The Sound Monument : Composing in symbiosis with the performance environment

Sammanfattning

One of my earliest childhood memories is the sound of church bells in the distance. I remember how their abrupt appearance made all my thoughts stop, entrancing me in a sudden awareness of the present moment, how I could feel the sound in great detail, emanating from the church tower at the top of the hill, echoing through each narrow street around it and around me. I remember how the sound would make me stop feeling time as a concatenation of subsequent instants and instead being within time in a continuous flow. This experience of sound has accompanied me throughout my life in various forms. Metal scraping from my hometown's shipyard, reverberating in the warehouses and spreading across the docks, trains screeching and whistling, heard from the hilltop next to my house, ferries blaring their foghorns across the piers on foggy days. In the last few years, I worked to develop a musical practice in an attempt to convey this experience of pure perception of sound, resulting in a type of work which I call the Sound Monument. In this thesis, I discuss how a Sound Monument can be better understood as a process rather than a piece, encompassing both practice and experience, and I show its application through four different Sound Monuments, discussing the methods of composition and the insight I learned through their realization.