Touched upon briefly in my last blog post, I have been struggling to tie my ideas together, or even to find the next thread to pull. It seems as though I am coming to the end of this thematic cul-de-sac and am genuinely surprised to find a dead end.

Maybe there’s more directions to go in, but I certainly can’t for the life of me find anything interesting.

It’s deeply frustrating, I struggled in vain for weeks upon weeks to find a topic that invigorated me, failed to do so, decided instead to research something arbitrary that seemed to have a lot of depth, and now it seems as though that has failed me as well. This seems to be a problem about how I approach academic thinking, there must be a more elegant approach than brute forcing a topic that one soon falls out of touch with.

For next term I really hope that I can find a better way of doing things. I think one of the ways of doing this is consuming more sound art – I plan on going to more exhibitions and reading more about sound art in the new year to see how others deal with these dilemmas, and I reckon that that may be enough of a tip off to get me out of my rut. Otherwise this will become a serious degree-risking situation.

**information taken from paper notebook writings from the past week**

One of the phenomenons that I find interesting about footsteps is identification – living in a house with more than one other person will eventually lead to understanding the nuances of gait present in each footstep, and these signifiers can be identified and separated out. This seems to be a natural, subconscious process which intrigues me even more.

Beyond identifying this phenomenon, I’m unsure what to do with the information. This entire audio paper seems to be based on the absurdity of placing so much importance on footsteps within a social setting, and pinpointing ways in which identifiable timbral nuances come into play with regards to living.

I can remember being a lot younger than I am now, perhaps 13 or 14, and musing on h0w different polar patterns for microphones came about – why would anyone invent a figure-of-8 microphone? I asked my dad, and he replied simply: for interviews! This was such an obvious answer that I was frustrated that I didn’t think of it myself, and although I’ve since learnt that the invention of fig-8 mics was one of technological limitations rather than one of seeking the perfect mic for interviews, I’ve always been very eager to use a fig-8 mic for interviews as it seems like it would be perfect. I conducted two interviews for this project, one over the phone and one in person, and the in-person interview was superbly suited to using fig-8, but the telephone conversation was sliiightly uneven in the relative gain department – an oversight on my part with regards to volume of the phone speaker, nothing that a touch of compression can’t fix.

Overall, I was happy to finally use fig-8 for this purpose, and was very pleased with the results.

**information taken from paper notebook writings from the past week**

Defining the outcomes of this audio paper has been a hefty task. I began looking into the footsteps thing as an absurd angle on research; I noticed that different shoes made me feel different. Oxfords vs. Doc Martens are hugely contrasting moods, and I decided to link that with sound. The Oxfords have a distinct knock when the heel strikes the floor and then a quieter ‘clack’ when the ball of your foot comes down. My Doc Martens simply ‘thunk’.

Following these simple observations I came to wonder how much information we can glean from just simply listening to a persons footsteps. This led on to researching different studies that looked into footsteps, some recording data with pressure pads and others by using structures as receivers.

This told me that there was a lot of data held within footsteps, and so I decided to interview some friends on the matter, to see whether they notice any alterations in the sound of footsteps under different circumstances.

Hunting for scientific sources to aide my audio paper, I’ve come across a variety of scientific papers and articles that have piqued my interest. Listed below are all of the relevant sources that I think I’ll manage to get some good information from.

Gait recognition from (geophones?):

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/footstep-sensors-identify-people-by-gait/

Gait recognition from pressure pads:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2011.0430

Vibration and sound signatures of human footsteps in buildings:

https://asa.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1121/1.2217371

Altering Walking Sounds to Change Perceived Body Weight, Emotional State and Gait:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2702123.2702374

Article that shows how much attention goes into footsteps (foley):

​​http://www.marblehead.net/foley/feet.html

Human recognition patterns in footsteps in buildings (geophones again, talking about a variety of studies?):

https://asa.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1121/1.2217371

There’s some very interesting pieces on gait recognition, which might become a big focus of my essay? Although, trying to gather my own data on gait recognition might be very difficult and arduous. One of these gait recognition studies used pressure pads and measured 2D pressure responses over time with a ‘carpet’ of sensors; this doesn’t help me with any audio related work, except perhaps shedding some light on just how much data footsteps contain. The study was able to correctly identify each footstep with 99.8% accuracy.

There seemed to be a few studies that used some sort of hyper-sensitive geophones to utilise structures as sensors, amplifying the super low frequencies that occur within buildings during walking. This seemed more relevant to my interests; there are really low frequency signatures made by footsteps that we can perhaps perceive subconsciously?

I also looked into how individuals come to recognise the footsteps of others in their homes, especially family members – although none of my research into that specific topic is linked above.

