Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts

Thursday, October 6, 2016

Medieval

 

A crudely drawn scribble, frankly I have never quite given up on the child who would spend hours making bold statements on a page. 

Strange really, I could easily find the means to make clear lines, to adhere to the suprareal. I could just take a bloody photo, and retouch it with an application, to smooth away the wrinkles. 

No! I refuse to give up on the child - even to my children.   

I found a moment between things and started scratching away on the Paper 53 application on my iPhone. My fingers were too large for the screen, I felt like Gulliver in Liliput. After a short while,  I was rather surprised to find myself confronted by a brute in armour. He was staring out at something in the distance. 

Is he a Saracen, a Crusader? 

I know not.  I am not quite sure if the castle behind is on fire or set in colourful forest, either. 

No matter. It is the ambiguity which gives me space to dream.  

However dense the scribble, clear forms emerge.  

I have found a new restrictive playground, for all our playgrounds have their limits...

I messed around with the possibility to combine drawing and photo. 

These are early days, I have no idea where that game might lead.

I played around for about three quarters of an hour and put the sketchy results in a Steller folder.



The images inspired me to play with sound. 

I hopped off to one of my new favourite activities, Thumbjamming. 

I shall continue with this toing and froing from image to music and back.

I am beginning to really enjoy it.








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Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Vagabondage

I had absolutely no memory of having created the image. Suddenly, my eye was attracted to it. It took on new meaning here. It is not so much the form of the figure which counts for me, nor even the colour, it is the memory of freedom in the gesture. There was no preconception, no cahier de charges, nothing more than a gesture.

I suppose it was the term "vagabondage" which connected.

"Un droit que bien peu d'intellectuels se soucient de revendiquer, c'est le droit à l'errance, au vagabondage. Et pourtant, le vagabondage, c'est l'affranchissement, et la vie le long des routes, c'est le liberté."

 Ecrits sur le sable 1988, Isabelle Eberhardt

I need those stolen moments of peace, where my mind is free to wander.

I find a quote of Baudelaire:

"Glorifier le vagabondage et ce qu'on peut appeler le Bohémianisme, culte de la sensation multipliée, s'exprimant par la musique." 
Journaux intimes, 1887, Mon coeur mis à nu, Charles Baudelaire.

I still see the fields racing by, I struggle to hold onto the beauty in the light, there was too much to take in. I had had just enough presence of mind to point my smartphone at the window, to capture what I might.  It was only later that I started to really look and breathe in those fields racing by.

"How might those racing fields talk with other images?" I mused.  I scanned the images on my phone and then came to a halt. Two leapt out. I suppose it was the architectural quality which I liked, to contrast with racing nature.

I fused the images together, played with various versions and put them together in a Steller collection.


On looking at the images, I moved to Thumbjam. What sounds would tie together the images? After a few experiments, I kept coming back to the harmonica. It was that sound which would tell the story. Playing as simply as possible with the sound, I settled on some sort of melody.  I took it with me to iMovie and started editing. There is so much to  learn messing with sound, image, darkness, silence.


        "All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together."

Jack Kerouac
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Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Adagio.

Adagio: indicating that the music is to be played slowly or a composition intended to be played in this manner.
I tighten up the bow and apply the rosin.

I love the smell of rosin, its texture, the gesture involved in its application.

Hour upon hour of practice built a relationship between myself and the instrument.

That time was my own, and no one else's.



I find myself talking to an inanimate instrument.

It becomes a means of mediating my soul.

I remember the pressure of the strings on my fingers.

I remember the gloomy, musty smelling claustrophobia of that music practice room. 

At no moment did I really think of working on composition myself. 

Nonapplication.

I press an icon on Garageband and I hear a sample of a drum beat. 

I press an icon on Garageband and I hear a sample of piano playing.

I might as well be pressing an icon on Spotify and listening to a musician's piece of music.

It's pretty much the same.  

It takes less than a second.

A physical relationship between myself and the creation of sound is virtually non-existant.


Application.

I move my fingers up and down the screen on the ThumbJam application.  

Instantly, I am able to hear what sounds like perfectly bowed cello playing.

What of my involvement in the sound?

I tilt the phone and I am able to hear vibrato on the notes played.

I take another sampled sound and add it to the cello loop. 

I have the impression that I am able to compose music.

Is this composition?

Is it a seductive simulacra of artistry?

