Author: Barnaby Jones

Earlier myself and Brian had a meeting with Dante Ferrara, a medieval musician who specialises in music of Tudor period. We explained our situation in context with Louth Museum and our current production task:

Recording of the conversation between Sir John Bolle and his Spanish lady.

We got in contact with Dante as we felt he would be able to help us with the bedding music we hoped to use behind the dialogue. Having showed him the conversation that we transcribed from the book in the museum, he instantly recognised the ‘Ballard’. He informed us that it was a Ballard called ‘the Spanish ladys love’ from the Tudor period. Having identified the time and period, we discussed the best possible style of music to accompany the conversation and he is going to email us the details of one his own compositions that he thinks will suit the bill. We are going to get back in touch with him over the weekend once we have recorded the Ballard and know the duration.

On Friday myself, Miriam and Brian had our proposal for this project. We had to present our ideas to Bryan Rudd from the University. We had to cover:

• an overview of the project with details concerning the output.
• our aim and the objectives we will need to fulfil in order to achieve our aim.
• the format of the piece as a whole and how each of our four artefacts will be output.
• who we hope to produce our work for, the audience that will generally consume the audio. Primary and secondary.
• a brief timescale of the project, what will be done when.
• individual roles as part of the team.
• research avenues, a list of sources that will have/will use.
• set of potential issues evidences.

Overall it went well as we prepared well in advance and we have a good grounding in what we believe will work. Bryan did suggest that we create an introduction piece possibly 3-4 minutes long that we can use if the flood docu-drama was to be broadcast. It would help to set the scene and creatively introduce the topic.

We also discussed external contributors. An art historian was someone that we thought would benefit the project, he could help us with the panoramic painting interpretation.

From now we will be undertaking our initial research and developing our ideas.

Yesterday Bryan drove myself, Miriam and Brian to Louth to visit the museum. We eventually found the museum after an hour in the car and had to wait five minutes outside for David the museum manager/owner to arrive. The museum is currently undergoing improvements and is not open to the public until April. At this point i wondering what inside was going to have in store for us.

When we entered the museum we were greeted by two ladies that were responsible for cataloging the museums artifacts and various documents. We explained who we were and exactly what we were doing with the museum and they offered to help if ever we needed any.  They brought to our attention their impeeding trip to a local nursing home, to meet with the residents who were alive during world war 2 for a piece in the museum. We agreed to go along and help them with the audio recording as we could also talk to some of the residents about their lives in Louth. This offering will be a brilliant addition to my research as primary information is generally very accurate.

Whilst walking around the museum we took notes for possible ideas and inspiration. We still have to make the decision on what exactly we are going to do in terms of our output. The possible options are to focus all our attention on the flood and make a radio docu-drama in great depth or do all of the museum as an audio tour in small bit size chunks.

We have yet to decide but will meet in the next couple of days to discuss our ideas.

Today is Thursday and tomorrow Bryan is driving us to Louth to visit the museum. It’s going to be really interesting to see how we as a group interpret the project after we have visited. We will have to decide wether we choose the do the whole museum or if we put all our focus on the flood. Personally I would prefer to do the whole audio tour as I believe creating a good reconstruction for the flood is going to be very difficult. I think that either finding or generating authentic flood and water sounds will be extremely hard so I think we should focus on the whole Louth history and saturate the whole museum with our work.

We have recently set up a ‘facebook’ group for our project, this helps us to communicate with each other and the chat features means we can send files quicker than email or by manually transferring them. This morning Miriam suggested that we should get in contact with the Louth Players a drama club with reference to helping us reenact certain scenes that we may use for the audio tour. As brian is the director, he is going to email them and explain our position.

For me personally now I am going to start researching the general history of the area. As we havent been to the museum yet, it is hard to specify my research so a general skim of the topic is first priority. I have managed to get hold of eight books on Louth, the flood and its heritage so they are a good point to start. I will over the next few days create a research agenda to give Miriam and Brian. From this i will then conclude my research will a list of areas that I feel we should cover in the project.