It is my intention to self-style myself as the world’s first paranormal sound artist and to document my (re)search of the sonic weird in written accounts that accompany the creative experiments of my soundscape compositions.

These written accounts aren not so much a form of nature writing as they awriting about the supernatural; albeit, I am aiming to write through nature in order to arrive at the supernatural artefacts that lie on the other side of it, just as the supernatural is often reached through conduits of sound.

The sonic weird is an expressive force in nature and architecture, in history and space, and in the temporal shifts of our perceptions in the vanishing moment. It stands upon the precipice of the here and now, disappearing out of the reach of sight and sound as it is swept away in the instantaneous cascades of the past, leaving fleeting traces of possibility in the phantasmic welter of half-hidden worlds that we struggle to capture, to conjure and convey in the alternative worlds of our artistic and scientific practices. (There is no great distinction between art and science, as I see it: they are two heads of the same beast—the beast of curiosity and the allure of the unknowable that instils in us a prolific hunger).

The sonic weird is experienced in the imaginative space that appeals to the senses and sensibilities of the listener through involuntary and instinctive episodes of what H. P. Lovecraft has described as “awed listening”.

Awed listening arises from sounds that are heard without revealing their sources. It maintains that the salience of mystery is preserved in an aural smog of uncertainty, unfamiliarity and the excited wonder of fear and fascination that accompanies a strange and unknown sound when it fails to be accounted for.

Awed listening causes the imagination to be stirred by an awakened perception of reality as an enigma. It ushers us towards the belief that supernatural unlikelihoods are the potential realities of enigmatic acoustic settings where sounds occur as powerful anomalies of unknown origins, leaping into being with a ghostly prominance that defies the explanations of scientific rationale.

It is because of this that many of our most enduring nougats of folklore are exclusively related to sound—the distended footfalls of the Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui, the Phantom Trumpeter of Fyvie Castle, the Drowned Fishermen of Hell’s Lum, the ghostly Fiddler of Craigievar Castle, the Cruel Jailer of Slains Castle rattling his keys.

In each of these cases, the environmental peculiarites of the places associated with each haunting are such that exist outside of day to day human experience. They are, to this extent, extreme.

A part of my mission, then, is to focus on extreme places in order to engage the extremities of sound that occur within and around them, as a consequence of which my search of the sonic weird becomes an exploration of the half-hidden worlds that exist beyond the frontiers of everday living.

This is the story of my engagement with the sonic weird and my attempts to capture, conjure and convey it within the alternative dimensions of my own artistic practices - my soundscape compositions of the sonic weird as sonically real.