On Ruins and Sound

artistic practice-based research by Liza Kuzyakova

This research investigates how the ruin can serve as a metaphor for sound. In the text that follows, I share reflections on traces, memory, and the decay of sound, all shaped by the concept of ruinous thought. Central to this inquiry is what I term the aesthetics of fragmentation—an exploration of the aesthetic implications of processing tools and the tension between a musical source and the perception of its sonic materiality.

Through this lens, I examine how the image of a ruin reverberates across material, temporal, and spatial dimensions, with a particular focus on its relevance to electroacoustic music composition.

• Material decay: the disintegration of structure and matter | tonal material and the source.

• Temporal ambiguity: ruin's relation to memory, the past, and its traces | perception of sound

• Spatial dispersion: ruin as an inspiration towards spatial architecture | sound & space

My inquiry into these themes emerged from several years of engagement with experimental music practices, oscillating between the visceral energy of live performance in genres such as harsh noise and industrial music, and the meticulous construction of electroacoustic compositions that I created over the years: Yesh Me Ayin and Sarid. Merging these two worlds—live improvisation and studio-based composition—revealed both aesthetic proximity and tension, inspiring this research. The ruin, for me, became a speculative strategy—a material metaphor bridging philosophical inquiry and artistic practice, aligning my interests in the aesthetics of noise, electroacoustic processes, and the sonic tensions present in situations of acousmatic listening.

Guided by the questions 'What does it mean to compose ruins?' and 'How can an architectural ruin inform sonic material?', I entered into the research which interweaves the theoretical investigations and practical experiments. This culminated in my most recent piece for cello and 8-channel fixed media - Al Niente. A Song From a Past Time (I-III). A reworked section of which was presented as part of my research concert on December 12 2024 at Studio LOOS, in a joined presentation with Elif Soguksu.

This research attempts to analyse a sonic ruin from a variety of perspectives: a melt of philosophical, technical, cultural, and poetic contributions, it finds ground in the middle, positioning music at its core. Through the ruin employed as a guide, a parallel line to the music's ideas, I aim to open new pathways for thinking about sound and composition, where materiality and imagination converge.

A Ruin

My starting point could be pictured as a crumbled building. Its metal structure and the fallen ornament of stones stand still, in the liminal space between the past and the present, presenting the eye with a state of decay. In the scope of this text, ruin is formulated as a process of dissolution of form, the form itself, and formlessness at once. The presence and the representation. Drawing inspiration from works of artist Erik Smith, who excavates the peripheral and indeterminate material artefacts of existing spaces,1 my research is similarly concerned with the ruin's superimpositions of various histories through the exposure of its physical features. The material decay of a ruin led me to reflect on the perceptual instability and the erasure of the sound's source through the processing techniques in my compositional practice.

On Ruin's Material Decay

The words ruin and destruction are etymologically linked. Wandering from the Latin destructionem and its stem destruere, where struere 'to pile, build' and the prefix de 'un-, down' are combined (from PIE *streu-, an extended form of root *stere- 'to spread'), there is a reference to ruin - derivative of ruere 'to rush, fall violently, collapse'. A process of getting away from, down from, out of - something that is built; the physical obliteration.

Literary historian Sven Spieker writes about destruction in the introduction to a series of essays on contemporary art: ' Its creative potential often lies precisely in its incompleteness, in the lingering references to what is being decomposed or dismembered, or, more generally, in the vestiges and traces destruction leaves behind.'2 I suggest that the figure of ruin lingers in the traces of the source, unveiling its imaginative potential. In particular, when utilising granular techniques and those aspiring to noise and fragmentation. Distortion can be seen as one tool for altering materiality into a deceased form, feasibly, that of a ruin.

Practical Side: Experiments With Cello And Electronic Material

In the trajectory of this research, I propose the conversation on noise (type of sound) as an abstraction - the dissolution of form, opposite to a sound that refers to a physical object. Speculating on noise being potentially the most perceptually unstable, tenuous sound - - one that triggers the imagination - - and in tangency of a ruin's suggestion of speculation and fantasy as an indeterminate form in constant transition - I draw a parallel between sound tone and noise.

Through practical experiments with cellist Sigrid Sand Angelsen, I explored this idea further. By employing distortion, overdrive, and extreme magnification on the original recordings of the cello, the timbral characteristics of the string sounds were manipulated. However, the relationship with cello's frequency components in the electronic material was maintained. Noise synthesis often stemmed from the frequencies present in the source material (recordings of cello) to establish the perceptual relation. The resulting material therefore did not diverge from the source entirely. The resulting electronic material thus oscillates between the original sound and its transformed, deconstructed state, which are played alongside each other.

