Tuesday 16 October 2012

Day ten - slow and steady sound work

Jonnie working on the sound
Three of us are unwell. Possibly this is the result of a very intense previous week.

We arrive at Theatre in the Mill and acclimatise to our new surroundings while we drink honey, lemon and ginger teas to minimise the impact of our collective ailments.

We begin working by reviewing the footage of the material we shared with Dick and Peter on day nine. This is so that Lucy and Jonnie can come up to speed on where we're at.

Lucy has some interesting questions which highlight some of the less logical elements of the work. Most of these are tensions I'm already aware of but am reasonably happy to live with at this stage.

Lucy plans out her work for the week based on the information we've given her.

Jonnie has a long list of innovative sound ideas to try out. We have to narrow the list down due to our time constraints. I know from experience that some technical aspects can be time consuming.

The rest of the day is slow but steady process working on establishing a sound score. It's a very different kind of working day to the highly energised physical material we put together in week 2. This is for the best as two of us are pretty out of action and it allows for some recovery time.

Working with sound can be quite intangible. The language around the sound and the fact that we all hear the same sounds differently means there's a lot of discussion and listening and mistaken identity.

We work on tightening up one particular section, assigning a subtle sound cue to a set of actions. It proves virtually impossible because the qualities of the sound are too complex for us to hear the signals and subtleties. We look at tempo to find the right kind of structure for the action and then find the right kinds of sound to fit that structure.

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