This is a really neat initiative involving recycling, re-purposing, art, creativity, music and crowdsourcing to drive positive behavior change. We’re rooting for you guys and are excited to see the results!

unconsumption:

The Assignment: Record the music to a PSA using sounds sampled from your garbage bin.

“Take four objects from the garbage,” instructs (friend of Unconsumption) Disquiet, a site that’s more associated with electronic music and sound art than, say, trash or recycling. “These will be your sonic source material.”

In a fascinating spin on the notion of creative use, Disquiet is encouraging its highly participatory audience of digital music-makers to use garbage to inspire sonic creativity.

It’s the latest in the site’s popular series of “assignments” for composers: “Each Thursday evening at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership to the Junto is open: just join and participate.”

Disquiet Junto Project 0026: Compos(t)ing The theme of this week’s project is creative reuse — call it recycling, or unconsumption, or upcycling, or compos(t)ing.

You’ll sample four objects in the process of developing an original musical track. Please compose the track as if it might be used as background music for a PSA about recycling.

Here’s how you’ll determine the objects whose sounds you will sample for the piece: choose a garbage pail in either your home or workplace that you know not to be empty. Take four objects from the garbage. These will be your sonic source material.

You can transform the sounds of these elements, but only lightly, so as to respect their inherent sonic properties (for example, feel free to edit selectively to isolate segments, and to adjust relative volume and pitch).

Deadline: Monday, July 2, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Further details (including full instructions in multiple languages, from Japanese to Croation!) at: Disquiet Junto Project 0026: Compos(t)ing

Very excited to hear what comes of this!