Theodore Hughes & Stéphanie Alèxe Hébert
Songs Turned to Ash is a sound installation centered on four bells collected from the grounds of a 111-year-old church that had caught fire. Altered by the event, the objects no longer chime as they once did. Bells evoke places of worship and institutional rituals; they are echoes that start and stop, guiding and instructing with an intention to gather or disperse. They have the ability to permeate space in multiple ways, materializing sound through their recognizable form. The piece asks what becomes of an object’s presence or purpose when its materiality and context have been transformed.
The installation features a four-channel generative composition developed solely from recordings of the recovered bells as its sound material. The following file is a stereo excerpt of one iteration: