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The music practice room located in the basement of the Clephan Building

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This location presented me with an entirely different experience to Shepherd's Bush Empire. The room was so quiet that it felt like a vacuum, and the plain white walls only added to that hollow feeling.

The atmosphere felt somewhat hostile, almost sterilized of human life. While the room was populated with a drum kit and numerous amps, it lacked any sign that humans had interacted with the setting which left the room feeling very empty.

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I decided to use the Chantry for my field trip as I could see the character from the building from the outside and was already deeply intrigued by it.

The old, door, the mossy stones, and the renovated windows all spoke to me to say that this building has a story and would easily be a fantastic setting for even more in the future.

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While I was sat in the practice room I wrote an exploratory drabble, focusing on how the soundproofing and lack of life in the room could feel to a character from a first person perspective.

I tried to focus on the physical sensations that are caused by silence and a lack of movement in a room, the lack of sensory stimulation able to become almost as overwhelming as an excess of sensory stimulation.

I chose to do this in the form of a drabble because the strict word limit keeps me from getting lost in the piece and reminds me to put as much description as possible into a smaller space. It's also quite an impactful form of writing as it leaves a lot to the reader's own imagination and allows easily for the reader to imagine themselves in the situation.

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The interior of Shepherd's Bush Empire O2

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While I didn't visit this place for the scrapbook exclusively, it was a setting that I kept in mind while I did my research for this project.

Visually it was very different to venues I had been to in the past, with classically theatrical architecture from the early 1900s, which sparked thoughts of 'The Phantom of the Opera'

From just the physical building I could very clearly imagine a horror, thriller, or supernatural story taking place in this setting.

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(commentary about the history of the building, the visuals, the atmosphere, the scent)

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This image is of The Athena as it was originally built in 1939 under the title of an Odeon cinema.

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The stage of the Athena set up for the candlelit Rock Orchestra 

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(commentary on the sounds, the air, the warmth, the colours)

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I was drawn to places with ties to music as I wanted to focus on senses beyond just visual and I felt like that would be a good way to do so. In all of the places I visited, while there were stunning architectural sights and meticulously coded light shows, it was the scents and acoustics of these places that brought such personality to these venues.

Alongside this, I also wanted to explore many options under one common theme and I knew from experience that music venues differ wildly from each other while still having a common thread that would allow me to keep the same line of thought.

Despite this, my main field trip and the majority of my research is based within the Chantry of De Montfort University.

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The keys of the piano are cold, gloss against my fingertips. A rumble settles in my chest as I press one to my left, the grand piano waking up under my hands.

The metal handles are even colder, my skin colder still as a breeze brushes in from the gaps in the walls and ajar door.

I can feel the age in the door, layers of paint crackling under my hands as I use both of them to shift the aged wood.

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The room smells of wood. Wooden beams, wooden pianos, wooden doors, and wooden floors. It's only faint, but it's certainly present.

There's a faint hint of cleaning products, as if someone had been in only a few hours prior to mop the floor and dust down the fingerprints from the top boards of the pianos.

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The air is thick, you can taste the dust in it. It's almost stale, as if the age of the building itself and instruments inside can taint the air.

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Every breath and footstep echoes, every sound bouncing off the aged walls and back at the sole individual present.

The piano fills the room, its sharp notes and sustained hum commanding the attention of every being within its walls.

Voices sound different here, the acoustics of the room carrying each sound as if the building itself is an instrument. You can hear every note you produce reflected into your own ears with a peculiar clarity I have failed to find elsewhere.

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I can see two pianos, one with spruce bones and gilded organs, the other with an oak frame and a broken seat.

The wooden beams appear to have once been crumbling, the wood warped and frayed, however they still hold strong.

Fluorescent lights burn my retinas, glowing with an almost sterile white and washing out the warmth of the cream walls and tan wooden accents.

My reflection looks like a ghost, a pale figure almost floating in the sliver of glass between me and the next room.

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My first idea was born from the eerie atmosphere of the building and the scratch marks on the inside of the door.

The scratch marks made me imagine someone being held against their will within this building, perhaps already too frail from torture or malnourishment to break open the windows, but too strong-spirited to give up. As the scratches span from higher up on the door to almost at the floor, I could imagine a scene of this person slowly losing their energy and being forced to slump to the floor while still refusing to give up their futile attempts to escape.

Then, ghostly sounds and almost hollow interior from the noises of the outside world being shut out inspired me to push the story beyond this character's death and into their afterlife. Perhaps the idea of getting revenge on those who put them in that position would be keeping the character in the place of their death, or maybe they would be too afraid to move on and force their spirit to remain on the mortal plane.

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This video explores both the visual and the auditory aspects of the Chantry where I decided to do my final Field Trip. Unfortunately, due to the restrictions on Padlet, the video has been compressed.

The variety of sounds in this small building is so inspiring, and the unique echo to all of them reminds me of the work on ghost story that I had done in earlier workshops.

