21gs (Album Piece & Concept) (draft 4)

Continuation- the state of remaining in a particular position or condition.

Immortality- the ability to live forever; eternal life.

Going with the theme of continuation , I chose to interpret this through the concept of immortality. Researching into this, Plato’s view on eternal life helped shape a lot of my direction by writing that nothing can destroy the soul, leaving it immortal. Henceforth, I titled my piece ’twenty-one grams’, based off Duncan MacDougal’s experiment with the human soul, where he discovered the weight of a human body is twenty-one grams lighter, postmortem. 

My own vision on immortality is a beautiful, divine concept that I have most often seen in religion and mythic lore through divine intervention. (Example, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Christianity) Looking into modern research on immortality, I notice a much more macabre view. Hypotheses of freezing heads to move into new bodies, digitally uploading yourself to a cybernetic avatar, or cryo-sleep. Instead of achieving (or believing) this concept, humans have shifted this divine intervention, into a technological one. 

To achieve this through sound, I structured this piece to emphasize the beauty but also the morbid side of what immortality is believed to be, or will become. Ancient vs. Modern, divine vs. mortal, blissful vs. morbid. Looking into experimental orchestras, I thought this would be an apt approach to these contrasts and to achieve eternal life, sonically. I used strings and flutes, running them through spectral stretch (thanks Jose) to interpret the ethereal, empyrean nature of what I have believed immortality to be. To close this piece, I used noise to introduce the modern view and to play with the idea of entropy. In a way, this piece turned out to be a sonic timeline of what everlasting life has become in Western Society.

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Immortality | Philosophy and Religion.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 15 June 2017, www.britannica.com/topic/immortality.

Humphries, Courtney. “Digital Immortality: How Your Life’s Data Means a Version of You Could Live Forever.” MIT Technology Review, 18 Oct. 2012, www.technologyreview.com/2018/10/18/139457/digital-version-after-death/.

Thomas, Ben. “The Man Who Tried to Weigh the Soul.” Discover Magazine, 3 Nov. 2015, www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-man-who-tried-to-weigh-the-soul.

Demby, Constance. Skies above Skies. Constance Demby Productions, 1988, open.spotify.com/album/0mOvzxPIp6XULoaq2Kq3h9. Accessed 11 Apr. 2021.

yeule. Veil of Darkness. Bayonet Records, 24 Oct. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8WwX0jkVMU. Accessed 11 Apr. 2021.