August 27, 2015

9.00 am. I’d determined to complete ‘The Wounded Heart Ministries’ sound piece over the next few days. After a time away from a piece of work, one should always return, first, to its source. In this case, the collapsed homepage of the website:

The-Wounded-Heart-Ministries-(2015)

I performed again an analytical exercise that I’d undertaken at the outset of the project — to interpret to myself what I am looking at in terms of categories of visual phenomenon for which sound equivalents can be constructed. The sound work is the result of a technological process of translation (variously: image > sound, text > sound, and image > text) undertaken by changing one digital manifestation of the source into another via a common RAW file conversion. In order to realise a compositional translation, I now need to establish visual-sonic analogues, conceptually. What am I looking at?:

  • dense red and black, pale pink and white (background), areas
  • visual information punctuated by spaces
  • repeated motifs: a heart and the site’s title
  • legible text
  • illegible text
  • upper and lower case of fonts
  • cropped text
  • text superimposed upon text, either once or many times
  • text superimposed upon motifs
  • a fractured line
  • at least two distinct layers of information, which conflated following the glitch
  • among the legible text, certain words and phrases draw my attention: ‘DISTRESS’, ‘He allows’, ‘One writer’, ‘A HAND OF DISCIPLINE’, ‘There is no soundness‘, ‘The horrible state’, ‘the heavy hand‘, ‘Unconfessed’, ‘deadly’, and ‘deteriorate’.

Not all the features can be converted into sound analogues. Nevertheless, some of the more formal and structural characteristics can, easily. The textual content could inform such aspects of the artwork as my attitude and choices, and the composition’s spirit or demeanour.

10.00 am. I began extracting samples of enlarged areas of the source and translating them into sound files:

Screen-Shot-2015-08-27-at-10.28.00

12.00 pm. All the new tracks were imported into the track session for the composition.

1.40 pm. One by one, each track was then optimised and given its provisional position within the stereo field of the mix. Once this phase is completed, I can push, pull, move, and duplicate them to fit needs of the whole composition. 2.30 pm. I replaced and re-trussed (twice, in the end) a broken midi cable on Pedalboard II:

IMG_0146

3.00 pm. The process of composition begins in earnest. The piece is beginning to find its ‘musical’ feet. By the close of the afternoon, I’d achieved a consolingly satisfactory result.

6.30 pm. Practice session 1. 7.30 pm. Onward with the third Abstraction lecture:

Screen Shot 2015-08-27 at 21.16.59

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