Disquiet Junto 0285 Live Barcoding

The Junto this week asked for music from the three barcodes nearest to me.

When I started looking I found this sales gimmick from Woolworths that used a kind of a barcode on cards with various fauna and insects to trigger recordings.

I'd quietly waited until my kids lost interest in the cards and player, which had to be purchased seperately, but haven't yet taken the step of soldering an output.

For this project I picked three barcodes that offered a variety of wide and thin stripes.

I interpreted the stripes as notes quickly recording a single take singing each card. Then I thought it'd be fun to add the sounds of the card being read by the player.

In Ableton Live I looped the card sounds but kept my singing as single takes, then decided to add more variety by dropping one part down a fifth. Then I extended the parts so they repeated, then edited one with another to get a length of nearly three minutes.

I layered up these six parts and had an idea to duplicate the card sounds, slightly offset some then pan each into opposite channels.