Thursday 29 September 2011, 8.30pm
It has been said that the UK has great weather, 3 days in a year, I certainly glad to have been privileged to experience one of those days today. The weather today is so warm that it almost feels like Singapore’s weather, only that there is more wind. I was and still am comfortably dressed in my Singaporean attire for the whole day, one polo shirt and one jeans was already making me sweat.
I really starting to like this place…only issue I have here is the cost of living, it seems like I may face some financial issues on the last week, so I have been spending less, but I trust that the Lord with provide, so I’m not worried..
Well, these past two days were mainly focused on our workshops for the Keele students – The Music and Performance students (on Wednesday) and the Music Technology student (on Thursday, today).
I guess part of the reason why we’re sweating is because we have to setup our equipments for our workshops and tear them down totally after that and the next day setup and tear down again, this was because the Lindsay Studio was being used by an Orchestra for their rehearsal, they’re gonna need all the space they can get in the hall..
One thing that sure distinguished the two groups of students from the two courses were their choice of instruments. You’ll see that Music students would rush to Irfan’s station to get their hands on the dulcimer and Doltali or otherwise ‘scramble’ to play the sound sculpture while the Music Technology students would head to Valarie’s station for the airFX, or Chris station with the EMS synthesizer and the Guitar synthesizer. Well, thankfully there was no ‘fighting’ involved since the number of students who attended our workshops were few, numbering to about 5/6 Keele students.
So the video will show you a tour around our instruments, basically a showcase of our instruments we did today…
Basically what our main goal for this workshop is to teach improvising skills by forming a group of performers with the Keele students for our upcoming performance next Tuesday evening…so basically, students would first go around a tour of the instruments to find out which instrument they wish to play, then once they have selected, they will be randomly assigned a group- made up of one student from Keele and then the rest of us depending on group size..
As of now, we have 6 groups I reckon, some of us will have to play for one or two groups from the Music and Music Tech, others- like myself – don’t have to play. Well actually I do need to play with the mixer, so that makes me part of every group! HAHAHAHA..no wait, that means more work..sigh.. :P
Thursday 29 September 2011, 9.50pm
Just went for my first stargazing with Michael Spicer, along with Gabriel Clara and Valarie. It’s really an magnificent sight to see yourself being surrounded by a dome of stars. I never felt so small in my entire life. It’s like you - a small microscopic dot - looking up to the wonders of the universe, this huge place out there with so many other galaxies apart from us in the milky wave.
Well, apart from planes and a bunch of weird goose flying in a v-shape formation at night, we saw Pleiades, Ursa Major (Big dipper) and Ursa Minor (Little Dipper), and the North Star, Cepheus and Hercules and probably Saturn or Jupiter in the horizon.
There was were many more out there which we couldn’t see if our eyes because of the street lights and other distractions such as planes and clouds, the mist was also just about to set in so that didn’t make things any better.
Michael was sharing with us about how he used to go Stargazing back when he was in Australia, it was very easy there simply because you had clear skies at night. Because it is a desert you hardly get any clouds due to low humidity, so you could really see the stars even at the horizons. Oh well, I should be content, you don’t get to see much stars in Singapore to begin with… so this is yet another incentive to live in the UK.
If you think about it, star gazing is looking back in time, because you see these stars the way they were a from a thousand to a million years ago, even when we see the sun, we are actually seeing how it looks like 8 minutes ago, so in a way, you are looking back time…
Indeed as Incubus describes it: “The sky resembles a back lit canopy
With holes punched in it”. And these ‘holes’ are really punched in a such a wonderful arrangement just for us to marvel at, and get our necks pain at the same time…seriously there bound to be someone behind all this that we see, whether it’s the stars, or on this earth, even ourselves are too marvelous, even if there were evolution, surely there must have been a starting point to all this, even if it was a big-bang, there must be cause for that to happen.
Surely this wonderful things we see now cannot be just a mere matter of chance, can it?
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