My Experience of Isolation: Amble Skuse

Amble Skuse is a composer and violinist whose chronic fatigue syndrome has meant that she mostly worked from home long before lockdown. She has created an improvised musical piece that explores how isolation can cause a “looped psychological experience”. To make the piece, Amble created software that enabled her to scan her own brain waves using an EEG sensor and send the voltage of the brain waves to her computer. The performance was then shaped by her own responses as she listened to it, in a creative feedback loop. Amble explains: “The sensors are connected to processors, including delay, loop time, reverb and distortion. As I improvise, my subconscious reactions to my sound generates the processing. As I hear the processing, I will then have further reactions which produce further processing. The sound that I create in the improvisation is a combination of my conscious intention (violin) and subconscious interpretation (EEG processing). The piece demonstrates that we are a combination of intention and subconscious interpretation in all our interactions.” “The recording includes fragments of a poem – which you can read in full below – that Amble wrote while living in a camper van in the Western Isles during a long period of stormy weather. “The wind was so violent I hadn't been able to sleep for days and days,” she recalls. “It felt as though the wind and the birds were inside my head, swirling and swooping, chattering and clattering. The poem reflects how my mind feels when the ME hits and my brain is no longer able to be calm and focussed, but jitters around by itself.” The result is a powerful illustration of how, as Amble puts it, “our isolation causes our own world view to influence our behaviours without external perspectives”. The recording on this page is just one possible version of the piece, which is generated differently every time Amble plays it, depending on her mental state. “The piece tried to reflect the circular nature of isolated thought, and a jittered mind, shattered by fatigue,” she says. “In itself that is a hard thing to create as when my mind is at its most jittery I am most unable to connect the electronics and perform the piece. There is something ironic about trying to share the jittered mind space when what that mind needs is rest. I think that is the learning point for me - that communicating the fractured points of ME using technology actually requires me to function well enough to use that technology in the moment, and to create a piece whilst in a difficult mindset.”