I’d been testing the devices in the afternoon at Bedford Creative Arts, and all seemed to be working OK, although I could only get 2 to be stable enough to use and walk around with. I got to the venue at 7pm – so I had 30 mins to set them up again…  At this point, the devices started to become a bit less reliable… which could have been down to me setting them up too quickly, or worrying about them too much !!

I wanted to start the session by showing the choir the device, with all it’s features – but unfortunately, when I did this, … low and behold – it stopped working quite early on in the ‘demo’ and needed re-booting.

Luckily – we have a ‘choir assistant’ – the very talented Roger Illingworth, and so I handed him my notes for the session – and he started with some of his own warms ups and some of mine from previous sessions. Meanwhile, I spent more time working on getting the device up and running.

It took some time to get it to be stable enough to walk around with, so Roger went on to lead the first exercise I had planned. This was simply to pass a sound around the circle.  
- Listen to the person on your right and then ‘pass’ the sound to the person on your left. 
- Repeat the sound (texture) until you are ‘passed’ a different sound from the person on your right – then switch to that. 
This was really effective, and even though I was busy trouble shooting the tech side of things – it was extremely useful to be ‘outside the choir’ – (not singing myself) - because I was able to listen more carefully to how it was developing. In fact – it was really good having Roger lead this exercise, and even though I completely sprung this on him unannounced, he rose to the challenge... thanks Roger!

I managed to get one device up and running and behaving in quite a stable way – so one choir member (Clare) was game for trying it out. We gave her a little bit of time to experiment with it and get used to the controls, then we continued with the ‘pass a note /sound around the circle’ idea. Clare worked in the centre of the circle experimenting with the device – moving towards and away from other singers.  This was really interesting – and it lead me to think that not everyone in the choir needs to work with a device , in fact, it would probably work better with just a few…. So this is quite a development in how I am envisaging the piece.

The next piece we re-visited was the ‘walking past each other in lines’ structure. The first task was to all be on the same note – and crescendo when we crossed by our opposite partner. The idea was to vary our speeds and start times so we all pairs were passing at the same time – so everyone’s going in and out of synch. I then added the instruction to ‘choose any note’, and this produced a few amazing moments. We then discussed this process – Roger made the point that maybe we were not making enough aesthetic choices, and I suggested we spent more time considering the detail of what exactly we choose to do and when – including varying the dynamic range and using ‘silence’ as a material by listening for at least one third of the time, and deciding when to place a sound, and when to take your voice out of the piece. This continued to work quite well – but I realized it could perhaps benefit from some ‘fixed’ or more ‘scored’ sections. 

Something I had considered before was to have some ‘cue’ notes on headphones to give people notes. I had semi-abandoned that idea in favour of using pitch pipes, but now I think I will revisit it, being as headphones would also be useful for mounting the microphone onto.
Ultimately – with all these exercises and structures -  I had originally envisaged developing them by introducing the ‘device’ into them at this session – so being as this wasn’t possible, I’m not sure we got enough covered in terms of progressing towards a performance... However – I have been quite impressed with how the purely vocal structures and exercises have been working – using ‘moving around the room’ as a guide to how the piece is ‘scored’. The group is really good, and very receptive - and for this session - especially patient!

After the choir session, I had a bit of a de-brief with Dawn Giles – director of Bedford Creative Arts.  She had come along to the session, and gave me some really useful feedback and observations. We discussed the exploratory nature of the project – and the importance of not fixating on the December performance having to be a finished and polished piece. This autumn is for 'Research and Development'  -  and I am certainly learning a lot – which is, in turn,  really informing how I develop the piece – so in that sense, this is very effectively research and development.