Restricted and Repetitive

Project Overview:

Autistic musician Cat McGill confronts the concept of ‘restricted and repetitive’ behaviours – one of the criteria for gaining a diagnosis of Autism – and asks what it would mean to reframe these behaviours as ’regulating and relaxing’. In this creative residency, Cat invites you to view the world through her eyes – and ears – as she explores how her brain experiences the sounds of the world around us, and shares how her ‘restricted and repetitive’ behaviours are a source of great comfort and joy. Through Cat’s interactive sound art you can immerse yourself in a sensory soundscape, and maybe explore some ‘regulating and relaxing’ behaviours of your own.

To showcase the project, Cat is creating an interactive and immersive sound installation that will allow other people to experience the sensory-seeking, pattern loving, musical, autistic world inside her head. The installation will make use of different objects and textures, as well as a combination of different music technologies to trigger musical sounds and replicate the multi-sensory aspect of hearing and feeling music. Each person interacting with the installation will experience it in a different way, meaning that – as a piece of music – it’s different every time it is played.

Restrictive and Repetitive is being brought to life thanks to Appetite – Stoke on Trent’s Creative People and Places organisation – who are supporting Cat as an Artist in Residence, and is being premiered at Frontline Arts Festival on 28th February 2025. Cat would like to thank Drake Music for their support with the project and loan of an Ableton Push.

Read on below for Cat’s Project Blog as she documents her journey to creating the final piece.

Starting the build

It’s very exciting in my house right now as we have got to the point where everything starts to come together actually in the clock itself. For this stage of the project I’m working with a brilliant mentor Billy Payne, who is an experienced instrument builder, and my husband Euan, who is an electrical engineer and doing most of the actual building because my hypermobile wrists do not enjoy manual labour.  I’ve been working on a few things over the last couple of days that I want to show you; firstly this sketch of how everything is going to sit inside the clock. We’re adding a bunch of things to the outside of the clock body, all of which will

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February 20, 2025 No Comments

A visual representation

I’ve got a couple of things to show you which might help explain how I’m visualising the piece of music I’m creating. https://youtu.be/yVkdfJ9PkRQ?si=9Zqdy-07QzRhAlCL The video above shows a wave pendulum (sometimes called a harmonic pendulum) and if you watch you’ll see how the pendulums phase in and out of time with each other, eventually returning back to the point where they’re all swinging in unison. This is a much more complex pattern than mine because there are many more pendulums – if you think of one pendulum as one of my ticks then my version of this would just have three balls. This is a picture of a standing wave, taken from a physics website, and although it doesn’t represent

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February 11, 2025 No Comments

My mum’s going to hate this

Well, obviously she’s not going to completely hate it (or if she does she’ll pretend she doesn’t) because she’s my mum, and even though I’m 44 she still does ‘proud mummy’ posts on Facebook. However, she does like a nice catchy tune and this is definitely not that. What we have in the video is: three tracks of clock ticking, each one at a slightly different speed; one melodic pattern that is at the same tempo as tick 1 (you may remember ‘Ominous thud’ from the last post), a different melodic pattern that is at the same tempo as tick 2, and yet another melodic pattern that is at the same tempo as tick 3. I wouldn’t recommend listening to

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February 11, 2025 No Comments

Ominous thud

It’s been a bit of a grey and miserable day today so I’m indoors playing with sound.  After my last session where I was playing around with the different layers of ticking I got a bit stuck and couldn’t work out where I wanted to go next, so I decided to look through all the sound samples in Ableton and find some that I might like to work with. There are 801 different sound samples in my version of Ableton and I listened to every single one of them! (Never let it be said that I am anything other than thorough!) As I was going through I came across one I really liked called ‘Ominous thud’. I had my MIDI

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February 9, 2025 No Comments

Layering ticks

I’m starting to get a bit more into the fun stuff today! A big part of this project for me is working on my own development as an artist, and pushing myself to learn how to use different technologies to try and create the effects I want. It is so frustrating though when you’re trying to learn how to use something and simultaneously trying to do a piece of creative work with the thing you’re trying to learn..! In this video I’ve got my cleaned up audio of the clock ticking, which I have looped in Ableton so it keeps playing over and over. I’ve then duplicated the audio file onto a new track (I’ve coloured the different tracks rainbow

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January 30, 2025 No Comments

The boring bits

Every project contains the little boring jobs that you have to do before you can get down to the exciting stuff. Today I’ve been editing a sound recording I made of my clock ticking. First it was too quiet so I used Audacity to amplify it, but then all the background noises were amplified too and there was a lot of hissing in the background. Audacity has a filter for removing background noise – it doesn’t always give great results (because sound is a very complicated thing) but it has cleaned it up enough for what I want, and it’s still recognisable as a ticking sound. In the video I am removing the last bits of background noise that the

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January 29, 2025 No Comments

Project launch

Restricted and Repetitive is officially launched with this little video made for me by the fabulous social media team at Appetite.  As you can see I’ve been having a lot of fun experimenting with different elements that I might want to use in the finished installation. At the start of the video I’ve got a mini Tesla coil which is connected to my phone via Bluetooth. When I play the piano app on my phone it’s sending a signal to the coil which is making a sound and creating a spark. I love the visualisation of the spark to represent sparking neurones in my brain! I want to have a play with this to see if I can increase the

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December 16, 2024 No Comments

Ticking clocks and sound-based stims

The idea for this project has been knocking around in my head for so long I can’t remember exactly when I first thought of it, but I do remember what prompted it: sitting in some kind of waiting room, right underneath a clock that was ticking really loudly. I’m a bit obsessed with clocks; I think it’s to do with the fact I have no real sense of time (very common in neurodivergents) so I surround myself with them in order to keep track of the time as it passes. Sitting in the – whatever waiting room it was – I could hear the clock ticking above my head, and as it often does, my brain began to improvise little

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December 8, 2024 No Comments