Chamberlain Clocktower Sonic intervention

Title: Residual Drift

Something that became very apparent when attempting to synchronise compositions to the clock for this project was the considerable day-to-day variability in the timing of its chimes. Although now guided by an atomic clock, Old Joe remains subject to mechanical and environmental factors that can compromise its accuracy by tens of seconds. The 10 a.m. chimes have no quarters, so I have reintroduced them artificially: while they herald the true hour (at least according to Coordinated Universal Time, to which our devices are beholden), 10 o’clock actual never sounds. Instead, extended chime resonances ‘hold time’ until the hours catch up. 

PhD 1997-2004

The University clocktower has always contributed strongly—both sonically and visually—to my 'sense of place' at the University.

This brief work is a response to the multi-layered resonances of an iconic campus feature, using source recordings provided by the organisers.

PhD 2000-2007

In this composition, I focused on creating dense layers of drones, similar to material that I was working on while studying for a PhD at the University. The chimes were always a reassuring presence on campus, and would often spend time recording them and using the material in compositions. 

PhD 2010-2014

Title: Angry Old Joe

This piece draws on recordings of Old Joe’s chimes and other clock sounds, processed, distorted, and projected across campus. The result is a fleeting burst of chaotic noise in spatial counterpoint with the tower’s acoustic voice. Low rumbles frame the chimes, while fractured, granular echoes extend them.

This anniversary arrives at a troubled time, with intolerance, censorship, and violence re-emerging around us. I imagine an angry Old Joe, bearing witness to humanity’s failures and the return of horrors we swore would never happen again, his broken, noisy chimes demanding that we finally wake up and choose a future built on compassion, justice, and respect for history and memory. 

 PhD 2020-2025

Title: Ripples

Composed entirely from recordings of Old Joe, Ripples accompanies the eleven o’clock chime. Emerging from the clocktower, it amplifies and extends the resonances of the original chimes, allowing them to ripple across the campus whilst the architecture of the University reflects and refracts sound in unexpected ways. This piece holds space in anticipation and reflection, inviting listeners to pause and notice the clocktower’s daily sonic presence - a familiar soundscape that quietly connects those on campus and in the surrounding areas.

BMus 2000-2003; MPhil 2003-4; PhD 2004-2008; Staff 2014-present

This miniature traces my ongoing interest in the line between unreal and hyperreal. Recordings of the clocktower's own bells are broken using waveset synthesis and recomposed: first as buzzing, synthetic apparitions; then brushing against the live bells; and finally as extended timbres and melodic after-images that remain recognisably clock-like. 

MA 2024-present

My intention is to extend and explore the timbre of all the chimes ringing every half hour, thus creating a connection between the Clocktower and the campus spaces where the speakers are located.

The aim is to create a sense of connection to, and closeness with the timbre of the chimes by letting the sound 'fall' into the campus and resonate throughout the entire space, while also drawing attention to Old Joe's impressive height.

PhD 2010-2018

In 2006, whilst at Birmingham I worked on a piece based on handbell recordings using bespoke software that I had created. My aim was to create tools that would allow me to radically reshape the temporal behaviour of a sound, as well as pulling apart its spectrum, so I could 'get inside it' somehow. Both these kinds of processes and programming remain key to my work almost 20 years later.

Rather than recalling memories of the clocktower, my intervention is mostly about my memories of those formative times, and a nod to this earlier composition. After all this time, it’s nice to imagine similarly resonant textures sounding out through the campus that I must have walked through hundreds of times in the five years that I spent there. 

BMus 2001-2004, MPhil 2004-2006

Title: 125 and Counting

Exploring the huge space of the central campus and made entirely from recordings of Old Joe’s internal mechanism and the resonance of his chimes, 125 and Counting is both a celebration of a moment in time (looking back over 125 years) and a reflection (not without regrets!) on time’s inexorable forward march.

BEAST Founder, Staff 1980-2014, Director of BEAST 1982-2014

Title: Short Memoire from the Clocktower Chimes

The architectural beauty surrounding the clocktower and the soundmark of its chimes remain vivid memories from my time as a PhD Music student at the University of Birmingham. For this sonic intervention, I sought to extend the resonance of the bells through subtle spectral transformations and by enriching their sonic palette with three additional notes. Using only recordings of the quarter-hour chimes, I shaped the piece as a continuous sonic event, spatially expanded through an eight-channel loudspeaker configuration.

