Suspension of Belief (continued)

Friday: Chris phoned from the foot of the rock this morning and we experimented with our very basic technology: a mobile phone with some ambisonic mikes attached. The mikes didn’t sound any better than the standard attachment, but we managed to pick up the noise of gulls and Gaz talking. An hour of aborted phone calls, buzzing noises and interference followed: atmospheric but not exactly what we wanted. Meantime, my fibonacci sequence outline has been deemed both obscure and beside the point: it will be hard enough to cue all the contributions according to my complex timings even without the mobile phone cutting out every few minutes. Finally, I’ve asked several people to provide snatches of music but bad luck has dogged their efforts so far. Keith Rowe is hoping to send me something but the airline has lost all his electronics.

Pondering all this on the train home, my thoughts were thrown into disarray by a wild man who hijacked the driver, ran through the train, suddenly appeared yelling outside on the tracks, came back on the train, then disappeared: total delay, about an hour.  Simultaneously, for reasons I cannot fathom, my own mobile phone went berserk - meaning that I was stranded incommunicado, a state that ordinarily I’d consider blissful but which this afternoon left me merely exasperated and out of sorts.

Later, Jim Perrin writes and tells me to relax, everything will be fine.

ADDENDA (Saturday morning): I meant to say that Gaz reckons the climb will take about five hours. So anyone expecting a quick 90 minute show (given somewhere in the early publicity information about this project) should revise their expectations. From the listener’s point of view the pace will be “leisurely.” 

The fibonacci sequence (measured in minutes from noon) as it is superimposed upon the broadcast (European times given for majority usage), going up and down within the five hours for convenience sake and perhaps to suggest equilibrium: 1.01,, 1.03, 1.05, 1.10, 1.18, 1.31, 1.52, 2.26,  3.21, 4.16, 4.50, 5.11, 5.25, 5.33, 5.38, 5.41, 5.43, 5.44 with zero points at either end and one in the middle of the sequence to allow for 21 separate points along the x and y axis. Gaz Parry’s activity occupies all 21 points, Chris Weaver’s 13, Jim Perrin’s 8, the musicians 5, the announcer 3, the theme music 2 and a random noise of virtually nil duration 1. You can tell I have been reading too much Mario Merz recently (as part of some hackwork for Tate Modern, as it happens).

2 Responses to “Suspension of Belief (continued)”

  1. Hi! I like your srticle and I would like very much to read some more information on this issue. Will you post some more?

  2. Ed Baxter says:

    Thanks for your interest. I’m not sure I have much more to say about the project at the moment. We’re doing an edit of the broadcast currently, which I will listen to this week with a view to refining some of the elements. I am thinking of combining the techniques deployed here with those Resonance used for a recent edition of the “Bike Show,” in which bike riders traveling through the night from London to the coast used Audioboo to upload instant sound files, providing a more or less real-time sound documentary from multiple perspectives. Our long-term idea has been to transmit the London Marathon as a radiophonic (rather than sporting) event.