After hours of practice of cello, composition never felt accessible.



The experience of playing the cello clearly influences my search for sensitivity and musicality from the application.  

I begin to ask myself questions.

Instrument.


 Why is it, I ask myself, that Thumbjam feels more like an instrument to me than Garageband?

I find an article written by Mikkel Bech-Hansen entitled "Musical Instrument Interfaces."

 I read:

 "Originally being a drummer, my approach to creating music has always had a very physical and tactile dimension to it."

I can relate to this lack of relationship that Bech-Hansen feels towards electronic synthesizers.

Garageband feels flat and unresponsive, I feel unable to establish a relationship with the application.

I think again of the time that it took me to go to the music room take the cello, adjust the spike to the right length, tune the strings, tighten the bow...

I think of the angle of the bow on the strings, the pressure of the fingers on the steel strings.

I hear the resonance of the instrument in my body.

I feel the vibration of the instrument within the confines of the room.

It is as if the instrument and myself have become one.

A smartphone application, while capable of reproducing faithfully a myriad of sounds feels like a social, emotional and physical impoverishment.

I feel disconnection.

As Bech-Hansent says:

"The advent of electronic and digital audio technologies severed the ties between the physical form of the mechanical instrument artefact and the actual generated sound, thus paving the way for sound generation liberated from the confinements of physical acoustics."

 On one hand a new world of sound is opened up for me, on the other hand I feel amputation.

"The natural mappings between the bodily gestures of the musicians and the audible and haptic feedback determined by the very shape and materiality of acoustic instruments were nevertheless entirely missing."

Can one really build relationships with applications or electronic "instruments"?

 I search around and find an "instrument" which blurs the lines somewhat.
Feeling alive.

Which applications, I wonder, offer me "feel"?

There are perhaps two that come to mind: Thumbjam and Paper of 53.

Which applications, have I spent time building stories with?

Image manipulation applications: PicPlayPost, Fusion, Strip Designer, Prisma have become of interest to me when using them in combinations to answer artistic questions.

It is hacking the applications together which interests me.

I resist the idea of soulless reproduction.

How does Prisma, for example, engage one artistically if one simply flicks through a series of filters?

I don't see a person, I see Prisma.

I don't see art, I see commerce.

After a short time, I see nothing.

I feel nothing.

How does Garageband engage one artistically if one simply flicks through a series of sampled loops?

After a short time, I hear nothing.

I feel nothing.

I find an interview with David Byrne entitled "When to resist technology?"




 Instrumentalisation.

 When I played the cello, I was so small that my peers used to say jokingly:

 "Ensor is not playing the cello, the cello is playing Ensor."  

I suppose I was perceived as instrumentalized.

I wonder about the time spent sharing links, gory click-bait, borrowed drum beats, photos, drawings,  and existential yearnings across social media.

Am I playing or am I being played?

I think about power differentials present on these participatory networks.

I find an article by David Byrne and share it with others for future reference.

I see the same article by David Byrne shared back to me by Terry Elliot with an accompanying comment:

I open up his annotations and I read:

"This is one of the most serious problems with online life - we live in a zero sum "attention world".

 "I find the digital 'look at me, look at me' attention culture we live in is...shallow and devious."

I think back to David Byrne's words about resistance towards what the computer wants of us.

Terry reminds us time, and time again of the importance of real engagement

He is right, to remind us thus.

Adagio.

To live is to engage, to relate is to deeply entwine story.

What are our relationships if we flick between avatars like so many virtual instruments in Garageband?

To appreciate life and relationships we must play our parts adagio.

Attending but not attended.

I read Byrne's article again.

He speaks of the appropriation of lesser known artists' images by pop-stars.

"Sometimes ideas and images are lifted by commercial entities without attribution - and one wonders if, in the eyes of those creators, commercial and mainstream work becomes cooler if it harvests from hip unknowns. There seems to be a sense that unknown artists ideas are there for the picking. In fact it's often viewed as an honor to be picked."

To what extent are we simply commodified by these "participatory networks" to be gobbled up by those with a more highly developed attention credit rating?

Kanye West made that bitch...

Are we forgetting that the time we engage even soullessly has value...to us - perhaps none to others?

We share "freely" and yield data to data brokers, our souls encoded in zeros and ones.

Are we just there for the picking?

Are we just stringed puppets to be plucked pizzicato by those with the means to marketize?

