The realisation of this conceptual score requires that the project leader solicits answers to questions posted every day for five days to a group of friends, colleagues, or others. They may use email, post, telephone, and/or online resources for this. At the end of the five days the group involved should meet (in person or online) to discuss their responses.

Participants should, of course, be informed of this prior to the first question being sent.

The 'composition' will have been the attention to listening that members of the group will have engaged in, each in their own spaces and times. It's an extremely slow, polyphonic composition (it will have lasted for a week) and it's a composition which no one participant can ever hear in its entirety, and it will never be performed again in its current form. The discussion functions somewhat like reviewing a recording, though, of course, it's not a recording, and as a way to focus participants' attention on the various temporalities involved in listening.

Here are the questions.

Some responses to 'Pavans and Galliards for Butler's Bees'

1. Is there a sound that you wait for? 

• Yes, the click of the key in the lock that tells me loved ones are home.
• Non-specifically: thunder, echoes. I wait for my children's alarm clock (which goes off after I wake up). My door is fraught with sounds. Sometimes I wait for a knock on the door, when I know someone is coming round, someone who I've invited so that is a happy expectation. But then -- and particularly if my children are already asleep -- I wait for it to squeak. The wood is waterlogged and it makes an awful wrenching squeak. Knocking at the door can be a sound that asks for permission, permission to cross the threshold of the home and enter. We have learnt the different knocking habits of our neighbours (e.g. Mary from number 55: very loud hammering knock).
• Water to boil, traffic noise in the early morning; bells; organ bellows (I can start playing when I hear the leather folds creak in a certain way).
• The alarm clock, last orders

2. Are there any sounds that tell you where we are in the year? 

• Grasshoppers, which I hear in the summer. The sound of the central heating with its creaks tells me it is winter or a cold edge of autumn/spring.
• Spring lawnmower; leaves blowing in summer; echoing crackle in winter.
• twittering of swallows and screeching of swifts, relative absence of birdsong in late Summer, autumn gales
• Yes, the buzzing of bees. It's summer.

3. Are there sounds, or a sound, that you need to listen to until it ends? If so, why? 

• echo; certain animal noises; clock chimes.
• Clock chimes, to hear if you have the time right (I often miss the first chime).
• If I am honest, the sound of the breathing of someone who is dying.
• Sometimes I have to listen right to the end of a recording I've been listening too, I want to hear how the sound turns into silence. The beeping of a Pelican crossing.

4. What sounds do you have in your life that go on for too long?

• The high-pitched whine of a dentist's drill definitely. Hate it.
• Reform voters on the bus after a long day at work!
• Background conversations. I can't tune out of them easily at all.

5. Think back to the first question I sent through. Is there a sound that you wait for? Are you still waiting for it? 

• none.
• The key in the lock
• Yes, in general. A lot of my life (as a lone parent) involves being in during the evening and so a knock on the door is how a lot of my social life starts, if people come round for dinner or a drink and a chat.
• I listen for it every morning.