March 24, 2017

8.00 am: I made start on my application to the ‘AU Learning and Teaching Conference’ for this year. I’ll submit a paper examining the way in which the fruit of individual instruction can be shared with the learning community. 9.00 am: Studiology. Pedalboard IV needed to be modified: the tube-based gain effector was replaced by the Pro-Co RAT gain effector. 9.30 am: The extracts of the word ‘blind’, taken from ‘The Talking Bible’ discs, were assembled linearly. In the background, I digitally recorded the discs that make up the Gospel of Matthew:

The process of digital translation will take an age and a huge file capacity. I fell into this project without any sense of what would ensue. This was liberating. Once the source material began to react with itself, possibilities presented themselves. (You cannot think these things out in advance.) Play is the way — an unhesitant and reckless abandon to the manipulation of form alone, in the first instance. Musicality arose. There’s no muse, of course. (Visual art never had one; too much a craft for that.) The absence of ideas is always the result of a failure of the imagination on the artist’s part.

1.40 pm: After lunch, I extracted ten ‘musical’ phrases (4-7 ‘notes’/’blind’s long) derived from all the samples taken from Genesis to Revelation. From this set, a provisional melodic sequence, of just under one minute’s length, was constructed. I’d no idea whether this will be included in the final work; I’d no desire to know, presently. The aim, rather, is to generate collage material; something to manoeuvre. When the digital recording of Matthew’s Gospel was completed, I overlaid the four files (one for each side of the two discs). The intention is to overlay each of the other biblical books in turn in this way and, then, superimpose their recordings on top of one another, so as to produce a dense fabric of speech representative of the entire set of records:

6.30 pm: Practise session 1. 7.30 pm: I developed a repetitive motif of ‘blinds’ and looped it. This will serve as the spine for the composition – a regular pattern against which irregular melodic lines and non-pitch specific speech extracts can be mapped.

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