A piece commissioned by Delia Derbyshire Day and Brighter Sound, in partnership with the National Lottery Heritage Fund, to celebrate the legacy of Delia Derbyshire and Doctor Who. This project was a collaboration between myself and visual artist, Alexis Maxwell, and has since been added to the Delia Derbyshire Archive at Manchester's John Ryland's Library.
Musically, the track was inspired by Derbyshire's Inventions For Radio, in which she harnessed the voices of real individuals to aurally explore contemporary perceptions of God and faith. Building on this concept, Alexis and I conducted interviews with members of the local community, using these real-life narratives as the foundation for a science-fiction that remains rooted in real perspectives. The use of recorded human voices, divorced from their sources, places the cognitive dissonance detailed in R. M. Schafer’s notion of ‘Schizophonia’, and Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of ‘acousmatics’, directly in view; the sound of human voices, so familiar, yet dismembered and robbed of their autonomy, is profoundly jarring.
I was particularly inspired by Delia’s working notes from the John Rylands Archive to explore new methods of generating musical material. For example, many of the sounds heard throughout the track, and the rhythm of the main Doctor Who-esque melody, are a spelling of Delia’s name in morse code. In addition to this, much of the harmony used in the track is built on the mode that results from the numericisation of the spelling of Delia's first name (D=4, E=5, L=12, I=9, A=1).
https://youtu.be/lL6geafcsCs…A piece commissioned by Delia Derbyshire Day and Brighter Sound, in partnership with the National Lottery Heritage Fund, to celebrate the legacy of Delia Derbyshire and Doctor Who. This project was a collaboration between myself and visual artist, Alexis Maxwell, and has since been added to the Delia Derbyshire Archive at Manchester's John Ryland's Library.
Musically, the track was inspired by Derbyshire's Inventions For Radio, in which she harnessed the voices of real individuals to aurally explore contemporary perceptions of God and faith. Building on this concept, Alexis and I conducted interviews with members of the local community, using these real-life narratives as the foundation for a science-fiction that remains rooted in real perspectives. The use of recorded human voices, divorced from their sources, places the cognitive dissonance detailed in R. M. Schafer’s notion of ‘Schizophonia’, and Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of ‘acousmatics’, directly in view; the sound of human voices, so familiar, yet dismembered and robbed of their autonomy, is profoundly jarring.
I was particularly inspired by Delia’s working notes from the John Rylands Archive to explore new methods of generating musical material. For example, many of the sounds heard throughout the track, and the rhythm of the main Doctor Who-esque melody, are a spelling of Delia’s name in morse code. In addition to this, much of the harmony used in the track is built on the mode that results from the numericisation of the spelling of Delia's first name (D=4, E=5, L=12, I=9, A=1).
https://youtu.be/lL6geafcsCsWWWWWWWW…