14.11.2025

I’ve been thinking a lot about how audiences react to theatre, dance, or spoken language, and how different that reaction is from their encounter with music. Bodies, gestures, language — these are concrete things. People are familiar with them. They can relate. Sound is abstract, it doesn’t come with a built-in vocabulary, and most of the times it doesn’t point to anything outside of itself. Even though I’ve worked with sound for years, even though I’ve learned to shape it, sculpt it, understand it, I’m still aware of how immaterial it is.

I’ve always worked with the idea that sound is my material, and that time is the dimension in which sound unfolds — the space that lets the sound exist, move, and transform. For me, form was essentially that space around sound: the framework that allows the sound to act. It’s never been easy to understand a sonic material and find the space it needs in order to live. It took me years to realize how closely sound and time influence one another, and how different sounds require different kinds of time. The temporal structure shifts depending on the material I’m working with. So each piece becomes a new form, a new way for time to function.

What surprises me now is the growing feeling that maybe what I’m really creating isn’t sound, but time through sound. And because the listener ultimately experiences time, not just the sound itself, I’m beginning to think that time might be even more abstract — and perhaps more fundamental — than the sonic material. This makes me question the “space” I’ve always tried to build around sound, the form that was supposed to let the sound act. If the listener’s perception is shaped first and foremost by how time is organised, then maybe I should also be asking whether the temporality itself can be created before the sound. Whether there is a way of imagining a structure of time first, and only afterwards thinking about which sounds can inhabit it. But, I know how to work from sound, but I don’t yet know how to work from time. I don’t know how to handle time as a material. How do I begin from time when I’ve always begun from sound? How do I construct a temporality in my mind before there is anything to inhabit it? And if sound is already abstract, then time feels even more abstract…

I know that other composers and thinkers have approached similar questions, each in their own way. That doesn’t give me a solution, but it reassures me that this confusion has a history, that it belongs to a broader conversation about what composing actually means.

At the same time, my exposure to theatre and dance is pushing me into this new territory. These forms construct temporalities without relying on sound. They shape time through bodies, movement, repetition, stillness, and space. Seeing this makes me realize how tied I’ve been to the idea that sound must lead, and how many other ways of thinking about time I have never considered.

So now I find myself in a strange position: I feel confident working with sound, but almost inexperienced with time, at least as something I can create rather than something I inherit from the sound itself. I’m at the beginning of learning how to think temporally, not just sonically. I don’t have answers yet. What I have is a shift in perspective — the sense that the material I thought I was shaping may not have been the main material after all. That what I’ve actually been working with all along is time, and that I now need to understand how to approach it directly.