8.30 am. What Bank Holiday? I made additions and adjustments to this week’s tutorial schedule, addressed student queries and reviewed draft submissions, looked over the final Chapels in Wales lecture in readiness for tomorrow’s final (ever) class, dispatched instructions for the MA Vocational Practice presentations and Portfolio assessments, and wrote to the British Library’s Sound Archive, before filling the days of my diary for the next few weeks with assessment times.

In the background, I’m listening to the music of the African-American saxophonist John Coltrane (1926-67) (sainted by the African Orthodox Church) — one of the first musician/composers to ally jazz and religious sentiment:

The final part of his masterpiece A Love Supreme, ‘Psalm’, is a setting of his devotional poem, of which each syllable is given a corresponding musical note.

1.30 pm. After lunch, I reviewed further the PhD Art History thesis that I’d begun last week. A change of working environment was in order: from study to studio:

By 4.30 pm, I’d completed my reading and developed a set of interrogative questions for the candidate’s viva voce. Now, to review the accompanying documentation.

An erotic book:

6.20 pm. Practise session 1: pick-up explorations. 7.30 pm. I scrutinised and tested the accompanying documentation related to the PhD, and ended the evening looking over my book proposal. Back to the Belmont Loose Leaf File.

9.15 am. A trip to the Farmers’ Market in cold rain, the megaphonic bleat of a mobile party candidate drifting on the wind. What!?:

At the market, the ‘egg lady’ hadn’t arrived, and the ‘pasty man’ wanted to sell up and go home soon (such was the weather). A forlorn turnout.

10.15 am. My morning was focussed on rationalising Handboard 1. Simplicity, economy, and functionality are the guiding principles. The introduction of a delay effector on Handboards 1 & 2, and a reverberation effector on Handboard 2, helps to restore the stereo ‘image’ of the sound source at the end of the processing chain. Now, too, both boards are symmetrical in terms of their final stage modulation:

It remains for me to decide whether Handboard 3 (which is routed through the mixer’s effects loop) is superfluous.

The are several pitfalls to using effectors to colour a source. For example, one can be beguiled by the effect. Rigour is called for. The sound produced must articulate some aspect of either the source content or its processing. (In this case: the meaning and construction of the second commandment’s text, and its conversion into an engraving.) In this regard, the effectors are subordinate to, and interpretive of, the source — rather than an end in themselves.

1.30 pm. Following lunch, I made trial of the effects-loop and direct-to-computer recording facility. Both are operational. 2.30 pm. On with the book proposal and a little CD propagation research. The problem with composing a proposal is knowing what not to deal with, and what has not been dealt in other authors’ publications already. In short, one needs to find the hole in the subject field and plug it. I’m getting somewhere. (I think.)

5.15 pm. The dank air and grey clouds have persisted throughout day. The garbled, gritty sound of a public-address system, now very far off, is still audible:

5.20 pm. No more! 6.20 pm. Practise session 2: dynamic expression.  7.30 pm. An evening with the family.

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.