stimming

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 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

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 exactly what my ticks do (if you’re going to be all science-y about it) it is nonetheless a good way of visualising what is happening, and pretty much how I think of it in my head. If you imagine that each of the wavy lines represents one of my ticks, you can see that there are points when all three come together perfectly – marked in purple as ‘nodes’ on the diagram. The red arrows point to ‘antinodes’ which are the parts where the three lines are most spread out and separated from each other. The straight dotted line that goes right through the middle is like the anchor for my harmony. (If you’re interested, it’s a G.) At the nodes when the lines come together you can see from

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 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

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 keyboard set up so tried out a few different notes to see what it sounded like with different pitches – literally just putting my fingers down wherever they landed. This came out as a little five note pattern that I really liked the sound of, so I temporarily paused my trawl through all of the sounds to try it out against the ticking tracks. I experimented a bit with how fast I wanted to play the pattern, how many times I wanted it repeated, whether it should go in time with the main tick or not, and then found a lovely sustained droning sound that could go alongside it. At the moment it’s very very simple and very basic, but for the first time I’m starting to feel an echo

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 colours because why wouldn’t you) and slightly distorted the audio so it plays a little bit more slowly. This gives me the effect of two clocks ticking slightly out of time with each other, and you can hear the rhythms change as the ticks go in and out of sync with each other. Just for fun, I’ve then repeated the process again and created another two tracks, each with slightly different speeds. I’m liking the effect you get with the three tracks playing together, but once you add a fourth it gets a bit messy! https://catmcgill.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/IMG_6458.mov

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 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

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 amplitude of the signal to make the spark bigger. Later on in the video you see an Ableton Push, which is a MIDI controller (MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface). The Push sends a signal to my computer when I press the touchpad which my computer turns into a musical sound. I’ve been very lucky to borrow this Ableton Push from Drake Music to experiment with. It’s a really flexible piece of kit and you can use it to perform with live as well as record. I’m not sure yet whether it’s got a place in this project or not, but part of the joy of this residency is being able to try things out!

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 rhythms along with the tick. I could also hear another clock somewhere else, and it was ticking just slightly out of time with my clock; not just out of sync, but slightly slower so that the two ticks phased in and out of time with each other. I don’t think I knew it at the time, but the way that my brain was enjoying the rhythms created by the ticking clocks is a form of stim; even though I wasn’t making any outward movement my brain was dancing, pushing and pulling at the out of sync ticking, leaning into the messy dissonance of the rhythms and relaxing again when they were back in sync. ‘Stimming’ is how most neurodivergent people refer to the ‘restricted and repetitive behaviours’ that are part

December 8, 2024 No Comments

Stimming for mental health

Yesterday was tricky. I was doing a new thing that I’d never done before, and which necessitated me being around lots of noisy children for a prolonged period of time. (Tap dancing in a showcase, if you’re interested.) When we got home, I told my husband that he was not allowed to talk to me until I came out from under my duvet. Up until now, my duvet has been pretty much my only coping strategy, and as life is going through a difficult phase I feel like I’m using it all the time. Often I get home from work and go straight to bed. I’ve been eating meals in bed. I’ve been working in bed. It’s good, because it does help me feel better, but it’s quite limiting, and it’s affecting my relationships with my family, particularly my children.

December 17, 2018 No Comments

So here goes, the start of a self-exploration of what autism means to me. In this first blog I’m going to talk about stimming. The term ‘stimming’ refers to self-stimulating behaviours that are often used by people with autism or other developmental disorders. The most common one you’re likely to think of is flapping your hands – my son does this a lot when he’s excited! Some people rock, some people jiggle, hum, bang their head, make noises; there’s really no end to the variety of stims possible.

October 4, 2018 No Comments