Bell, cosmology and the ruins of time: Exploring intermediality and narrativity in audiovisual live electronics

This paper examines the historical trauma of Japanese bonshō (Buddhist temple bells) melted down during the Second World War through the concept of ‘sonic ruins’. It argues that the loss of the bell sound does not signify only the disappearance of a material object but also the interruption of a sound-producing body through which spatial order, ritual practice and cosmological imagination had been articulated. Taking the audiovisual live-electronics work Are You Still Melting as a case study, the article explores how intermediality can transform this absence into a processual form of narrativity. By bringing together East Asian bell cosmology, gagaku tuning, Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli method and the ritual continuity of Shuni-e, the work treats the melted bell not as an object to be restored but as a conceptual source to be decomposed and reassembled across media. The article argues that this intermedial process does not simply synchronise sound and image; rather, it allows historical interruption, ritual continuity and sonic absence to remain perceptible as ‘ruins of time’.