loop of each of the three individual extracts from Step 3: that is, a two-minute loop of the first extracted piece, a separate two-minute loop of the second extract, and a separate three-minute loop of the third. (You might also accomplish these loops in some other manner.)

Step 5: Layer the three loops from Step 4. Do so in a way that might allow you to subsequently manipulate the loops individually, should you choose to do so. Notably, the three tracks will be out of sync with each other.

Step 6: Listen through to the layered piece in Step 5. Pay attention for moments of chance intersection, of rhythmic ingenuity, melodic unlikelihoods, and textural congruence, among other potential results.

Step 7: Create a short piece of music, based on the observations you made in Step 6, that builds on those serendipitous results. This may be as simple as using relative volume to highlight the highlights, or you might add other musical elements.
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I used 3 files for the loops; Mage Menika Suwase Nidai /Surawira Mathalan Mamai /Hansa Ranee Aadare. Changed track volumes here and there, used a phaser (slow rate) on each track and added a reversed version of the original mix at the background.

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from Disquiet Junto, released August 4, 2013

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Michel Banabila Rotterdam, Netherlands

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