The production of fiction requires an absence from worldly reality and a duplication of the teller in a site of potentiality positioned between life and death (Bronfen 1992: 358)

Following on from the utilisation of framing devices in the initial mediation of acoustic referents, the replication of material manifesting as a reflection of its source characteristics inherent in the sound is annihilated by partial removal, decreasing the contextualisation of the artefact. The copies born in the initial stages of mediation and decontextualisation mask the acoustic referents source characteristics; this is supplemented in this chapter with the transformation of the soundscape by mutation. This stage displays a continuum frame magnified by the augmentation of time, which has been expanded to portray the nuances of the sound phenotype.

In this stage, the fragments that remain from annihilation will be manipulated through the concept of Brøvig-Hanssen’s second point [Figure.01 and Appendix I] over a continuum of time represented in the soundscape composition that contextualises this mediation to ‘pervert or process an imaginary reality of sound’ (Fales 2004: 169). These sounds operate as the simulacra of a reality manipulated by composers and sound artists in soundscape construction. Here copies and simulations are destroyed again, as effect processing permeate through artificially constructed digital spaces, and each has its own contribution to the transformation from the realism of source artefacts to a representation of such that manipulates the parameters of the artefact. For example, reverb through an IR of the ‘One Room’ is utilised to artificially extend the life of a sound at a section of the evolving deathscape where the animation of sound has been annihilated. This mirrors a perversion of form, where copies of artefacts mask the destruction of the original, displaying an auditory falsehood as ‘audio images transduced into signals by the recording equipment and stored in a physical medium are none other than simulacra of the reality which artists manipulate in composing their works’ (Bizzaro 2011: 3). The copies generated in the transition to the state of augmentation by mediating studio technology accommodate mutations that would be otherwise inconceivable. This manipulates auditory schema[1] further from acoustic signifiers inherent in the soundscape and instills recognition through processing of the death of a memory without an awareness of such. This technique produces a sense of detachment from previous reality states.

Over a continuum of time illustrated by the automated spawning of the partial representation of the clock pendulum in [05_Clock_Pendulum_Partial], we observe a dialectic that is manifested by the processing of artefacts between a concept of death, and a hyperrealism of potentiality. The conclusion of this movement by the decay cessation of [06_Clock_Chime_Positioning_Decay] does not rest but moves in a cyclical nature between the two extramusical markers displayed in [07_Clock_Chime_Granular_Scene]. The aim of this expansion and subsequent contraction is to elicit a temporality that deserts the receiver, leaving the movement of the artefact with no strong conclusion. In death’s case Hollan states that resolution is often only a temporary experience never finite since ‘suffering is only rarely…radically “transformed” or “resolved”; rather, it ebbs and flows’ (Hollan 1994). In this sense, memories weaved into ethnographic descriptions of death and losses are processual in their nature as memory in relation to death is not a static entity; it proceeds through stages of an agents coping mechanisms and perceptual schema.

The same is applicable for the sonic medium used to empress these states, for instance, memorial components that fuse and rupture in augmentation of the soundscape operate in a manner similar to performative utterances outlined by Magowan in that ‘they do not simply describe states of being but feelings are manifest and transformed in their display’ (Magowan 2007: 71). In this augmentation, the primary concern of this stage is the reveal of microprocesses in the structure of the singular components wherein the observer is transfixed on the augmentation and destruction of the memory of the death object over a time continuum visible in sonic medium. This can be conceptualised as a reflection on the previous stage, revealing the stages of annihilation and assimilation [the third chapter] as a processual, rather than reflective, stage.

The former stage, annihilation, is a harsh, attack-led death of a source sound and its real world attributes, representing the primary death of the object. Through processing, the object begins to mirror itself as it moves further from the original over the two minutes, as can be illustrated by [08_Clock_Face_Hands_Distortion]. In this stage, the manipulation takes place in the memory we hold in place of the death object, therefore perverting the recollection we hold in place of the actual thing. As this augmentation is drawn out over a continuum of time, it reveals these shadow microprocesses that would be otherwise hidden. The initial loss through annihilation is unsettling in its form, and proceeding losses will be linked to this main death, replicating the memorial ties with the acoustic referent.

In the vein of transformation through decontextualisation, we hear in this section how the reflection of previous incarnations of source material floats over the surface of these new objects in a different formation. There is a sense of unstableness evoked throughout the beginning of this area as parameter mutability is highlighted by the absence of key auditory signifiers present in the original context of the artefact. This process of time leans much more on the concept of decay of sonic material then the focus on attack and destruction. I feel this section highlights the destruction of the intact memory of the artefact being perverted and decayed over a time continuum. Due to its unfolding nature over a period of time that is viewable [rather than quick and violent destruction of parts], as this mutation unfolds, the sensation emanating is one of displacement, moving the deathscape into a stage of assimilation. Dastur describes this evocation as, ‘continually present as threat, death as this absolute absence must be accorded a paradoxical mode of appearing which is not the origin of any particular phenomenon, but confers upon phenomena as a whole their singular ‘tenor’ of finitude by having them stand out against the background of its black light (Dastur 1996: 42).

[1]The mechanism by which the listener unifies experience of auditory events.