Monday was the hand-in day of the essay and also the last maths lecture which would have been a giant waste of precious time.

Tuesday we planned our concept a bit further and also went on a small mission putting up event posters around campus and some of the city. It was the details that needed to be worked out. Some ideas were put out there to perhaps use a female as the performer having the technical difficulties and see how different the reaction might be. Putting my desire to extend myself a bit by performing, we considered this. We considered it a few times during the week but nothing really came of it so I sort of continued my role by default. We've have a couple of people try to enter our group and none of us were really happy about the idea. We know that we work well together and didn't really think anyone else could add to it, at best they'd be taking a free ride, at worst, they'd likely derail us. Fortunately all attempts were resisted and our tutor backed us up.

Wednesday was more of the same, we decided to compose a 4-bar track of annoying sounds in a rhythmic  fashion, foot taps, pen clicks and zips. The idea was to possibly make the noise random and only ordered in the last 10 seconds or so so the audience could click. We did this in audacity, a free wave editor / multitracker program preinstalled on our macs. It's a little painful to use but I have yet to find a wave editor that isn't, and I've used a few. Then again it's quite possible I've never used any of them properly.

What I really enjoyed about the time that we were doing this was that we were sort of through trial and error essentially learning how to record multitracked music in the same way a recording studio does, and without doing it in some class. Why did this please me so much? I guess because I feel that my group was composed of highly capable and logical yet conceptual people. There was just something really nice about seeing people that you work with just work out what works and building on it. Put simply, there are lots of people who can't do that. It's hard to explain more fully without either sounding patronizing or cynical. So I'll just say my group is great. Well, was - this is written retrospectively.

Thursday morning there was a dress rehearsal. At the last minute before leaving home I'd decided to bring in a beanie, it just seemed appropriate to my character, slightly shy, aloof and quiet, hiding his face a bit. Some of the performances had me a bit worried as they just didn't look like... performances. Lets just say that if you were given a random object with which to make sound, you could either hit it aimlessly as part of some involuntary nervous spasm or you could play it with some deliberateness - not necessarily with constant beat or rhythm, but... with some purpose of making sound. But it was a rehearsal so I guessed the performances were being saved for the real thing.

I spent the afternoon putting up more posters, sticking them in all the AUT lifts around campus.

The next morning some were gone. This really annoyed me. Who was the pompous git that decided an AUT event poster was not appropriate for their AUT department's lift?

Friday was a bit stressful, I had to help an outside friend out with some personal issues at the same time as preparing my performance. I had loads of gear with me and our group got some time in an empty  room 5 floors above where we practiced various details of the performance. We concluded that the performance should be one of a guy who twiddles knobs and acts like there is sound but you can't actually hear anything. I bobbed my head in time to nothing and turned knobs and hit keys.

My group watched me and critiqued various parts and we all worked out what different gestures might suggest to a viewer. Such as the way one taps a key on the keyboard. One way can be taken as playing it, another can be taken as testing it.

We also finally worked out a suitable ending to the performance. The original idea was that near the end I started composing it but it always sat slightly uncomfortably with is. It was hard to get the timing of when should start - it was very timing dependent as to whether it would be successful or not. But it was clumsy no matter what. But then we realised that I should just do my performance all the way through then stand up and announce to the audience to applaud the noisy people for their performance. This was perfect, for a few reasons, most of all I wouldn't walk away leaving the audience confused as to just what the hell had taken place. Well they might still be confused but at least it made me look a bit less stupid.

As the day went on and I had to duck out a couple of times, we had to set up at around 4pm. I was also in charge of sound recording, so I collected some Zoom recorders and tripods and set them up, one on each side of the room. I also had a portable handy and loads of batteries. The last hour was a bit stressful with people milling around not sure what they were doing, tight space and limited time. I got the zoom recorders running in time and took place at the back of the audience and quietly considered that I had switched my mac off instead of putting it to sleep. I did that earlier in the day because the battery on my mac is crap. But now I wouldn't have instant on which would mess up my performance a little bit. It wasn't critical as I was faking it anyway, but I was using a composition I'd set up in Ableton Live for timekeeping and cues on twiddling knobs. When our performance was up I flipped open my mac and started it up and just faked it. The next day I considered that a video camera might have been on me which was broadcasting to a TV facing the audience so they'd have seen that my mac was actually starting up while I was performing. The audience noise wasn't loud enough and the performance seemed a bit short to me, though I had no idea due to not having the computer running for most of it. We had decided a cell phone ringing would be the cue for me to wrap it up, it seemed to come quite quickly.

I then smiled and thanked my team members and the "rude BCT orchestra" and walked off. My team mates were a little disappointed too as the rehearsal looked rather promising. But it was okay.

I recorded some of the later performances with the handheld recorder as they were either outside or in other locations. I was a bit disappointed with the sound from one of the recorders, I'd adjusted the levels but not put on the mic windshield as it was indoors. But it turned out that the one closest to the adjacent door was still picking up the odd bit of wind and clipping. I really hate digital clipping. It's awful. Even as a deliberate art piece, it just sounds like a mistake. It's like setting a piece of print work in courier. You just avoid it (courier is the font rips usually default to if they can't read in the right font, I guess so that you are less likely to miss it).

I have one more post to make on this Studio project, it will include a few things that I had left off. Mainly sound and performances that we were expected to upload. I have so much data on this computer and I have to sift through it. ugh. Also I might try to reflect on the project and my team(s).