The silent death is considered a naked death. Death must always have its accompaniment (Seremetakis 1991: 76)

In conclusion, as the deathscape and the theory underpinning its formations are highly abstracted concepts, it is necessary to construct a frame of finitude to view this consistently fluxing transformation. This is how the notion of a soundscape that is transformed to a deathscape by increments of mediating decontexualisation is primarily modeled on Baudrillard’s procession to pure simulacrum. The reflection of sound composition for this purpose is more complex, as an acoustic artefact cannot by itself be weighted in causation to death, nor does it impart an effect on the receiver, therefore, as Bizzaro explains, ‘it begins by distancing itself from the reality of what is represented and disowns any intrinsic link with the structure of the representation itself (Bizzaro 2011: 7). This distancing occurs in the annihilation stage, as the destruction of memorial site recordings and artefacts. In microprocessing during augmentation, the artefacts no longer represent anything to each other, and therefore their formation in the assimilated deathscape is an entirely new structure woven with decay of memory of the death object. The metaphorical images of sound are changed by death, themselves absorbing each loss and rebirth in the replications endowed on the structure of the soundscape. This is metaphysically represented in space with aetherial qualities of the afterlife of a memory, resonating with processes it has endured to transform.

Death then, ‘may be considered at one level as essentially marked by its non-narratability, by its rupture with language’ (Das 1990: 346). The acoustic power of the lament, ‘like its language, faces opposite directions: towards the dead and towards the living’ (Seremetakis 1991: 119). In a site of potentiality between life and death and in this way, the stages of augmentation and aether can be conceptualised as primarily processual states, as augmentation concerns itself with transition over time, and aether is concerned with finality and space. This embodiment of grief by sound signals not only the deconstruction of memorial totality but also the reconstruction of a different mechanism of reality, one evoked to sustain presence in a deathscape marred by absence. At every stage it presents us with another face, a framing of finitude. This was replicated during the processing continuum by decontextualisation of source-emitted sounds as described by Fales. As the soundscape masks its procession away from us, it is inspired by an ethnographic approach to the description of mourning rituals as a way of animating the interior state of memory, utilising sound to give life to something dead. In this way we pursue something that is barely animated, that flutters away with each death, twisting and mutating into something unrecognisable.

This sonic simulation of passed life is constructed as a memorial landscape between life and death, through which sounds glide through, diffusing and mutating in the process. Through the frame of death, these permutations in augmentation result in an accumulation of patterns in the memorial material that are articulated in a mourning context as they are decontextualized from source recognition traits and stylised in composition and sound art. This does not mean that these processes provide a resolution to the loss of the death object, but through these methods a continuum of dying and the death of the acoustic reference orients what is alive and living, ultimately shaping a procession of memory in singular form to its totalisation and acceptance in place of reality. This approach, at its conclusion, by utilising the procession of non-language acoustic signifiers in its construction, produces and resolves desolation by ‘acknowledging that the past, while dead, is not gone, and that we coexist with it not as its afterlife but as its survivor’ (Horowitz 2001: 22).

This is replicated by artefact manipulation in the deathscape as mediation technology decontextualises each artefact from its original reality state. This detachment evoked by the hyperreal can parallel to the loss of the death object and its memory. This detachment is best explained in its context, in a state of melancholia, there is ‘confusion between the loss of self and the loss of the other’ (Gould 2010: 289). If the receiver is invested in the original source characteristics that are inherent in memorial material, the processes endured so far will manifest as a disassociation from both the original loss of characteristics and the replicated forms that annihilation and augmentation produce. Through assimilation, artefacts articulate and serves to grasp and form the multiplicity of dynamics that orientates a memory to replicated world. By the final stage of spatialisation through component positioning a representation of the hyperreal is complete, creating a shadow sense of dimension and entanglement. The positing of the receiver in this dimension of sound reminded me of David Toop’s description of coma twilight; ‘as befits an altered state, the memories have been superimposed, stripped of context, conflated from seasons, times, eras, moments, even fictions, into a concentrated essence of my existence in the sound-world’ (Toop 2001: 1).

At the cessation of this project I feel my core enquiry was a curiosity for how death manifests in the sonic domain. The aims I had for the integration of theory to practice were met, and resulted in what I find to be a revealing piece of sound work. I would have liked to further integrate Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic principles[1] to this sonic exploration but the rhizomatic concept of boundless branching and numerous lines and multiplicities would have expanded the soundscape beyond the scope of this project. In conclusion it is through technical mastery over these artefacts that the annihilation of space and time is possible in the deathscape, as ‘modern artists and thinkers were united by their desire to challenge the traditional bounds of space and time. Modern acousticians shared this desire, as well as the ability to fulfill it. By doing so, they made the soundscape modern’ (Thompson 2002: 120). By joining the theory from thinkers such as Baudrillard and Luper, and the artistic processes of Brovig-Hanssen’s opaque mediation to decontextualise artefacts as laid out by Fales, we place the mirror of soundscape and its image of death in a sonic simulacrum through the core narrative of sound design, creating a modernised, theoretical deathscape. Through the tertiary layers of soundscape, design and assemblage informed by theories of representation, replication, category and mediation, death becomes a near musical representation of its reality.

‘Music is a credible metaphor of the real. Undoubtedly, music is a play of mirrors in which every activity is reflected, defined, recorded and distorted. If we look at one mirror, we see only an image of another. But at times a complex mirror game yields a vision that is rich, because unexpected and prophetic. At times it yields nothing but the swirl of the void’ (Attali 1985: 92).

[1] Deleuze and Guattari (2004) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Continuum.For correlating dualist stages between theoretical parallels.