Are we playing or are we being played?




































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Saturday, September 3, 2016

Detuned wanderings.

If ever there was a demonstration of chaotic complexity in learning it is in these "detuned wanderings" that I have experienced in the past few days.

Natures lies depressingly dormant and then in the space of what seems an inkling the desert colours are vibrant.

It is at times like this that I really value the despair that I am able to write here.

I draw it like it is.

What the hell is the point of trying to pretend?

There is an astonishing contrast between catatonic states and sudden energetic flourishes.

That is the nature of our lives.

We are always on the brink of falling apart.

I suppose writing this will help me to deal with parenting of teenagers who, at times,  seem to have transformed into a worrying chrysalitic state.

We must have faith.

I think of my eldest son, who appears to be learning butterfly flight.

He is beginning to stretch those wings.

Untamed elements.

 A chance encounter with a post of Amy Burvall "Epherments: Transient Beauty Spliced with Sound."
sparked an unpredictable chain of connections and explorations related in a couple of blog posts here:

"Ephermenents...aagh."

"Ensemble."

A series of blog comments, tweets, DM's and Facebook posts, between friends, acquaintances and unknown but connected Twitter users has enabled the emergence of creative collaboration, exploration, and reminded me of the value of participating in these, at times alienating, digital spaces.

Even here, in these virtual wastelands, wildlife flourishes.

We never know if, what, when, or quite how learning will be sparked.

Bearing in the mind our differences it is a miracle that we can connect.


We never know really why it is possible that it happens.

At times we come together in harmony.

At times we are flung uncontrollably into dischord.

It is easy to forget that there is joy in spinning around together despite at times feeling light years apart.


God, it is hard to hold onto faith at times...


When we see reasons for confusion others may see with clarity.


When we may perceive chaos, others might sense underlying harmony.


Transcending despair is an act of blind faith.


We hold on for grim death - it must make sense, it must make sense.

Why must it make sense?

What has faith to do with reason?


Perhaps we need to fully sense our existence rather than to vainly attempt to make too much sense of life?

I am so thankful to be connected to Terry Elliott's 'Antiharmonium'.

I am so thankful for the support of my friends who are there when my machine is shaking itself apart.

What is it that Terry says when at a loss for words?

Let's go bowling.

 What do you say when there is nothing to be said?

We stand, hugging ourselves, trembling fearfully before our threshold of silence.

Suddenly those questions strike a chord with what I remember reading in Mary Ann Reilly's post entitled "Blind Faith".

  "Last night I was reading another book by Thomas Merton (it's like he's whispering directly in my ear). About halfway through Dialogues with Silence: Prayers & Drawings, Merton writes:
But there is a greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. Eternity is in the present. Eternity is in the palm of the hand. Eternity is a seed of fire whose sudden roots break barriers that keep my heart from being an abyss" (Kindle Locations 431-433). 
The substance of silence. Oh my.

Mysteries abound and surely that is for our good."

I repeat those sentences of Merton again to myself.

"Eternity is in the present. Eternity is in the palm of the hand. Eternity is a seed of fire whose roots break barriers that keep my heart from being an abyss."

 Seeds of fire.

 I return to that feeling of being "ensemble."  

An unexpected DM appears in my Twitter feed.

Wendy Taleo used to play the cello too.

She shares a poem.

I smile, thinking of "trembling before our threshold"...on seeing her poem is entitled 'Vibrato'.

Vibrato...indeed!


I smile, thinking of the difficulty of disentangling responsibility for creative endeavour, for learning.


Meanwhile, Amy's posting of "Transient Beauty: Spliced with Sound." has opened up for me a whole range of creative possibilities which were sitting there on my smartphone waiting for the moment to take flight.


An initial creative effort of a cello piece for "Ensemble" has encouraged me to investigate further the interest of spending time gaining mastery in the manipulation of the application ThumbJam.

Kevin Hodgson's poem "Broken Strings" attracts me to play with the microphone and the music.




I go back to Amy Burvall's videos and combine it with the performance of Kevin's poem and its musical accompaniment.



In the meantime, Kevin has been enquiring about the interest of ThumbJam on Twitter.


A few hours later and Kevin is busy playing with ThumbJam...


I try to "close-read" his piece.

I am beginning to start listening to music anew.

My cello sawings are forty years dormant.

Those passing years have disabled my bowing and left me only too aware of the gap between my ability and those of my peers.

