Daily recording

I quite like the idea of mixing creative processes with the act of diary keeping. This was one of the ideas loosely included in the making of my album Themes 1-50, as told in the sleeve notes (only on the CD version obviously).

However, exploring this idea more thoroughly was still on my to do list and I finally got round to trying out an idea from the 1st of January 2007 onwards.

This idea was to record ten seconds of humming each day for three hundred and sixty five days, then present them back to back with no gaps in just over an hour of humming. The pitch of the hum would be whatever pitch came into my head, usually first thing in the morning. I assumed that although the pitch would vary, that it would be within a fairly small range of comfortable pitches.

The play back of this collection of hums could be accompanied by flicking through my diary where the pitch of a hum might be explained to some degree by the corresponding events recorded in the diary (I only keep a work diary with notes on stuff to do and places to be, but I thought this would be enough). Maybe in busy periods the pitch would be lower as I was more tired? I was intrigued.

I ended up recording ten seconds of humming up until May where it started to really annoy me. Still, this gave me around twenty minutes of quality humming, enough to mock up my presentation ideas and see what's what.

What I immediately found interesting was how random the pitches appeared to be. They were all over the place and spanned a fairly large range, larger than I expected anyway. Unfortunately, any more than about a minute of constant humming, recorded to a crummy tape dicta-phone (I used my dicta-phone for convenience and quirk factor, I know it's quicker to just use my thumb) is a horrible experience. It sounds like a small motor that is just about to run conk out, but refuses to die.

Upon discussing the project with Michael Young (and managing to sit through a good five minutes of the humming noise) he noted that perhaps the most significant part of each hum was the part I was not including in my twenty minute hum montage: the intake of breath at the onset of the hum and whatever sounds were involved as the hum came to an end. And so a twenty minute version edited together in the opposite way including the start, end and no middle was slightly more bearable, but still not something with enough context to warrant submitting other people to it.

I have since used the hums as source material for a few ideas here and there but nothing that has been finished. Perhaps I will combine them into one of the other diary projects that I am and will be involved in, we'll see.