WFH: DAY 126. 8.15 am: A communion. My mother’s unused buttons. Winfield was F. W. Woolworth’s own brand. It came to epitomise the ‘cheap and cheerful’. I suspect that these were bought in the early 1970s, and certainly after the introduction of decimalisation in 1971. Mum’s niche product was hand-knitted cardigans, made for Dad, myself, and any new-born who came within her orbit:

9.00 am: Inboxology and studiology. Those days when I can immerse myself in research alone were coming to an end, as the beginning of the new academic year approached. Thus each needed to be wrung-dry of possibilities. I listened again to the sample constructed for ‘The Singing in the Air’. Judging the duration of a pause between two sounds is difficult. Silence is like the untouched canvas, the white of the paper, separating clusters of marks. Too much of it, and the sounds or marks disconnect; too little, and they tend to coalesce. The Goldilocks zone is where they’re far enough apart to remain apart and yet close enough to exert a gravitational pull on one another.

10.00 am: The morning’s two priorities were: 1. A review of all compositions initiated since the beginning of the project; 2. An exploration of the effect of sending digital sound as an analogue signal into a digital processor. Periodic reviews enable to me to discern the best from the least good compositions, as well as diagnose why the latter, not so much fails as, doesn’t succeed as well as it might. (There may yet be a remedy for such.) For example, merely swapping the order of the first and second ‘visitations’ in ‘Like Children in Bright Clothing’ improved the whole considerably.

12.00 pm:

I’d yet to discover a means by which routing the analogue output signal through the Amplitube3 software could offer anything close to an improvement on the source sound. (It seemed like a good idea in theory. But … .) A new strategy was required. Better!:

While most of the modulations applied didn’t produce sounds relevant to this particular source, they may have an application to compositions as yet unconceived. 4.00 pm: I set aside the technological and returned to the textual in order to discover a spirit narrative that would serve as the next composition’s basis.

4.30 pm: Outward bound:

7.30 pm: Admin: futurology, student references, postgraduate admissions, and general correspondence.