Ghosts of Lunches (2011)

Ghosts of Lunches (2011) from Tom Ellard on Vimeo.
From the 'The Shape of a Note' performance.

"Ghosts of Lunches seems a silly title -- but it has a reason. We see ghosts all the time, in photographs, on television and anywhere where recordings of departed people can be found. Some cultures find recordings of dead people offensive. In our own culture the philosopher Jacques Derrida coined a term 'hauntology' for those presences that still impact on our thinking, simply by being replayed from stored media.

In general both spectral and electronic ghosts 'live' mundane non-existences. They float up and down stairs, tap on walls and in the case of photographs tend to be captured uncomfortably staring at the camera seated at the dinner table. Most of the ghosts I have seen are ghosts at lunch.
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Late last year I inherited family photographs going back to the mid 1800's. There being so many I decided the only way to manage was to scan them and keep only the important pieces.
Nearly 7000 scans later I realized the crazy task I'd taken on and was very grateful for the Picassa management software I used to organise the tidal wave of images. Picassa has face recognition; once you've identified Aunty Mary, it will try to find her in every photograph. More interesting were all the incidental people -- in the background, standing nearby, or just too far removed to say who they might be. I decided to categorize them as one person I called 'Everyone'.
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The most prominent feature of the audio is an inharmonic note cluster which sounds like a forlorn cry. That's mostly due to the pitch of the notes descending over the duration forming the shape, but also the formant, vocal texture of the sound that's played. It was originally a larger spread of notes, which I sculpted down to make the shape that best expressed my idea -- an electronic banshee, a ghostly woman that cries out on the eve of the death of an important person.
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This 2011 version starts with a stuttering, clicking and thumping sound that sets a sense of urgency. The stuttering keeps it from being soothing like a ticking clock. Soon after comes a sample of old phonograph music that repeats two and a half times each few bars. The tonality of the old record gives a sense of history. The half bar interruption has two main uses, adding some swing to the pacing of the music and building on the general feeling of uneasiness."