The creak of the door and the slam of the piano's fallboard both reminded me of movies where the ghost will move objects and make itself known in different ways to build suspense before manifesting visually.

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Audio of myself playing the grand piano in the Chantry.

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While playing the piano I could only focus on the haunting sound created by the very slight off-key notes and the full echoes created by the emptiness of the room and the implementation of the damper pedal.

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The detail in the music rack caught my eye immediately. While the wood itself didn't feel particularly high quality, the intricacy in the design, even using cutouts instead of just carvings, showed that there was still a lot of effort put into the design of this piano.

The body of the piano was so well polished that the keys would reflect in it, creating a unique visual experience when playing it and being able to see the movement of my hands within this reflection.

The keys themselves were well polished, completely free of dust due to cleaning and the fall board protecting them while they're not being played.

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An image showing the inside of the grand piano, golden with blue accents. 

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The inside of the piano clearly displays a large amount of the piano's components. This includes the strings, the bridges, the dampers, the music rack in its resting position, and the soundboard.

Looking down on this, a part of me felt that it could be the foundations for a futuristic city. The small inclines of an industrialized area, circular bases for high-rise buildings, strings as roads and trainlines, and the barriers as walls to separate parts of the city as is a common theme in dystopian novels.

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The visual of the door was also deeply interesting to me. The imperfections of it, such as the broken window decal and the worn down wood, lent ideas of possible stories for its past to my mind.

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I was inspired by The Monkey's Paw (Jacobs, W. W. 1902), which is a short story we discussed in a workshop. This also continues with a theme of the supernatural, however the concept differs greatly from my original idea.

In the story of The Monkey's Paw, a magical artifact is discovered by a small working class family. Place is referenced frequently in this book, from describing the house they live in to make these characters more relatable to the average reader in the early 1900s, to the tension created at the ending of the book as the wife struggles with clanking chains and stuck bots to gain access to her now undead son.

From this, I wondered if the Chantry could be a place of tampering with the supernatural in a fictional world. With such thick, almost soundproof walls and with a small yet open layout, there would be plenty of space for a coven of witches or curious teenagers to toy with supernatural artifacts or partake in rituals.

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This is a piece of writing I did in the Chantry, it also inspired one of my ideas for assignment two as dictated in the section below.

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For this piece I tried to focus on the introduction to The Darkness Out There (Ruddy, A. J. 1999) and how the author describes the setting through the movements of the character.

Their work is also in third person, which I experimented with for this small piece of writing.

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The Impact of Place in Published Authors

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The Impact of Place in Published Authors

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I looked into a YouTube video (British Library, 2012) to discover how places in reality have an affect on authors and their work.

One that caught my eye was Sarah Maitland's The Book of Silence (Maitland, S. 2008) since this video gives her an opportunity to discuss the places that have influenced her works. When discussing one of the places she writes about, she says "I'd like, after people have read when I do write about here, they start to see it as beautiful."

Then, when reading an excerpt from her book, I am able to experience her passion about this book through phrases such as "We had the first frost last week, light fingered on the car windscreen. I think about how beautiful is is, and how happy I am." and "Sitting here in the golden morning with nothing in my diary for the next fortnight." where her characters share her pure love for this place despite having nothing else to look forwards to.

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How Perec's Method Changes The Way Place Impacts His Writing. 

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How Perec's Method Changes The Way Place Impacts His Writing. 

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The first thing I researched into the craft of writing place was An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (Perec, G. and Lowenthal, M. 2010) as it had been mentioned previously in one of the workshops. Within his work, it is entirely focused on facts of what happens in this place.

There are some sections that are more descriptive, usually at the start. These read as "The newspaper kiosk was closed; I didn't find Le Monde; I took a short walk (rue des Canettes, rue du Four, rue Bonaparte): idle beauties swarming into the fashion shops. On rue Bonaparte I looked at the titles of some books on sale, some store windows (antique and modern furniture, used books, drawings and engravings)"

As the session continues, it quickly becomes more short and snappy descriptions such as "A 70 goes by, nearly empty." and "It is 5:50."

I explored the impact this method has on his work by reading Portrait of A Man (Perec and Bellos, 2014).

The quote "Night train. Empty compartment. Fuzzy images. You’ll be lying on your bunk, no way out. Who will get you first – Rufus, or the police? One and then the other? A fine piece of melodrama, an avenging finger pointed at you – that’s him we’ve got him keep it up lads go to it – then banner headlines in huge type. In court today. Read all abo2ut it. Eight columns wide. Headless corpse found in alley." enlightened me onto how his observations of place were impacting his writing.

Similarly to his method, these sentences are as descriptive as possible in a very small amount of words. However, it isn't only the method that has an impact on his work. There are a variety of moments within An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris where Perec seems to become quite saddened by the place he is in, and these emotions are translated clearly into the dark themes within Portrait of a man.