Music is more than an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world; a tool of understanding (Attali 1985: 90)

This project was undertaken as an experimental collusion of theory and practice, text and sound. Its aims were to expand on microprocesses arising between a soundscape[1] and a theoretical conception of a deathscape by recreating this in the sonic domain using opaque mediation techniques [Brøvig-Hanssen].

I drew from my academic work on the application of cultural theory to studio technological practice, from my role as an electronic artist and as a sound designer. The source material for this project was recorded from memorial sites that evoke memories of death for me. As death can be said to frame life, this project aims to assimilate ruptures attributed to annihilation, while drawing correlations between text and sound, life and death, and loss and the other. The concept of deathscapes was set out by Kong (1999); I employ the notion of deathscapes described by anthropologists Maddrell and Sidaway to portray the depth and resonance of loss and sorrow experienced as it meshes with the soundscape and embodied sentiment. Death and deathscapes evoke soundscapes, and these acoustic domains, removed from cultural systems, would prove a useful site for analysis on an interior state that is animated by grief and given symbolism in the context of its display. My aim was to create a piece of sound art in the style of an acoustic soundscape [such as Feld: see Structuring the Soundscape], and through the application of multiple strings of sequential theory, transform this material to conceptual deathscape.

This theoretical scape embodies the resonances of a reality of death by drawing from an ethnographic approach to death, grounded in real-world sounds associated with death and memory, and theoretical model intersection and its subsequent abstraction in the sonic domain. The processual nature of this reality is best illustrated in sonic form, as the replicated capture and recapture of sound manifests as an allusion of reality. The format of a sound composition animates the additional layer of ethnographic context to illustrate a soundscape of death, a description that is required by Hirschaucer to ‘solve problems of the silent, the voiceless, the unspeakable, the pre-linguistic, and the indescribable’ (Hirschauer 2006: 413). This project is an assemblage of theory and practice that serves to illustrate, illuminate, and animate the various materials invoked by death that affect multi sensory capacities. These acoustic signifiers are the most pronounced sonification of death, and are paralleled to ‘icons of crying’ (Urban 1988) in ethnographic descriptions that are crucial to the proper expression of emotion and demonstrate the depth of relationship and value of one’s loss, which impact on the soundscape of the environment (Schafer 1994) to create temporal deathscapes.

Sounds drawn from memorial phenomena are malleable in a sonic context as mourning is an inherently spatial as well as temporal phenomenon, described by Maddrell as experienced in and expressed in sites of memorialisation; ‘[these include] individual mappings of bereaved people’s experiences of significant spaces/places and how these change over time, how they are expressed through performance in space, written as corporeal, landscape or literary texts; and how these individual [and collective] emotional maps impact on particular places’ (Maddrell 2010: 123). In this sense, sounds and their subsequent orientation in music provide a context for journeying between life and death as ‘song images deal with the travel of the deceased’s soul and enable ideas of life after death to be passed on’ (Morphy 1994: 15). Art has an affinity with loss, ‘you can only really make art out of dead things…we encounter the intimate bond between representation and absence’ (Gould 2010: 286). To facilitate this project, four theoretical stages have been correlated to inform the structure of the deathscape. This continuum will be manifested in the sonic domain utilising Baudrillard’s procession to full simulacrum [the frame of a reality of death], paralleled by Luper’s replicator theory to inform the growth and animation of source material in the soundscape [the contents of the deathscape], Brøvig-Hanssen’s stages of opaque mediation [choices applied through studio technology, the extension of the machine and human metaphor] to parallel with the four types of sound present in Fale’s description of electronic music [figure.01 and appendix I for expansion].

A soundscape transforms along a continuum to a deathscape by gradually stripping away the contextualisation of the sound sources. These representational stages, mirroring most sonic phenomena, form a continuum. One that Fales describes in relation to her sound categories as defined by decreasing contextualisation. The first category, ‘at one end of the continuum, consists of exact copies of real-world sounds, derived perhaps from unaltered sampled sounds’ (Fales 2004: 169). In the processing domain of sound technology, artefacts ‘maintain their metaphoric quality but diverge by increments from a known acoustic referent, until by category two, sounds are unfamiliar but possible or imaginable in some musical universe’ (Fales 2004: 169). In an assemblage, the third category, sonic material sheds it metaphoric linkages until it achieves pure simulacrum at the end of the continuum. In this sonic projection,soundscapes mutate into deathscapes, and memory, viewed through the augmentation of sound as a processual representation of loss, provides tracing opportunities for processes of annihilation and assimilation in the presence of death. The animation of the interior state of grief by memory is an attempt to revive what has been annihilated, both in the lost object and the bereaved, and posits as a fruitful initial counterpoint for the approach to source materials for the deathscape. This ‘death inside life’ is reborn through sonic means, and it manifests an unspeakable silence coloured in by sound, as particles ruptured by annihilation are drawn together in aetherial form. As Joe Milutis explains in his account of the ether, ‘the poetics of the sky grants the imagination a vital medium for fantasies of oblivion or hope as well as for material constructions’ (2006: 85).

[1] Schafer, R. M. (1994)