Liza Kuzyakova
RESEARCH
Bachelor's Thesis Institute of Sonology, The Hague 2024
Within The Invisible Shifting of Sources and Their Material Qualities..
on Sonic Fiction, Aural Drama, and Ruin
> Full paper: ‘Within The Invisible Shifting of Sources and Their Material Qualities..’
Throughout the past many years, I have found myself persistently drawn to all kinds of art forms, the more transitional, alienating, and surreal, the stronger my fascination manifested itself. My background in contemporary arts, where it all began, shaped the way I think of sound and compose, the inclination towards visual thought pertaining until today. Having discovered the world of sound, what drove my curiosity further was the vastness of approaches that sound entails and at the same time the fleetingness and ephemerality of its experience. That there is always more to it than we can outline, that it escapes defining, always touching on the elusive, the poetics.
Weaving a thread of inspiration from experimental theatre practices, her current research relates to dramatically unfolding space in electroacoustic music and the sonic relationship between reality and fiction. Focusing on the perceptual tensions and the role memory plays in the listening process, she investigates the conditions of emerging active imagination, formulated through the notions of sonic fiction, and creates often surreal fictional realms.
Alongside this, a strain of her research concerns how the metaphor of ruins can be translated to sound. A ruin is an intriguing concept in the context of musical form in how it assimilates in relation to time structures; what it suggests about the presence and materiality of sounds. The ruinous as an embodiment of the musical aesthetics of form and formlessness, collapsing spaces and degrading materials, and non-linear time narratives where the past, present, and future of sounds are interwoven. Bearing many complex perceptual tangencies, sonic ruins unite and direct her thought as a material metaphor, a speculative strategy for working with sound.
What does it mean to compose ruins?
How can an architectural ruin become a metaphor for a sonic material?
The two pieces Sarid (2022) and Al Niente. A Song From a Past Time I-III (2023-2024) are part of this artistic research.