PhD 2003-2007

The 12:30 composition emerges from the tail of the clocktower chime. Granulation processes are used to lengthen the bells' natural resonances, and these are entwined with other bell-like sounds derived from a wine glass in combination with a serrated knife. A distant synthesised drone provides a harmonic grounding whilst a knotted, chromatic texture of muted bell attacks and scrapes acts as counterpoint to the gentle stasis of the bell resonance. 

BMus 2000-2003; PhD 2003-2013; Staff 2013-present

Title: Hell's Bell's

One of the constraints with this project was trying to make anything coincide exactly with the bell chimes. I had originally intended to enhance each of the twelve chimes with a sound I’d recorded on/near the campus over many years. In the end, I chose to decorate only the three long chimes at the end of each phrase, using gestures from two pieces I created in the studios in the 1990s and a final flourish made from popadom cracks in the Dilshad in Selly Oak, which itself is overcome by a wash of bell decays gradually fading into the distance.

BMus 1979-1982, PGCE 1983, MA 1984, PhD 1984-1996

Title: Joe's Echoes 

I explored the sounds of the quarter chimes and the hour 'bong' sound recorded at 1300 hours. I worked with some of the stereo recordings of the chimes along with the geofon recordings.

I wanted to enhance the tonal frequencies within these sounds and spread these throughout the loudspeaker array. The aim is to immerse the listener in tonal echoes originating from the clock tower which then spread out to the other loudspeakers surrounding the clocktower.

Staff 2022-2023

This sound piece is a meditation on the sun-drenched memories of a beloved campus clock tower, reimagined from my current home in Greece. The primary memory of the clock tower is now filtered through my life in the Greek sun, resulting in a mental image of exceptional brightness. To realise this, I created a soundscape that is intentionally bright and warm. I utilise the distinctive texture of the santouri (a traditional Greek zither) to ground the piece in my present environment, while a harmonious, colourful pad evokes the emotional tone of the memory. The result is an attempt to acoustically connect two distant points—my past and my present. 

PhD 2010-2015

Title: Clockwork Tone 

Throughout my student years in Japan, I heard the Westminster Quarters everyday, marking the passing of each school hour. In retrospect, this constant presence feels both ordinary and strange. The small intervention is my way to 'appreciate' this melody. What you hear is an interplay of pure tones tuned spatially to the peculiar acoustics of bells (minor 3rds harmonics).

Title: Champagne darling! 

I used some of the inside the clocktower sounds to create a simple reflection on the patterns using traditional music concrete technics such as insert, melismas or reading speed variations. 

Erasmus, Mphil and PhD 2005-2013

Title: 14:00 BHX = 20:00 BKK 

The sounds of Old Joe's chimes are stretched and blurred around the space of central campus, and harmonised in line with a traditional Thai scale. This unexpected but hopefully welcome arrival of other musics, bringing together what sounds like Southeast Asian gongs and Western chimes in one musical space, reflects the University's increasingly global outlook as it celebrates its 125 year anniversary. 

Staff 2004-present

Every birthday party needs some dancing! I wanted to lean into the percussive sounds of the clocktower to create a beat and bass line. I also wanted to pay homage to one of our iconic professors of music, Sir Edward Elgar, so processed the chime sounds to create a Nimrod inspired counter melody. Some percussive sounds have been reversed to demonstrate the tension between modern idioms created from the historic sound source of the clocktower. 

BMus 2008-2011, MMus 2011-2014

Title: Rewind

Rewind draws inspiration from the resonance of the bell chimes, manipulating their tones through a dreamlike ambient alchemy. The sounds are stretched into ghostly echoes, pitched into haunting new frequencies, and then reversed like fragments of lost memory. As the piece unfolds, these manipulated tolls gradually unravel, morphing into the unmistakable clarity of the real bell chimes and blurring the line between the mechanical and the mystical. 

PhD 2023-present

Title: Betwixt 

2.45. Almost mid-afternoon. Autumn. No longer summer, pending winter. A betwixt time. Burning daylight or bent to tasks. Shadows lengthening, sun clasping the sky. Soon chimes will ring the hour. A cadence suspended, readying its fall. 

PhD 1997-2001

While studying at Birmingham, I realised I was primarily learning to listen. I specifically remember a revelatory moment hearing the bells of Old Joe on emerging from a long studio session and realising that I could really hear the richness of overtones in a way I hadn’t before. This piece reflects that, taking a recording of the bells and just gently augmenting it. The bells harmonics are stretched out and combined with subtle extra ‘harmonics’ - pure sine tones generated by a modular synth – before being separated out and spread across the twelve speakers surrounding the tower.

PhD 1990 – 1995

The chime responses at both 3.15pm and 3.30pm are taken from the original Old Joe Sound Sculpture, which I presented from the clock tower in 2001. Through this work, I wanted to explore how the chimes shape the acoustic experience of being on campus. That experience is always changing — the sounds bounce off different buildings and shift as we move around, sometimes making it hard to tell where they’re coming from.

Despite these peculiarities, I noticed that most people barely seemed to register the chimes. They blended into the everyday background. My chime interventions were therefore designed to complement and draw attention to the tower’s sounds — sometimes subtly, sometimes more overtly.

PhD 1997-2004

The chime responses at 3.15pm and 3.30pm are taken from the original Old Joe Sound Sculpture, which I presented from the clock tower in 2001, and through which I wanted to explore how the chimes shape the coustic experience of being on campus. That experience continually shifts as the sounds reflect off different buildings and as we move between them, even to the extent that their source can sometimes become difficult to localise.

Despite these peculiarities, the chimes seemed to make only a minimal impression on passers-by, fading into the background of the everyday. My chime interventions were therefore designed to complement and draw attention to the tower’s sounds — sometimes subtly, sometimes more overtly.

PhD 1997-2004

Using the bell sounds as base material, the natural bell sounds of the clocktower become extended through drones created from recordings of the bells. Mixing these bell drones in with drones created from recordings of Birmingham, this piece aims to critique the space within which the clocktower sounds in comparison to where it is able to be seen. 

PhD 2024-present

Title: (Non-)belligerent decibels 

The 4pm intervention draws on the Clock Tower’s opening four-note melody (approximately G-B-A-D). From this motif, I created drones that morph into reminiscences of strong emotions and signals the bells can convey, ranging from urgency and danger, expressed through sound distortion, to subtle harmonies and moments of brightness. This brief narrative unfolds in two parts: before and after the four low-pitch hourly strokes. Composition materials are spread across different spaces: recognisable chimes will sound directly from the Clock Tower, interwoven with the actual chimes in patterns of call-and-response and accumulation, while drones gradually emerge from various campus locations, inviting listeners to experience the work from different spots. 

PhD 2021-2024

Title: Chancellor's Court, quarter past four 

I'm very pleased to have been asked to create a work for the celebrations of The University's 125th anniversary. In considering how and what to possibly do, focusing on the notion of resonance—time isn't a single moment... scholarship, knowledge and wisdom are not discrete, but echoing—appealed to me as appropriate.

What you'll hear here in Chancellor's Court at four and a quarter hours post meridiem is an extended, blooming resonance of the final tone of the 1st quarter of Old Joe's Westminster Quarters chime. The tone expands both up and downward in octave transpositions... extending in time, space and frequency.

MMus 1994-95, PhD 1995-2002 

I am drawn to bells and often record them in the places I visit. Here, sounds from the bells in the tower combine with the resonance of bells in Vilnius, Lithuania which I recorded and transformed, adding more tones, both higher and lower.

PhD 1985-93

In an attempt to take advantage of the large distances covered by this installation, this piece comprises of two contrasting collaborations with Old Joe’s chimes: an ambient harmonic accompaniment in the Green Heart, and a more angular response around Chancellor’s Court, where the resonances of the bells are torn apart by and merged with the rhythmic mechanical sounds of the clockwork.  

BMus 2014-2017; MA 2017-2018; PhD 2021-present

Title: 1700 

As a student at Birmingham in the 1980s, Old Joe’s chimes made an indelible imprint on my aural memory. Especially precious were those 3am chimes as I emerged from yet another long night in the composition studio. This piece is a loving tribute to that sonic heritage and the memories that go with it. The long final fade, which ends the day’s cycle of works, evokes the image of Old Joe chiming steadily over the city and across the decades, from Birmingham’s metal-and-steam past to its present-day sci-tech revolution, and on into the future. 

BMus 1981-1984, PhD 1984-1992