Unbecoming

A ten-minute stereo composition made for Soundscape Studies, built from field recordings captured in and around Hopetoun Gardens, Elsternwick. The piece sits with the experience of a panic attack: the dissolving of acoustic ground, the way sound stops being something heard and becomes something happening to the body.

It moves through four sections, the familiar walk, the build, the unravelling, the body alone, layering footsteps, suburban ambience, a tram stretched into a Shepard–Risset drone that rises without ever resolving, electromagnetic static, fragmented voices, and a heartbeat that refuses to slow. Everything stops at once on a single spoken word.

The graphic score below is a spatial timeline of the full composition. Press play and the marker traces the piece through the score; click anywhere on it to jump.

Unbecoming is concerned with the territory between belonging and unbelonging, with what happens when a familiar place becomes uninhabitable from the inside. The piece sits with the experience of a panic attack: the dissolving of acoustic ground, the way sound stops being something heard and becomes something happening to the body. There is an attempt here to make audible what is usually private. The slow accumulation of pressure that has no source you can point to. The moment perception fragments into too many directions at once. The collapse into a single internal rhythm that refuses to slow. The usual comforting sounds of home can twist and warp, becoming the backdrop to a particular kind of estrangement, one in which you feel out of place not only in your environment, but an unbelonging within your own mind.

What this piece hopes to portray is not catastrophe, but its strange quiet aftermath hidden internally to the outside world. The unsettling intimacy of being left alone with your own body in a place that once felt like home.