Starting playing an instrument, starting singing again, jamming with others seemed so unattainable.

I listen again to Kevin's piece.

What notes can I attempt to reproduce?

I realise that I don't have to cover it perfectly for my efforts to be recognized or appreciated by Kevin.

I am suddenly enjoying fluttering childlike rather than flapping frantically like an adult.

I can some way approach his playing on an iphone.

I can participate, meaningfully.





I am suddenly curious again at what I can conjure with my new found tricks.

We investigate future collaborations.

 Courage is volatile.

There are many of my friends who fill me at awe at their talents.

I become frustrated at what I consider to be my scribbling, my dabbling, my scratching around.

I remember my mother's words at her frustration with her artwork:

 "Oh what the use, I shall never be any good."

One of my most treasured belongings is her scraperboard hedgehog...

I return again to a quote of Warhol that I sent to my eldest son when he asked me about what I thought of his short film.


It is a quote which keeps me going in these "detuned wanderings..."

 "Don't think about making art. Just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding make even more art."

 Andy Warhol.

 Our courage is "volatile" when faced with this uncertainty of becoming...



Wings pulse, wings pulse, wings pulse, imperceptibly...

breathless,
silent,
emphemera,
revealer.






I am so fortunate to be accompanied by fellow travellers who know what it is to be "trembling before the threshold"...




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Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Ephemerments...aagh.

It is quite bizarre how things almost don't happen.

I wasn't supposed to be writing this.

It is Amy Burvall's fault.

Aagh..





I have work to do.

It might not have happened.
I might not have noticed.
I did.

Her blog post:

Ephemerments: Transient Beauty Spliced with Sound.

caught my eye and sparked my imagination...aagh.

She clearly has nothing better to do than to notice.

God damn it.

She noticed light dancing, passing clouds, palms swaying, kite surfers surfing and then went and filmed what she saw.

Not content with that, she then went and spliced the images together with music and then...

Aagh.

She went and shared them on her blog.

I shouldn't have noticed it this morning on Facebook.

I really have better things to do.

I have lost another couple of hours to play.

How many bloody hours do I "lose" to play?

Light playing on a kitchen wall and I am stuck for hours.

Light playing on the sea surface and I have to go and change my avatar.




It's inattention, that's what it is.

I do concentrate, but not on the right things!

I probably need some sort of medication to make me more productive...

If it had been just the pretty images that Amy posted, I might have resisted the temptation.

Unfortunately, it was the sound spliced with the video which got me.

I went and dug up some more or less frequently used sound apps.



AudioCopy which I use all the time for sound recording.

Figure and ThumbJam for beats and music making.

I uploaded a series of images (which I used for a recent Apehazard blog post) to iMovie which works pretty seamlessly with AudioCopy/Figure/ThumbJam.

I uploaded the resulting sound/music to Soundcloud if any wants to play with it.

If you have some tracks I can play with let me know :-)

Cello track made with ThumbJam


Beats/sound made with Figure


Beats/sound made with Figure

Version 1


Version 2





Version 3



Thanks to Amy, I shall now be wasting more time on not just collaging images but sound.

She has gone and created another hashtag: #ephemerment.

I shall resist this distraction.

I have work to do.

Aagh.














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Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Before our maker space...


"Subjectivity is objective." 
Woody Allen.

I am stepping perilously close to the edge of reason.

What have I gone and done now?


"I have only gone and made an object of myself."

As soon as I give a sign of existence.

Nay, before I give a sign, I am already objectified.

  • the one so hoped for.
  • the vermin.
  • the Prince 
  • the heir.
  • the mistake.
  • the loved one.

Darn! It's too late.

I am here now.

 "I have gone and made an object of myself!"

You'll forgive me but it ain't all my own doing.

You are responsible for my disappearance.

You are killing me while giving this IT life.

As soon as I get this down on the page, I go and disappear.

You can't know me.

I hastily reread all that I have written.

I no longer recognise myself.

Who is this writer and why won't the bastard leave me alone?

 "He's only gone and made an object of me."

So while I may object, I am now a subject of my own study.


I go back and read what I have written.

I don't recognise myself.

I never used to write like this.

No this is a lie.

I never used to write so much like this.

I blame tragedy.

I blame sadness.

I blame the others.

I retraced my step this morning.

It was Jesse Stommel's fault.

Though I admit that he was not at fault.

