The beginning of Term 3. My new, old Denon DR-M24HX cassette deck had arrived. The device was made between 1987 and 1988, and is still in very good nick. (Denon were one of the finest manufacturers of this type of audio equipment ‘back in the day’.) I purchased it for only £30, courtesy of eBay. Having cleaned the play and record heads and capstans (Ah! The smell of isopropyl alcohol), I connected the deck to both my analogue/digital interface and iMac in order to migrate the content from my Aural Diary cassettes, digitally:

The transfer took place in the background to the day’s other activities. Some teacherly housekeeping to begin the morning: setting up individual tutorial appointments, notifying students of the recommencement of modules, arranging assessments for postgraduates, dealing with postgraduate application inquiries, and carving out spaces for administrative duties and research in between.

The new School of Art Instagram account was launched today:

On, then, to undertake a final review of an undergraduate dissertation, prior to its submission next week. In the background, sounds from 1985 to 1986 dribbled into my iMac: clocks bells and fog horns in Cardiff, conversations, preaching, and my first efforts as a teacher. There’s an endearing sample of a roll-call at the start of an art class for hairdressers at Pontypool College (a tertiary education centre in the South Wales valleys). I taught three groups of twelve students (each comprising eleven girls and one boy), none of whom could understand why they should be learning art. They had my sympathy in that respect. On other recordings, I heard the voices of those who have flown this world. Audio captures the kinetic presence of the departed — the residual anima of their vocal signature through which character, temperament, and responses were expressed. Press ‘play’ and they are conditionally and temporarily resurrected. Audio recordings, like photographs, are not so much the ‘ghosts’ as the stains of the dead.

Throughout the afternoon I pushed on with a ‘take no prisoners’ approach to the dissertation, currently under scrutiny:

June 12, 1986: the sound of chicks in a bird box that my father had made, recorded at my childhood home in Abertillery. July 30, 1986: Me, preaching assertively through a megaphone in an open-air service held on the promenade, Aberystwyth. It sounds like my voice had been driven through both a fuzz box and a high-gain pedal. (A preachily form of death metal.) The loud, aggressive, and distorted tone robbed the message of any compassion and consolation. It was, for me, an uncomfortable audition. Nevertheless, there may be the seed of an idea here.

The Aural Diary permit me to travel back in time, acoustically. The audio recording evokes the sense of lived experience far more intensely than a photograph does. Perhaps, this is because the former captures time in motion, rather than as a fixed moment (which is an entirely artificial construction in relation to lived experience). Recorded sound summons mental images, but photographic images don’t likewise evoke sonic memories, in my experience. Perhaps, this is because one cannot imagine, let alone recall, a frozen split-second of sound.

I’m grateful to myself that I had both the presence of mind and the courage to capture samples of my life’s sonic fabric between 1985 and 1987. Towards the end of that period, much was lost and much changed, irrevocably:

Platform 4, Shrewsbury station (4.04 pm, 16 May 1987)

In the evening, I began making notes for my contribution to a staff seminar, to be held on Wednesday morning, dealing with the principles of and practices of internal examining at postgraduate level.