Been a funny day. Yesterday was extremely productive, playing with lots of different things and discovering characteristics that I hadn’t predicted (eg the curve of the piano having different possibilities according to how far (mid-ratchet) I go: either a fun ramp for things to fly off OR a kind of pendulum for objects on wheels (such as Stan’s ambulance…). Today though, I decided to focus on trying out the Wii idea, so brought in all of my music kit: cables, stands etc, ready to try going through Ableton and using the swing of the Wii controllers (I thought I had 3 but one of them is dead ☹ ) to play with delay. This morning I managed to forget my soundcard (d’oh!) and a few little cable bits but then, returning this afternoon with genuine motivation to crack on I got everything wired up to discover my Macbook doesn’t take the Firewire 800. Of course I knew that, but what with the building project and getting the piano built and having Sylvie – just normal busy life stuff! – I’d forgotten. Shame!

More interesting though is to say that I’d been rather stuck by having a very productive first day where I had lots of ideas and tried lots of things – different positions with the piano etc – and even created a kind of structure, where one thing led to the next. This immediately fixed everything and suddenly I was trying to ‘tweak’ where I lucky patcher no root download clearly had hardly started the process. My meeting with Lou (the Dramaturg) freed all of this up and reminded to really focus on tasks with no worry about where it might fit (if it even would) in the eventual piece.

Another thing that’s interesting to observe is that yesterday I brought in loads of kids toys and suddenly the space was all homely, domestic, colourful and fun looking. Today when I brought in all of the music kit it instantly became male, complicated, black, technical and boring!