He left an object lying around.

How careless of him!



OK.

It is my fault.

How was he to know that I would read the bloody tweet.

It is not my fault.

How was I to know that it would somehow make me bloody think.

So I thought, stupidly aloud.

"I went and made an object of myself...again...twice..."Nay! Three times!"







That really set the cat amongst the pigeons.

Jesse Stommel replied...more than once.

Darn him!







 Then Sarah Honeychurch ploughed in...twice!



 


So.

I wake up this morning with matter to make my head ache.


I retrace steps and tweet what seems relevant back to Jesse and the others.

All of this is Beyond Me.




All of this is Beyond the MeMe.


All of this is Beyond Us.


I note with surprise the books that I am reading at the moment:

Thomas Picketty. Capital in the 21st Century.

Bell Hooks. All about Love

How did that come about?

Surely those are not the sort of books I read!

I don't recognise myself.

I note an article to return to:

Carl Ratner. Subjectivity and Objectivity in Qualitative Methodology

All this, I suspect, is about love (to write on), and the poetry of our futile science.

A final note perhaps?




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Friday, December 11, 2015

Inference.

There is only one way to build an Airbus, there is no poetic licence allowed.

Engineers all over Europe use a 'simplified English' specially conceived for the aeronautic industry which removes every possible ambiguity from their minds and hands.

Forget a rivet and the results are potentially catastrophic. There is no space for interpretation, no leeway for inference.

One word means one thing.

I was reminded of this while reflecting on a post of Kevin Hodgson entitled: "A single word can change a story. (perhaps)."  In it, he talks of a writing experiment based on the #25wordstory format.

The story is here:

His stated aim was:

 "to infer another story, behind the ornament being put away, and also, to shorten each sentence to make the story more and more compact by the end."

 It wasn't the story in itself which caught my eye at first. It was the folllowing sentence:

 "And what, I wondered, would happen to that story — still so very short — if I changed that last word to something else."

 Kevin goes on to experiment with the addition of the word: 'Laughed' or the alternative 'Cried.'

Short Fiction Ornament String

Words play off against each other like notes of music, I remark later.

It was not this that I really read.

I was already elsewhere.

I was impatient.

I had seen the climbing frame, dropped all bags and rushed off to explore.

That story had become a playground.

Interpretations.

How many interpretations were possible from Kevin's story I wondered?

How might our reading of the same words produce different meanings?

What were the constraints in his text as written and how were they engineered?

I tapped on Audiocopy and did a series of recordings.




The first recording seems to reveal the intimacy of Kevin's writing. There is an apparent melancholy, and age to the person, or at least a depth of nostalgia. She is apparently alone, there is ritual in her actions, there is a precious fragility in the ornament.

The story recalls to me my mother, at Christmas, alone, tucking away little brass angels from a candle blown angel wheel.

The story, short that it is, opens up possibilities for me of identification, for imagination.




Three minutes later, the tone has changed.

The reader is apparently unsympathetic to the woman and her ritual.

There is mockery in that voice. The story suddenly seems less intimate, more critical. Perhaps we can imagine that it is part of a larger comic collection of incidents.  What was once preciously hidden is open to ridicule. I am beginning to add ornament to the recording in the way of a photo.



The photo has become a black box.  If the mockery has disappeared, the voice appears as neutral narrator. I no longer feel that the box is open. The story is a series of words, there is no depth.




Suddenly the ornament, 'that ornament' has become disassociated from the memory.

She has 'tucked that ornament away' in a drawer? What now is 'the memory'? Why is not in the same place as the ornament? The change of stress on the words has changed the story, I feel less drawn to the question of why the woman might laugh.

What on earth is 'the memory'? How might one put a 'memory' in a box? What is she trying to forget?




Poetic licence - I ignore the punctuation, which in no way suggests that there are two people speaking, to invent another person in the scene. The woman is no longer alone with a narrator, she is being bossed around by a Monty Pythonesque civil servant: 'Put the memory in a box out of view.'

She is rescued by a more neutral, even sympathetic narrator.

Suddenly I feel empathy for the woman, how on earth did she get into a relationship with that prat?




Whimsy...it sounds like we're hearing the Wind in the Willows or some Jeeves story. Now I am getting irritated by that narrator imposing a reading onto a text which it didn't deserve. On top of that, what on earth has the image uploaded to Soundcloud got to do with the story or the tone of the story?

