The assignment was a track that is half sound, half silence. I reasoned like this. A piece with 50% sound and 50% silence will have periods of sound (with durations of, say, a1,a2,…,an) alternating with periods of silence (with durations of, say, b1,b2,…,bn), with a1+a2+…+an=b1+b2+…+bn. We can view these in pairs: (a1,b1),(a2,b2),…,(an,bn). Given a set of durations (say {6,7,8,9,10} seconds), we might want every pair from this set to appear among (a1,b1),…,(an,bn). (In other words, we might want {(a1,b1),(a2,b2),…,(an,bn)} = {6,7,8,9,10} x {6,7,8,9,10}=S, say.) So we essentially want to enumerate S; one way to do that is to use a knight’s tour of S. This has the advantage of not changing the durations too drastically (since the knight is limited in its movement) while guaranteeing that the durations both change from pair to pair (e.g., we would not go from (6,7) to (6,9)). So that’s what I did to generate the lengths of the sound bits and the lengths of the silence bits. The sounds themselves were made with Csound using a few recordings of metal objects I’ve made, with a bunch of filtering, ring modulation, and intentional clipping to get some variety. I made the sound bits decay quadratically; when I listen, it is not clear to me when the silence starts, which keeps things fun.
About Disquiet Junto: disquiet.com/2013/04/25/disquiet-junto-faq/