music

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 be wired up to the computer and will make a sound when you touch them. Some will trigger the pre-recorded loops that I’ve made already, and some will just be a single sound so that you can improvise different melodies of your own. So from the top down: a brass figure of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders is going to sit on top of the clock – sounds a bit random but bear with me! All the clock sounds you hear in the piece have been recorded from an antique Dutch wall clock I have at home (click this link to see a similar one), so to reference it visually to my new ticking clock I have taken some of the decorations off another one I have which

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 all three at the same time. (There is also some other stuff but I’ll come to that in a minute.) Over the course of the loop, which is about a minute and a half long, the three ticks are more-or-less in time with each other at three points – beginning, middle, and end. In between those points where they’re together they very gradually and very irritatingly slide more and more out of time with each other, creating lots of rhythmic patterns that are shifting and changing and battling with each other until they slide back into place again when the ticks come back in time. I said in my last video that I was going to see if I could pick out some of the rhythms and make them into

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 programme didn’t get, which was actually caused by me moving as I was doing the recording! The blue blobs you can see on the screen are the where the ticks are, and I’ve zoomed right in so I can highlight the areas between each one where there’s a bit of extra noise and then remove it. A very boring job but it will make for a much nicer piece of audio in the end! https://catmcgill.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/IMG_6456.mov