Laziness, I mutter to myself.


Here we are back to breath, back to melancholy, back to sadness.

All is as it was...until a last, sinister, laugh.

What has she done? What was that ornament? Who has she murdered?

We have gone from melacholy to macabre with a laugh.

Memory box.

I am finding it hard to remember these different emotions, different characters, so I stitch the readings together in iMovie, find the only video footage that I have which I feel is indistinct enough give space enough to these different voices and publish on Youtube.


Music box.

I then wonder how might music affect the atmosphere, the tone, the meaning of a single reading.  I drop a sound file into Garageband. I go and run my fingers over Thumbjam, choose what I feel is appropriate instrument and assemble voice with music.




Cello perhaps? Bassoon? I am not sure, but the music appears to open up the text to a new theatrical dimension. What has the writing become now? I feel that I want to know the other movements to which this piece is part.  There is darkness in this assemblage....





A string ensemble... a change of atmosphere, a change of decor, of epoque perhaps, baroque maybe? Suddenly, the woman and her box appear as a period piece, crinolines, candle light, and consumption...



Goodness, where on earth are we now? Electro, echo, reverb, what has the writing become now? Are the words backgrounded? Are the words just beats in a strange dance? There is an underlying rythym to those words...

Rhythm (from Greek ῥυθμός, rhythmos, "any regular recurring motion, symmetry" (Liddell and Scott 1996)) generally means a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions" (Anon. 1971, 2537).

Ritual becomes mechanistic, I only care for motion, any person appears lost to machine.

I almost want to erase the words so that they become sampled beats.

I suddenly remember Stromae.




There is nothing precious in that box, however you look at it.

It is that emptiness which moves us.

Alors on dance.

Box sets..

I find a box.

I find a collage box in Accapella.



Am I enriching the story?

Am I changing the story?

Has the story become something else? I am not altogether sure.

I insert it here for reflection.

I save the video from Accapella to my camera roll and see how I can change it again with PicPlayPost. The story become secondary perhaps to collage. Are we less concerned now by the meaning and more concerned by the graphic effect? What has become of the words? I don't know. I insert it here for reflection.



It feels like that I have finished with the ornament. I have put it in a box, to move on...

We need words as boxes for resonance.

Writing is closer to music than I imagined.

That sounds right.

I make it a mental note.

 What of laughed?

A final thought occurs to me.

What of that word that Kevin added?

What of 'laughed'?

I laugh.

There is nothing in the box.

Faced with emptiness we might as well laugh.




Whose ornament are we?

Who is laughing now?

[END]


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Thursday, November 5, 2015

Road trip




This road was the picture which appeared on my first post: 'To boldy go'.

I didn't know then if it would be the last.  

A few years on now, the road keeps rolling.  

The destination is no clearer but rather than bemourn uncertain outcomes, I am reveling in the adventure.

This is how I view learning, teaching, living.  

I am reveling in the adventure.

When times are hard, I think of all the people that I have met who have shared a smile, a beer, a laugh, a story, a song and they are the ones that keep me going...

Every day, I drive the same route, in the same car, struggle to find a parking space, and think to myself: "I wonder what's going to happen next."

Invariably, if you are patient, if you are lucky, things do happen to keep you going...

In the classroom yesterday, there were a number of students who were sharing what they had learnt, or at least stuff which appealed to them:  sailing, rugby refereeing, mental preparation, Ellen de Generes, the Walking Dead, a football match, others were actually (to my astonishment) choosing to in speak English to each other.  

Others were busy preparing their work on a gap year project which was due for the following week. 

In the background there was a group of students gathered around a guitar who were singing covers of Daft Punk, perhaps John Lennon...I don't remember.

There was also an ex-student, Julien Diot, who had studied with me 6 years before- who was taking a break from his globe-trotting, before going off to Costa Rica, to help the other students with their gap year projects.

There are so may stories...

Julien shares stories here: http://worldtour-outdoorexperience.com

There is one photo of his which resonates with me, it is a collage of photos of people who gave him a place to stay in New Zealand.  

It is a testimony to the generosity of people.



People's generosity keeps you going...


At about 11:30, I wandered over to listen to what the students, Etienne with a guitar and Loic had prepared for their 'learn and share' session, I was expecting another cover version of a song. 

Nope...they had actually written a song in English - entitled...Road Trip.

