Colour Pencil 363

This is my contribution for Disquiet Junto Project 0735. The assignment was to choose a crayon and write a piece of music informed by its colour or name.

Concept

I have a set of twenty-four colour pencils. Each pencil is marked with a number. I found the pencils in their box in the following order:

301 347 349 343 337 334 319 325
327 321 316 314 330 307 370 361
363 359 378 392 376 352 396 399

There’s a nice looking emerald green pencil labelled 363 in position seventeen. That’s the one I chose to base my music on, or at least use it as a name for the piece.

I can’t easily imagine the sound of a single colour or a three-digit number. So I’ll include the entire set of twenty-four pencils and come up with a way to highlight the seventeenth, the one I chose to name this piece after.

Process

I transcribed the numbers from the pencils in the order that I found them, scaled them to fit a range between 0 and 10, and programmed them into a twenty-four step pitch sequence.

Step seventeen (the location of nice looking pencil 363) is used to open a filter envelope once per cycle.

The sequence is scanned at audio rate to produce the oscillation that voices the pitch sequence. Feeding the oscillator back into its own pitch control gives it a more interesting timbre.

There’s some barely audible emphasis and tuning on the rhythm elements that are influenced by the same sequence.

More or less all of sound in this track is derived from the pencil numbers in the order that I found them.

Process Videos

Here are a couple of live streams I ran while developing material for the track.

• January 30 2026
• February 1 2026

The final track itself isn’t captured in either of those streams. The final track was recorded spontaneously, with the help of a MIDI controller to adjust a few parameters during while recording.