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WFH: DAY 89. 7.15 am:

8.00 am: A communion. 8.45 am: On review, the musket shot that I’d fabricated yesterday sounded authentic. I returned to Jones’ account. What the witness heard was an acoustic phenomenon ‘like that of a gun’. However, unlike the sound a period weapon, the noise of the spirit ‘violently’ striking the bed — by the side of which the householder was praying — with a ‘trencher’ (a wooden plate for food), made both the bed and room shake. Thus the presence and resonance of original sound would’ve been as much like that of a canon as a gun discharging. He’d have heard a high-pitched ‘crack’ combined with a thunderous boom, at considerable volume:

10.30 am: I proceeded to explore the second, far louder and more disturbing, sound that took place inside the house. It came ‘on a sudden’ and was so great that the witness ‘thought the house was going away’. In the 1970s, news broadcasts during the ‘troubles’ showed clips of IRA bombs ripping to shreds shops and pubs both in Northern Ireland and on the UK mainland. Was the witness’ experience somewhat akin to being caught in the midst of something like that, but without the death and devastation? I watched a YouTube video of US Marines training with M67 grenades. The device’s explosion (outdoors) exhibited a compressed ‘whoomph’, as the air was pushed at speed by the shock waves. 11.00 am: My sonic realization of the explosion, implied in the text, came together quickly. In time, this would be overlaid by a sound of a house, as though being raised to the ground.

The third and final noise was ‘great’ and terrifying and, again, wholly disproportionate to the nature of the cause. In this instance, the spirit had thrown ‘a pad against the door, at the foot of the stairs’. ‘Pad’ could refer to the feather-down filled, kidney-shaped supports that women wore around their waist and under the skirt in order to enhance their profile around the hips and rump. In other words, this was a soft and light object that had a tremendously loud impact. The final demonstration of the poltergeist’s activity was when it struck a canwen (a vessel to hold corn) against the bed so hard that it was moved out of place. The spirit was that of a dead relative who wanted the householder to remove some things on his behalf:

12.30 pm: How would I sonify the spiritual and religious aspect of the narrative: the sound of prayers prior to the first impact, and of a dissenting meeting (variously prayers, preaching, and hymn singing) at the time of the third impact?

1.30 pm: I recorded: first, myself reading aloud the narrative about the first impact; then, whispering the same; then, the sound of ‘silence’ in the studio; before processing them all. But to little avail. There was no fruit worth picking (today, anyway). Before returning to writing, I collected a number of sample drones from my multiband analogue radios.

4.30 pm: I shut down my computers, and launched into the late afternoon sunshine.

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