8.30 am. A day for launches. Next week, first and second year students will be advised on their module choices for the next academic session. Therefore, it seemed opportune to publicise the new art history module on Abstraction:

9.30 am. I caught up with yesterday’s emails (and their implications — short and long), and then settled to design a logo for a new symposium series that I’m organising with my colleague Dr Roberts.  NOISE PROJECTion represents an extension to ‘The Noises of Art’ conference, which The Courtauld Institute and I convened in 2013. I’d been considering a second conference on art and sound, but couldn’t arrive at a thematic underpinning. However, as I’ve discovered, it wasn’t the content that was frustrating my resolve but, rather, the container. So, instead of launching into another grand extravaganza of art/sound scholarship and practice, I’m attempting to construct several smaller, shorter, and more focussed project-based events. Three-day conferences are good for defining breadth of subject, but one-day symposia are better for developing depth:

2.30 pm. Back to the sound studio and further post-production on The Aural Bible II: The Bible in Translation CD:

Sound production depends, in part, on a spatial awareness of the stereo field (left, centre, right) and the depth of field (foreground, middle ground, and background). (It’s not possible to establish vertical locations (up, centre, down) within a two-speaker stereo field. Although, high and low pitched sounds can sometimes ‘appear’ to be situated above and below the top and bottom, respectively, of the speakers.) Sound composition is, in this sense, very much like pictorial composition within a traditional Renaissance box-format. Like visually represented objects, recorded sonic objects can be given precise topographical locations within this network of coordinates. And the sound space is no less illusory than its visual parallel. What would a modernist audio space sound like? No depth of field, whatsoever.

6.20 pm. Practise session 1: the introduction of my new Nano Big Muff Pi fuzz effector to Pedalboard I. It’s a relatively inexpensive pedal as pedals go, but the fuzz has a fizz that sounds like Cadmium Yellow (Pale) mixed with sherbet (as Kandinsky might have described it).

7.30 pm. More post-production tweaking: piece by piece, track by track, second by second. I’m endeavouring to remove a microphonic feedback squeal (delineated in blue on the frequency graph) from one piece that, because the sample sound is looped, periodically despoils the whole:

Perhaps this is one for studio experts with specialised software for squatting flies like this. 9.40 pm. Practise session 2: caressing the strings, easing the note through a gentle curve, raising its pitch by a whole note, releasing the pressure, and then letting it return to rest.

10.30 pm. ‘The night watch’. Some ideas require quiet, darkness, and seclusion to come forth.