Looking up and seeing a few stars (not really seeing many at all, due to London light pollution) really gave me a good insight into the absurdist view in relation to Rhythmanalysis. A friend who I was outside with peered upwards and said the words (and I paraphrase) “Stars, eh? Really makes you feel insignificant.”. Except it wasn’t muttered in a frustrated, sad tone, it came out with a sense of gentle satisfaction. I’d been talking to him about my project earlier on in the day, and about how the whole Rhythmanalysis thing had come full circle with the Absurdism thing from last year, and I think he understood where I was coming from. Stars are just one more rhythm. Part of a daily-rhythm, they are only seen at night, but they are also engaged in their own universe-scale rhythms, doing a monumental dance with each other that is happening so phenomenally slow that we can’t hope to grasp a sense of their movement without long observation and the help of computers or maths. And compared to these massive rhythms, we exist in our own infinitesimal blips, in a comforting little nook of the universe.

So what if you’re late to work that one time?

I seem to have come full circle.

Funny how life works like that, eh?

Another slow rhythm?

I’ve been thinking that some of the meanings behind my rhythm work (my own mortality, being a happily small part of immense, timelessly massive rhythms, coming to terms with how life changes but finding comfort in the reliable and consistent rhythms that will continue long beyond my passing) reminded me of something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, until now. Absurdism was a big focus of some of my works last year, alongside the liminal. Absurdism is about how humans search for meaning in life, but life is intrinsically meaningless and disorderly – Albert Camus writes (in The myth of Sisyphus page 9, Penguin ‘Great Ideas’ edition 2005) “At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face” and I feel that this illustrates a part of how this piece ties together. I’m coming to terms with the fact that within life’s absurdity and lack of intrinsic meaning, one can find solace in the identifiable rhythms that we are all part of. Douglas Adams pokes fun at the search for meaning in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy with his supercomputer Deep Thought revealing that the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything is in fact 42. Although perhaps this could also be interpreted as commentary on the wisdom (or lack thereof) of computers – they can never offer answers to questions that are so deep rooted in being human, as they lack the frame of reference required to answer to such a question in terms that we understand.

It’s also notably amusing that the prevalence of absurdism in my life can be thought of as just another rhythm, as I’ve landed on it once again arouuuund a year later. Maybe winter makes me introspective and causes me to muse on why any of us bother with this whole life malarkey.

While polishing off my write-up I discovered that I’d touched on a few supremely essential things with regards to my relation to this work. This work is framed as an exploration of myself, my own rhythms, but while reading through Rhythmanalysis to find some good quotes to illustrate my intentions it occurred to me that this work also has an element of melancholic ‘coming of age’ to it. I’m realising that exploring these natural life-rhythms (say, days) that bracket our own contrived rhythms is just another way of exploring how people change over time, and I’m desperately grasping at straws as life rushes past me and I’m becoming more and more independent and I have only one more year of university and then I’m out in the real world. I feel like I’m bursting at the seams with life and I’m furiously aware that this may not last as long as I want it. I see people on the streets wearing suits going to their 9-5 job and underneath all of the furious desire to live that I am dripping with is a deep-rooted fear of getting to a point in my life where I feel that I am not living. This work seems to be a device to come to terms with the fact that certain things in life stay the same – the sun will always rise, winter will always come after autumn and be followed by spring – but expecting life to stay the same forever is a fools errand; the slow change of life is part of the beauty of everything.

One must simply administer a firm slap to ones own cheek, grit the teeth and carry on, for though I may grow old with many passes around the sun under my belt, the world around me will always be comfortingly alive with rhythms that have existed long before I turned up, and will exist long after I’m gone.

[A segment of this blog post was included (almost word for word) in my submitted write-up. This is because I tried to re-write it but the frantic tone of grasping at the present whilst peeking apprehensively at the future with my heart in my mouth didn’t quite come across in the re-write. Is it lazy to quote myself word for word in two different parts of the same submission? Perhaps, but that doesn’t bother me. Pasted below is the attempted rewrite that didn’t quite make the cut.]

I worry about how fleeting life can be, I feel happy and content at the moment but am slowly coming to terms with the fact that life changes, and someday I may become the very person that I despise; going through the motions of life not because life is beautiful and ever surprising but because life must go on, I must provide for myself and jump through the hoops of some ever-flaccid bureaucratic joke. I feel as though I am dripping with life at the moment, I recognise that these are the good days and yet I can’t shake the feeling that time may be running out for me to get on with things and achieve the goals that I hold dear to my being. This work feels as though it’s a reminder that even though my own rhythms will certainly change, I am an essential part of larger rhythms over which I have no control – and that is okay, and gorgeous. I should not dwell on the changing of my own small rhythms but revel in the knowledge that I am but a miniscule demi-semi-hemi-demi-semi-quaver in the grander rhythms of life around me, which is a lovely freeing thought.