4C-ZZ-2244: An Acoustic Study of a Hybrid Organism

Presentation by Camilla Siig (Skive, DK).

Abstract

4C-ZZ-2244 is a 19-minute electronic composition incorporating field recordings made in Tisvilde Hegn alongside synthetic and acoustic sounds.

I created the piece as a compositional challenge, returning to the classical musical language I grew up with, while approaching it through electronics, which has increasingly become my instrument. I aimed to explore sound as a primary storytelling agent: can a purely sonic work make us inhabit a world, rather than observe it?

The piece follows an imagined human-machine organism through a cyclical year of awakening, activity, loss, reflection, and transformation. Inspired by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, I developed the work through four loosely seasonal phases: Activation, Functionality, Malfunction, and Resolution. The work explores the tension between systemic order and organic freedom. At the same time, the organism itself reflects my own experience of cultural hybridity, identity, loss, and the process of claiming creative agency.

Through the interplay of organic and synthetic sounds, I explore the boundary between natural and technological environments and how they might coexist or conflict with, and transform one another. The listener is invited not simply to observe the imagined organism, but to inhabit it and experience its changing states from within.

The session will begin with an introduction to the work, its concept, and its sonic materials, followed by a listening to the complete composition (19 minutes). Afterwards, participants will be invited to share their impressions and responses, considering the textures, rhythms, transitions, spatial qualities, and relationship between organic and electronic sound. We will then open into a collective critique, discussing how the work communicates its ideas, how the imagined organism is experienced, and what possibilities the piece might have beyond this listening session.