As the winter snow subsides, we’re beginning work in earnest with the composition, design and technical development of Variable 4. It’s already pretty clear that it’s going to be a complex task: from designing the structure of the piece as it develops over its 24-hour cycle, studio time to record the masses of audio that we’ll need to build up the musical movements, to fleshing out the technicalities of how the weather conditions will feed into the software that underpins the piece, there’s a great deal to devote our attention to!

We’ll be using this blog to document the research and development of the piece as it progresses. Expect to see photographs and sound recordings from research trips, excerpts of meteorological theory and folklore, scores and compositional fragments, and the odd bit of software that we’re intending to release to the community under open-source licenses.