Diary:  the Loop

Mid 2001  Christine Carswell,PR liaison officer for Peterborough Southern Township Ltd, suggests that the new Deafblind UK headquarters  to be built in Hampton, Peterborough, may be appropriate to site a permanent piece of architectural music. Telephone conversations with the Touchstone Appeal director for fundraising for the new building, Laura Reid MBE, showed an alert interest and she suggested that there may be a way to have a permanent ‘display’ where deafblind visitors could feel the music in some way.

Nov 2002  Stan Hansel, together with his professional violinist colleague, Roger Stimson, meets with Heather O’Brien, Education Manager for Deafblind UK. Heather suggests involving deafblind people as participants in the project since it was with their help that the new building had been designed.  It was decided that the best way to proceed was to hold workshops and record the sounds made by deafblind people with the help of a specialist trainer. As a preliminary investigation of what may be possible, Roger conducted a workshop with Doreen in the same month.

 Late July 2003  Stan begins seriously to try to jot down musical ideas for the composition. These rarely come quickly and it was not until August 18th that the business of writing out the hefty score was begun.  During the early part of August Stan was visited by an old musical friend, Stuart Bowyer,who slipped him a recording of the American composer John Cage’s Concerto for Prepared Piano.  This occurred on the very hot day which broke all records. Stan had never actually heard the piece before ,presuming that it was simply rarely performed. However, it seemed that here was an interesting technical precedent for the idea Stan had for the use of deafblind voices. A prepared piano is one where materials are inserted next to piano strings in order to alter their sounds; Stan was going to record the deafblind voices and, after editing, these would be sampled onto a keyboard so that they could be played back at will.  Is this not using the keyboard as a prepared piano ?

 Oct 2003 - Feb 2004  A series of workshops are held for deafblind participants at Rainbow Court, Paston Ridings,Peterborough. Karen Collard,an experienced singing teacher from Huntingdon, is training our performers to use parts of their vocal apparatus in ways they are not used to. The events become fun for all involved and the entire workshops are digitally recorded.

After working alongside deafblind participants, invitations were then sent out to local deaf clubs for more participants and also through Deafview, the monthly magazine published by the Royal National Institute for the Deaf, which may potentially reach thousands of deaf people in the country.

During the period the workshops were held, Heather O'Brien had to hand over the management of the project to Karen Falco who quickly brought herself up to speed on all aspects of The Loop.

One of our volunteers,Violet Ansell, has been experimenting with all sorts of materials which have the potential to vibrate when stretched across a round frame. John Stead had told Stan of a piece of new technology called a Soundbug which acts as a very small loudspeaker when attached to a resonating surface. Stan  ordered one of these from their designers, Newlands Technology in Hull, and the idea becomes to try to place a soundbug in the middle of the device so that deafblind people may put their fingers on the resonating surface and experience certain aspects of the music. By common consent at one of the workshops, the invention is christened a ‘vibourine’. It is intended to encase three such vibourines for use by visitors within the education department at Deafblind UK.

Stan finally finishes the details of the score on Jan 1st,2004 and promptly goes to Hull to meet with John Stead ( director of the Electro Acoustic Ensemble) to record the bulk of the material.

Before Christmas, two of Stan’s recording engineers, James Preston and Paul Telfer, cleaned up the recordings which they had made at the sessions and a comparatively small number of sounds were chosen for holding a reasonably steady note. Further cleaning up by Paul and Stan and a multi layering for cluster sounds meant that a file of sounds had become ready to send to John in Hull, who sampled them onto a keyboard according to Stan’s instructions. When Stan arrived, all he had to do was to play in the score using Cubase SX software.Two days later most of the music had been digitally recorded.

John Cage’s Concerto for Prepared Piano is actually played live at the Barbican,London,and broadcast by the BBC !