8.15 am. I needed to follow up the R R B V E Ǝ T N Ƨ O A  CD publicity strategy, which was initiated last week. After composing a letter to Mr Fripp with regard to such, I returned to the ‘Image & Inscription’ project. I want to redo all that I’ve done so far (with respect to the multitrack mix) — just to see (hear) whether it could be done better. [John 1: ‘I don’t have time for this!’; John 2: ‘Improvement makes its own time.’] 10.30 am. Ah! Tea:

11.00 am. The exceedingly slow process of stretching sound files — from around 5 minutes to exactly 20 minutes in length — begins. In the interim, emails are condemned while MA assessment admin, reckoned with.

1.30 pm. Following lunch and a delivery and pickup mission at the School, I began creating a playback/record system to process the sound of the engravings made for ‘Image & Inscription’:

Software downloads, upgrades, restarts, settings, and reconfigurations — the irksome but necessary preparations before creative engagement. Handboard 2 will need to be overhauled in order to reverse the direction of the effectors — from input to output — in line with that of Handboard 1. And, Handboard 3 will need to be routed through the mixer’s effects-loop. Ah well! … Back to the drawing book:

6.20 pm. Practise session 1: 3-finger exercises (sans index). 7.30 pm. The overhaul begins. To understand something (even something one has made), it must be taken apart and reassembled. Thereafter, every part must be tested independently, then in connection with its neighbours, and, finally, in relation to the community of parts:

The loss of the source recording’s stereophony (due to the signal being fed through mono effectors) in unsatisfactory. A monophonic representation of a stereo source imposes limits upon all the sound’s dimensions (these being, the left, centre, and right field spread, and its position within the front-to-back perspective of the acoustic space). At present, the sound feels like a large object squeezed into a too small space.