Dead Symphony

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July 2013

Anna Snoekstra

Saskia Moore explores the sounds that reach the dying

“Sound is understood to be the last sense to leave the body in the dying process. So what are those sounds? What are people hearing in that process?” These are the questions artist Saskia Moore asked herself when she first begun on the project ‘Dead Symphony’.

Over the following two years Moore accumulated accounts of music heard during near death experiences to compose a symphony which will be performed by orchestra Apartment House in an intimate sound and light show at Melbourne’s Arts Centre. She began by contacting neurosurgeons and researchers all around the world, and was told that no one had done a formative study in sound or hearing in near death.

“What is known is more on the visual side,” she says. “I realised I was at the frontier of something that no one had ever done before, which is kind of amazing, but also – oh my goodness! I had no map so I had to go sideways and around and backwards.”

Moore had to be very inventive in her approach to transcribing the music from her subjects. She would create demo tracks as they spoke and often communicated by humming. Most of her subjects could not read music, and others found it hard to remember the sound in a literal sense.

“Some people described the music as a feeling. They described how they almost became the music, the music was them and there was no separation between them. They would often talk about colour associations. They might say: ‘The only way I could describe it is that it sounded orange.’ They’d start drawing orange and I’d find the sound of orange. They were able to draw wave forms and so I would try and interpret those jumps or leaps and then orange would change to green and then we’d work on green.

“There were often similarities in the description of the music. Subjects talked about it as a synthetic almost digital sound that doesn’t stop or start – it’s just a continuum. They say it’s very beautiful and it oscillates and changes but it’s always harmonious. A few people hummed similar melody lines to me which I found really extraordinary and very interesting.”

Melbourne audiences can expect a gentle and interactive experience from ‘Dead Symphony’. Moore describes it as a part performance, part concert, part artwork. Amongst the orchestra is an interactive light component which listens to the frequencies of the music and responds accordingly.

“The lights slightly flutter,” Moore says, “like a fluttering of an eyelid during consciousness or unconsciousness. It will be a very calming experience.”

Dead Symphony will be performed from August 7 to 10 in the Playhouse Rehearsal Room at Arts Centre Melbourne.