Delia Derbyshire Sketchbook

Delia Derbyshire

These are all of the important words which I have pulled out of my research for Delia Derbyshire. All of the words which I could develop, incorporate or suggest in my artwork for this project and they are the important parts of her work.

This is basically my bible and it is helpful to spark ideas but also make crazy connections.

From the very beginning I have decided that one branch I could explore could be to listen to the music she has produced and visually try to communicate what I hear HOWEVER this is something I committed a lot of time to during my A levels as I visually communicated a song my band created. Therefore I wanted to move away from this and explore a different way of recording her legacy and experimenting with sound and music.

Technical and pattern

 This was exploring how she made the theme tune of doctor who so eary and her work sound like " skeletons on a corrugated iron roof". This is due to her using a mode rather than a usual scale she used a Medieval scale which contained a minor 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 7th. I thought it would be interesting to visually represent this. Unfortunately this doesnt really communicate much because unless you read music and can picture how it would sound it is hard to show how wierd the scale sounds. It looks similar to the scale of C major which doesnt have any flat or sharps, like E phrygian mode.

An oscillator are key components to music concrete and are the parameters that you can modulate based on frequency and time. I thought that this would be a good structure in which I could make a pattern around perhaps. 

 Then I thought I would explore the waveforms which come out of the oscillator. I then took these shapes and thought that I would create a pattern out of them. I thought it would be interesting to explore paper-cuts and colours, really stripping the shapes down to their basics and using both the inverse and cut outs of the shapes. I like the way that building it up with layers and cutting it out links to the same techniques that she used when making her music.

This reminds me a lot of the Monoprints which I did for Visual Language...the same kind of shapes

I liked how I could take the shapes out of the mixing desk and form them into a pattern, almost a texture and it still be recognisable what it is. However the line quality is boring and not very interesting, definitely a rough sketch. I then developed this to see how it would transfer over to paper-cuts and created a pattern representative through paper. This was good fun, choosing the different layers and colours and what needed to go where.

Continuous Line

Then I started exploring the equipment that was used in the making of music concrete. In drawing this tape machine I really liked the circles of the tape turning wheels but also how joined up everything was, how fluid and connected things were.

I started by exploring ways of simplifying the turning tape wheels, having different parts in the for-ground and background. I then used the "scraps" to collage something more abstract but still representative.

I tired drawing again from a different angle of another yet similar piece of equipment she used. Here there are some interestingly shaped buttons.

 I then wanted to explore the fluidity and thought it would be good to do a continuous line drawing of the tape machine. I understand that the composition didnt work extremely well here (it is a gestural line drawing) but I like how much it flows, I can get a sense of the movement.

Developing on from this I was at band practice and was getting very distracted by the microphone lead and how it made interesting loops. I had to pause us playing whilst I unplugged the microphone and created this shape on the floor. It is also supposed to be a tape machine. It is a much larger scale than my drawings (and even the tape machine itself) however I had to chose the most important parts to keep in because it was difficult to create tight circles. I feel that this is so broken down it could almost be a piece of design.

 Things that make noise
I thought it was important to not soley focus on the music and electronic side to create images but rather the actual deeper subject matter-things that make a sound and inspired her. After watching a documentary on her there were some examples given of the 'found sounds' which she used in the recordings (wine bottles at different levels of empty) and things which inspired her (clogs walking on cobbled streets)

I like this image. To me it is representative of a cobbled street but also I picked out some "cobbles" which were sticking out and laid them in such a way that if you turn the paper horizontally it can be the same as a mixing desks levels.

This is technically a very simple image but I think it is interesting due to the use of cut out bits and the bits left behind. Visually i think it is a very strong image/design.

I then started looking at Coventry in the 1950s where she grew up and what possible images I could draw that made sound and could have been a subconscious stimulus and inspiration. I wanted to create these images through the use of continuous line because I felt it was important to use the same techniques as the music she created...making music out of tape which is long and continuous and as she was predominantly a mathematician as well the process was very important to her. However I decided that it would be better to create something using similar methods as with music but without illustrating the technology, looking outside the box a little bit.

These are quite loose drawings in comparison to what I normally create but they achieve a totally different aesthetic and I think I like it.

I went to the library in search of images that were from either Coventry, Northampton or Cambridge (where Delia has lived) to look for sounds which could have been inspirational to her. This was too much of a challenge so I photocopied some images that were from the 1960s and made noise. 

I thought it would be interesting to draw onto graph paper. She used to plot out her music very technically and this would be a way of showing order next to a continuous line drawing. I also drew a frame around the image because this links to the importance of the synthesisers being in sink so that the music works.

 I then thought I could incorporate another method which was used in the creation of the music through layering. Therefore I drew on top of the girls playing (the noise of the chant associated to the game) with a cyclist on tracing paper.

 I then wanted to expand on layering and build up lots of noises through overlapping of imagery that makes sound. I also wanted to keep the structure of the graph paper but also explode over it showing that she pushed the boundaries, creating new innovative things.