I took a photo of their manuscipt



I then got another student to capture their performance to post to Youtube.



They then did an encore of Get Lucky - captured by another student on another phone. 

At 12:00 I tweeted the following message:
Three hours later, a tweet arrived from Egypt:



A tweet in appreciation of Maha's singing and Etienne and Loic's lyrics arrived from Maha (another one) in Egypt:


Three hours and forty five minutes later, a tweet arrived from the USA:

There were a number of conversations going on about the song between people in at least three continents.

One problem of the original tweet was the manuscipt. It wasn't adapted to all the people who might want to contribute but were prevented from doing so by problems of legibility.

Not everybody wanted to sing or play guitar, Ronald transformed the song into a poem:

In Australia, Wendy Taleo wrote a poem inspired by the theme of the song:

In the middle of the night, the afternoon, the morning, Alan Levine, perhaps in Arizona shared a new version of Road trip:



The following day, a new grunge version arrived from Bryan Murley over in Illinois. 

After a bit of faffing around I worked out how to embed it from Google Drive here:

(I recommend turning up the volume to fully appreciate the effect Bryan :-)




And then a few hours later...Kevin in Massachusetts posted a completely different version with totally remixed music.


Then Bryan came back and shared his grunge on Souncloud, Thanks to you Bryan I have learnt how to embed audio from Google drive :-)




And then Sarah up in Scotland kilted the song out completely differently....



Then a bit later on she blogged about her remix here:

http://www.nomadwarmachine.co.uk/2015/11/07/roadtrip/

I have really no idea where all of this is going. 

There is some talk of a country version, 

Maha commented: 

Maha is talking about a lyric hack:
This Road Trip is really becoming illustrative of the complexity of Road Trips.

Travellers come together, spend time in conversation, tell stories, sing a few verses, and part going off on different routes, where they will take parts of their learnt songs and stories to new conversations in new places with new people.

I am becoming unable to follow their traces. I am now reliant on others who will be able to tell their part of the story, a part in which I am now absent. I am becoming to think that this will be a fascinating collaborative research project into creative emergence.  

I finally get round to reading Bruno's Road Trip Story here in his blog where he has embedded the image of Etienne and Loic's manuscript,... I in turn am beginning to be inspired by this story of a Road Trip song to write...

I shall look forward to listening to how the other branches of the story mutate.
 There are too many branches for me to collect here. 

 I decide to attempt to follow the different routes that this Road Trip is taking.

Bryan comes up with not one but two country versions:




 
And then for good measure uploads them to Soundtrap to enable people to record tracks to accompany him.



Meanwhile over in Australia Wendy has curated the story of another strand of Road Trip which arose from Maha's aforementioned image in response to Maha's aforementioned singing.



A series of six word stories inspired by two lines of Etienne and Loic's song, written by Wendy, Ronald, Maha, and others have been assembled and are going to be put to music by Laura's music students over in the UK.
Meanwhile, over in Canada, Maureen is contributing to a collaborative story with #digiwrimo and hears Kevin's aforementioned version of Etienne and Loic's song.

She includes the song in part 13 of the story quite unaware of the origin of Kevin's rendition of Road Trip.

Meanwhile, somewhere upstairs in a house in Glasgow Scotland, someone is doing a Road Trip song:


The person in question, Niall is the aforementioned Sarah's husband, he comes downstairs:
He goes upstairs, a tragic crime is committed:
Will we ever get to hear the lost Scottish version of Road Trip?

Meanwhile, I am waiting with impatience to hear what Laura's music students will compose, I am waiting to hear if Maha's guitar-playing friend will be heard playing with Bryan in Illinois.



I don't how Etienne and Loic will respond to the Road Trip that their song has been taking.

I know that Etienne tweeted this reaction to Maha's interpretation:


This is perhaps the most important lesson I have learnt: we don't need to leave the walls of a class room to appreciate the diversity, the creativity, and the generosity of the people around us...around the world.

We don't have to travel to have a Road Trip, to have an adventure.

We do need faith.

There was another tweet I shared yesterday:


I think that I would like to remix that quotation:

To write is to throw yourself into an abyss while telling yourself: I'll be caught no doubt...by people who find meaning in this.

There are days when we get lucky...

Thank you Etienne and Loic, Maha, Ronald, Wendy, Alan, Bryan, Kevin, Julien and you all for sharing with us.

It means a lot.










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