‘Don’t You Think It’s a Bit’ is an electroacoustic composition with voices that responds to the artist's project Tiepido Cool, by Davide D'Elia. Tiepido Cool puts forward a notion of a human algorithm, and 'Don't You Think It's a Bit' explores this notion sonically. The piece has two layers. There is a fourteen-minute evolving soundscape produced by sound artist Jan Mertens, in conversation with me. This part draws on electronic sounds, orchestral sample libraries and a range of percussive noises. The sounds are arranged on a spectrum from warm to cool, using some common visual metaphors as organising principles (the idea that lower frequencies are ‘warmer’, for example, and that electronic sounds are ‘cooler’). The second layer of ‘Don’t You Think It’s a Bit’ emerges at the mid-point of the piece. Twenty different voices speak forty-five different words. These words are the product of the workshop held at the University of St Andrews in February 2023. As the participants entered the workshop, Jan and I recorded each of their voices and used the recordings to place them on a warm-cool spectrum, again, using our own subjective judgment. At the end of the workshop, I organised the participants into a warm-cool chorus and orchestrated a complex, live vocal gradient. These voices punctuate the soundscape in the finished piece in a kind of mesmerising chant
