An expanded description of the theories that were utilised to create a framework for the composition and the recording of source material.

Brøvig-Hanssen

Mediating technology in musical creation facilitates the manipulation of process; therefore, mediation forms the processual interplay between sound and simulation. Brovig-Hanssen delimits the term further: ‘the term is broadly used to signify the process behind conveying sounds from the source to the receiver, or from one place to another’. He continues by categorising the ‘mediating process used in sound recording into four stages:

1. The initial mediation of aural raw material (the voice/human body, traditional instruments, samplers, software instruments, drum machines, etc.);
2. The mediation used to record and edit or process sounds (microphones, amplifiers, mixing console, editing tools, processing effects, etc.);
3. The mediation required in building compositional work (programming, synthesizing etc.);
4. Mediation of spatial placement (panning etc.)

Baudrillard

Baudrillard states that representational symbols will subsume the symbolised, transforming them in four stages to pure simulacrum. This transformation proceeds as follows:

1. It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2. It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3. It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (Baudrillard 1994: 170)

Fales

Fales’ four categories of sound in electronic (particularly ambient) music:

1. The first category of sound in ambient music ‘reflects precisely its acoustic referent’.
2. The second category is where opaque mediation is contextualized to pervert or process an imaginary reality of sound, it ‘follows canonical rules of sound to distort or lie about a nonexistent source’.
3. The third category – ‘transgressing the same rules, deceives by showing itself to be the exception that proves the rule – that is, since it is a sound that defies the rules of source-emitted sound, then there must be sounds that obey these rules’.
4. The fourth and final category is concerned with sounds ‘autonomous from a world of acoustic referents altogether’ (Fales 2004: 177).

Luper

Luper’s philosophy of death outlines four key activities performed by DNA in the stages of replication (Luper 2009: 12). These stages act as his replicator theory:

1. It replicates: it makes copies of itself
2. It mutates: over time, its copies differ significantly from the originals
3. It augments itself; that is, it constructs and integrates itself with structures that promote its longevity and copying process. Call these replicator bodies.
4. To its copies it bequeaths mutations, including mutations of features by which it shapes its replicator bodies: these are inherited, or copied by the copies it makes of itself.

Maddrell and Sidaway

Mourning is an inherently spatial as well as temporal phenomenon, experienced in and expressed in/through corporeal and psychological spaces, virtual communities and physical sites of memorialisation – Maddrell expands to include:

1. Individual mappings of bereaved people’s experiences of significant spaces/places.
2. How these change over time.
3. How they are expressed through performance in space, written as corporeal, landscape or literary texts.
4. How these individual [and collective] emotional maps impact on particular places. (Maddrell 2010a: 123)