On Tuesday we had a guest take us for an improvisation workshop. We were to bring in something to play like an instrument. Not necessarily an actual instrument, that might be a bit too tuneful the for the purpose really. I clean forgot but claimed a piece of vacuum cleaner pipe that has been floating around the studio all year for some reason.

Before the main event, we were given an outline of our performance in under 2 weeks and shown some videos of a few performers, most disturbing being a guy who performs with broken glass.

We were taken into the Chroma Key room and our first exercise was to sing a tone "aaaahhh" at a pitch that was comfortable. We did so with the lights off to aid everyone with discomfort about the whole thing, which was... everyone. I half expected everyone to breath in then do nothing. This is what would have happened if it was a room full of me. Fortunately that didn't happen here. Around 40 people singing "aaaah" like a choir, it was interesting. We did it twice, the second time, I started laughing (quietly) for a considerable amount of the time. I had to wait to compose myself or I'd have wound up making anyone in ear shot laugh too. It was a weird experience.

More relaxed now, we then did the same with the lights on and a conductor controlling pitch and volume as well as tone by way of facial expressions - mouth shape. A few class members tried being the conductor and general consensus was that although one might think conducting is a great power trip, it's actually a lot easier to be told what to do.

The next exercise was keeping a beat with the "1, 2" game. One person claps on the 1 beat, another claps on the 2 beat (and sets the tempo by doing so). The class was in a circle and on each beat one more person would join in. But they were to only clap on one of the beats, not both. Later we were to try to swap beats, but with the rule that it was to be done with no rest beat - for example (subscript representing beat not clapped by person X): "1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2..." and not "1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2"

This was actually quite difficult. And even keeping the beat was a bit painful. I think. I'm not sure really. It was mildly distracting with everyone else clapping too, although we were all supposed to be in time.

Last of all, we grabbed our "instrument" and played together. It was just tuneless sounds yet interesting. There was a bit more to it but every minute I spend here is a minute not writing (or attempting to write) my maths and art essay.

Overall it was a fun day.

Wednesday we were to start planning our performance. Most people had grouped up, but I hadn't yet. I considered working on my own briefly but then decided to approach a couple of classmates who I felt would be a good match for this project (or indeed any). One of which I'd worked with in Cinematic Flâneur, the last Studio Project.

We considered a few ideas, the first one that looked like it would gain some traction was mounting sensors of some sort at intersections around the city, beaming them back to some device that would interpret the signals as notes. Exactly what and how they were sensing had not been decided yet. We couldn't think of an easy or cheap way of beaming signals back from multiple locations though so we considered tapping into existing traffic cams on the web.

We had a guest later in the day who talked about her work, both art and commercial. She had worked in a few things I had recognised, such being sound engineer for TrueSchool Hip Hop show. She showed an interesting piece of film from the 30s that she had been commissioned to make a sound track for, both the sound and the film itself were mesmerising. She had also worked on installations that would have been interesting to see but I had not been aware of. This project, with all of it's guests have really brought home the fact that one really has to try to go out and check out things going on in the city more. Not easy to do though when you aren't used to it. Even knowing about stuff is difficult. I was however a bit distracted and annoyed by classmates behind me making noise, it was disrespectful to the guest and anyone who actually wanted to hear what was going on. When asked if we had any questions, I was sure I would have but all I could concentrate on was the background noise. When it was over, one of my team mates said the same thing to me - which is nice, having people on the same page.

Something good came of it though...

Thursday we had another guest who produced electronica as a hobby and he gave us a brief rundown of the history of electronica starting with Delia Derbyshire's Doctor Who theme, and moving on to

Jean Michel Jarre, the haunting Equinoxe 4 and King Tubby's dub (I don't think I've found the right tune) which took me by surprise as I knew the tune but thought it was something from the 90s as that's probably about when I got exposed to it a lot. The 80s mentioned O Superman and the 90s when electronica really started to explode with wider availability of computer hardware, starting of course with the Amiga and Atari ST that had inferior sound chips but sported a midi interface. I've been all rock n roll the last couple of years but dance music and electronica in general has played a significant part in my life so this was a rather enjoyable talk.

Our group talked and as we slowly concluded that the traffic light sensor idea would be problematic another idea that we'd had started to surface. Inspired by the noise of classmates, we started to formulate a plan of composing "music" where annoying noise was the instrument. It developed into a performance where one team member (designated me) goes up and pretends to attempt to play a quiet piece, has a bit of trouble at first. Meanwhile in the audience, actors are rude and make noises such as foot tapping, pen clicking, cellphone messages, packet of chips crinkling etc. This creates and builds up an uncomfortable tension until near the end it appears I'm conducting it and I close it down.

We started by listing all the sounds we could think of that are annoying and we recorded a bunch of them. That night I installed a trial of Ableton and attempted to sequence it. Downloading the trial took a while so it was bedtime by the time it was installed and I'd installed a driver from my oxygen midi keyboard that I own.

Friday we had to do a mini performance in the afternoon for the class, so in the morning our group attempted to sequence the sounds. It didn't work out too well, and we wound up ad-libbing quite a bit. I asked for quiet and then (sort of deliberately, although sort of not) had trouble setting up, and all the while my teammates started shuffling. We had called in a couple of other class members to join in on the act. There was much room for improvement on the performance, and while I was going to bring the conducting in much later in the final performance anyway, I'm now thinking I'll bring it in later still. Really build up tension. It's actually a bit difficult to do, making myself look like a right twit for 5 minutes who can't command any respect, but also quite a good opportunity for growth. It's possibly difficult to be such a painful noise-maker too (though it comes naturally for some). Over all I'm told it was successful with a couple of classmates not realising until the end which was the goal, and a couple picking  up early because I gave it away. Once again it is hard not to because the whole time that you are not giving hints about the true nature of the performance, you look like a bit of an idiot. But I'm sure I can pull it off on the real performance night. The whole class is in on the act now too.

I have a few audio clips that I have to put up on this blog, but we've been given a reprieve due to this essay due in in 2 days, so I'll be adding content on Tuesday I guess.