In one example, the cello’s narrow-band high-register tone was merged with noise, creating perceptual ambiguity that alludes to crumbling and decay. Similarly, high bow pressure on the strings produced compressed, highly textural sound qualities, further alluding to the altered clarity of tonal form.

Ruinous metaphor guides the material devastation of the acoustic source.

The guiding principle of the ruin first emerged during the composition of Sarid, one of my earlier acousmatic pieces, and informed my collaborative experiments with Sigrid. Traces of the original string sound disintegrate, leaving faint echoes of the acoustic source. These remnants morph into something new, oscillating between absence and presence— construction and decay—throughout the composition.

Working along the axis of a trace - a form, disappearing or no longer existing, an oscillation between the absence and delicate prominence of the cello sound

is perpetually revealed and concealed;

the melody's contour being gradually built throughout the piece. the resulting piece leaves only reminiscences, fading echoes of the acoustic source.

on Ruin's Temporal Ambiguity

A widespread term in the field of contemporary art and architecture, ruin doesn't come with the clarity of an object being one. Instead, it calls for the supplement of further reading, further syntax. A ruin carries its own archaeological layers and facilitates discussion on the origins. Behind the romanticised image of a survived structure, uncovering material traces of belonging, ruin reveals a plethora of histories and times.

Brian Dillon, Walter Benjamin, and George Simmel, among many other thinkers on the ruinous, suggest - when we look at a ruined building, what we see is the passage of history. Brian Dillon writes in the introduction to a collection of essays on the notion of ruin in contemporary art practices: 'Ruins embody a set of temporal and historical paradoxes. The ruined building is a remnant of, and portal into, the past; its decay is a concrete reminder of the passage of time. And yet, by definition, it survives, after a fashion: there must be a certain (perhaps indeterminate) amount of built structure still standing for us to refer to it as a ruin and not merely a heap of rubble. .. Perhaps the most enigmatic aspect of the time of ruination is the manner in which it points towards the future rather than the past, or rather uses the ruined resources of the past to imagine, or reimagine, the future. What Dillon designates is an inherent perpetual tension of the ruin's image, namely its temporal ambiguity. Ruin is a phenomenon of the semiotics of time: in its retrospective aspect, ruin refers back to its initial state and the strike that caused its metamorphosis, while in its prospective aspect, it refers to the course of (further) obliteration. Both temporal aspects of the past and the future are crucial for the perception of a ruin in the present, and mark a strong relation to memory. An artist Robert Smithson in his writing reminds us that ruin is always dynamic and in process.4 This temporal ambiguity echoes complex multimodal and multi-temporal perception of music, as well as the transience of sound at large.

One of the parallels I explored within the research was the fragmented cyclical unfolding of a melodic contour and spectral building of the familiar cello sound. In Al Niente: A Song From a Past Time, this temporal ambiguity is reflected in the fragmented, cyclical unfolding of melodic contours and the spectral reconstruction of familiar cello sounds. The structure of the piece mirrors the processes of remembering and forgetting, with each moment building on traces of what came before. The reworked segment presented at the December 12th concert incorporated this concept, exploring how the ruin metaphor could shape musical time and memory.

on ruin's spatial disintegration

The ruin’s decay extends beyond its material form, altering its spatial architecture. As walls and ceilings collapse, the boundaries between interior and exterior blur. Disintegrating holding structure exposes the insides of a ruined building that over time emanate into outer space, while the outside creeps in and inhabits the interior. Weeds and moss gradually dwell in the crevices of rotten and decaying matter. Writer and poet Susan Stewart writes about ruin's undermining of spatial integrity in her book The Ruins Lesson.

Meaning and material in Western culture: 'What should be vertical and enduring has become horizontal and broken'.5 A ruin therefore occupies all dimensions. Stewart advances: 'A ruin confuses the interior with the exterior and the transparent with the opaque as it also shows the interrelatedness of this aspect of perception.' This spatial instability translates to music through the interplay of gesture and texture as signifiers of two different conceptions of space. A sound that begins as a recognizable object can dissipate into formless texture, or vice versa—a melody or tone can emerge from fragmented, noise-like mass. In my work, this spatial metaphor is central to the duality of sonic construction and dissolution.

An aspect of this research yet to be fully explored involves further investigation into the spatial parallels between ruins and sound. As ruins are fundamentally a spatial phenomenon, the role of space in music is equally significant. This is especially crucial when composing for a combination of live acoustic instruments and electronic material played through speakers, where the interplay of sound and physical space becomes a critical element in the compositional process. With my piece Al Niente. A Song From a Past Time, I began to explore this intersection, conducting additional experiments with the reworked stereo version of a segment presented on December 12th. In these experiments, I specifically focused on the spectral division of high and low register sounds as a method of sculpting the aural texture, creating a dynamic spatial narrative within the sound field.

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