The point of departure for the composition was a Canadian  research project of the same name, launched in the 1960s by  the World Soundscape Project under the direction of composers R. Murray Schafer and Barry Truax. The title The Library of  Disappearing Sounds is a poetic allusion to the fruits of that project: hundreds of field recordings from around the world, made as  researchers sought to capture unique or vanishing soundscapes. Each of the dozens of recordings I listened to sounded like a sliver  of reality snatched from a chance moment in its maker’s life.  Many came with brief notes marking the point at which something particularly remarkable or unusual occurred.

The source offered countless ways of developing the composition. I chose instead to take a personal, sentimental path, and  ask: which sounds have vanished from my own acoustic environment? Visual memories—and memories of taste or smell—come  back far more readily. Sound, however, is like touch: in recollection, it seems the most elusive of all. The work is thus grounded  in memories of sounds, in the very processes of reflection and  analysis, and in the attempt to capture a corresponding bodily  tension. Any element of sound imitation occupies something less  than a secondary place; so too does the idea of a catalogue, immediately suggested by the word “library.”

Adrianna Kubica-Cypek