The Cost of Sound

2025

In 1983, my father gave me a cassette of Joe Jackson’s Steppin’ Out and a Sony Walkman for Christmas. I listened to that song again and again.

This work imagines that song time-stretched to last a lifetime, generating 445 terabytes of audio. A monument of hard drives stands in a windswept Scottish landscape, each drive containing a fragment of the extended recording — a digital cairn amid the grass and weather. From within, a faint, decaying tone drifts through the air, stretching far beyond the limits of human hearing.

Steppin’ Out (445 TB) reflects on memory and the futility of technology to preserve what we most wish to keep.

Note:
This video prototype was created with Sora AI to visualise the installation and convey its intended spatial and temporal experience.

Role:
Concept, archival cassette digitisation, sound design, and installation

Tools & Materials:
Eurorack modular system, PaulStretch, Ableton Live, LaCie 1 TB external hard drives

Duration:
80 years (time-stretched audio)