Our evening session was delivered by composer Nathaniel Mann. He gave a talk about his work as Composer in Residence at the Pitt Rivers Museum. His theme was along the lines of how to make these objects into music and turn them into a sound world. He approached this in three very different ways.

1. Through a single object
2. Through the sound archive
3. “Rough Music”

Nathaniel spoke about each of the strands to his residency and discussed how he had come up with his compositions and how he had overcome the challenges along the way. He demonstrated a large number of his samples of his work through his talk, they ranged from creating Sound Galleries and musical torchlight trails through the Pitt River Museum

and making pigeons whistles (flute like objects that pigeons ‘play’ whilst flying)

through to creating a musical link between traditional work songs, Gamelan and campanology.

and introducing us to Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room

and how he used this seminal work to inspire his works.