As part of the development for Variable 4 Portland Bill, we’ve been working with musicians local to the Portland and Weymouth area, developing movements which reflect the area’s maritime and social heritage. We’ve been working in the studio of Simon Swarbrick, an astonishingly talented local violinist who also has an astonishingly nice self-constructed recording space.

Pictured above is Simon performing some of the score fragments we’ve been devising for Variable 4. We have been experimenting with generating parts of the score based on algorithmic processes, to then be displayed on iPad and performed by musician. An an example, one such process takes the gradual directions in wind speed that have taken place in Portland over the past hundred years, and translates these compass directions into modular score parts. This can then be reassembled to produce musical movements portraying different eras of Portland’s weather history — or fed into the system to generate live patterns based on moment-to-moment wind speed detected by the weather station.