Author Note
This paper arises from a collaborative written dialogue between composer Vladimír Hirsch and writer-semiotician Mares P. W., who together explore the compositional, semiotic, and temporal frameworks underlying Memories of Mars (Op. 101). Their exchange bridges creative practice and critical analysis, reflecting the album’s intermedial ethos—where music and literature, interpretation and composition, converge within a shared architecture of sound. Meta Statement The study treats Hirsch’s Memories of Mars as a case of sound thinking—an experiment in translating temporal and linguistic structures into spectral form, where music functions as temporal literature. It expands the scope of literary analysis beyond language, demonstrating how compositional form can enact narrative cognition through sound. Furthermore, it proposes that Hirsch’s compositional logic operates analogously to cosmological dynamics, where spectral pressure and decay determine whether narrative memory dissipates or crystallizes into form.
Abstract
Vladimír Hirsch’s Memories of Mars (Op. 101), released in 2025 by Epidemie Records, is a chronological sonic reconstruction of Ray Bradbury’s internally dated The Martian Chronicles (1950). Composed between 2021 and 2024, the album comprises sixteen tracks, each aligned with a chapter-year from Bradbury’s timeline. It transforms narrative chronology—an allegory of colonial ambition and existential exile—into auditory architecture, merging dark-ambient, neoclassical, and post-industrial idioms through Hirsch’s integrated techniques. This study examines the album’s temporal design, semiotic translation, and spectral structure, situating it within frameworks of intermedial theory, cognitive design, and linguistic minimalism. By uniting compositional analysis with semiotic interpretation, it demonstrates how Memories of Mars embodies a new model of editorial composition—a posthuman archive of memory that treats sound not as accompaniment to literature but as a parallel medium of philosophical reflection.
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1. Introduction — Context, Composer, and Research Questions
● What compositional logic drives Hirsch’s strict adherence to Bradbury’s internal dating?
● Why employ a non-lexical Martian language rather than explicit motifs or quotations?
● How does the Czech translation of The Million-Year Picnic (Výlet na milion let) influence tonal irony and pacing?
● Why are The Silent Towns and There Will Come Soft Rains absent from public metadata yet conceptually mapped?
● What role does Byron’s “So, we’ll go no more a roving” play in reframing Martian ruins?
● How does Hirsch negotiate authorship in reconstructing another writer’s temporal architecture? These questions frame an inquiry into temporal composition as literary reinterpretation, where music reconstructs not only atmosphere but the epistemic logic of a text (Clüver, 2007; Rajewsky, 2005).
techniques expand action potential of expression and redefine spatial function. From 1986 to 1996, Hirsch was a member of the post-punk ensemble Der Marabu and later founded Aghiatrias, Skrol, Zygote, and Subpop Squeeze, each exploring facets of acoustic architecture—the construction of sonic structures via harmonic stratification and textural juxtaposition (Hirsch, 2025). Hirsch’s mature aesthetic, fully realized in his solo work, rejects linear narrative in favor of acoustic symbolism. Sound functions as semantic energy, preceding and transcending language. His compositions act as semiotic environments, navigating symbolic tension through timbre, resonance, and tone physicality (Nattiez, 1990; Tarasti, 1994). Prague’s layered architecture—Gothic, Baroque, Cold War—provides both metaphor and method. Hirsch transforms the city’s visible history into audible architecture of memory. In Memories of Mars, this philosophy extends to intermedial terrain: literature becomes sound, fiction becomes environment, and Mars emerges as the locus of human memory and technological melancholy. Hirsch’s approach to Memories of Mars reveals a rare form of mnemonic authorship. Although based on Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), the album was not composed through direct re-reading or textual study. Hirsch recalls first encountering the novel during adolescence and rereading it only in youth, never again in preparation for the album. Yet the affective impressions—its atmospheres, moral undertones, and metaphysical solitude—remained vividly encoded in his
memory. The resulting composition thus emerges not as adaptation but as retrieval: a work transcribed from long-term affective memory rather than linguistic recall. This process exemplifies what cognitive semioticians might term affective mnemonics—the capacity of emotional memory to preserve narrative logic independent of textual reproduction (Eco, 1979; Nattiez, 1990). Hirsch’s “remembered” Mars becomes less a setting than a mental architecture reconstructed through
sound.
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3. Technical Foundation and Contributors
Memories of Mars was recorded 2021–2024 at 16-bit/44.1 kHz, released as a limited-edition CD digipak (20 copies) and digitally via Epidemie Records. Hirsch composed and performed electronic, synthesizer, and keyboard elements, using also various electroacoustically manipulated sources of sounds (field recordings et al), integrating ambient, neoclassical, and post-industrial vocabularies. Vocal contributions: Nadya Feir, Dawn Carlyle, Lisa El, and Martina Sanollová perform the invented Martian phonology—non-semantic phonemes functioning as sound-symbols (Jakobson, 1960). Instrumental contributions: Czech Integrated Ensemble (Track 5, Summer Night Concert). Production: Ars Morta Universum. Track 7, And the Moon Be Still As Bright, includes Byron’s poem “So, we’ll go no more a roving”, recited anonymously, embedded within a post-industrial soundscape. Beyond its sonic embedding, the poem—also cited by Bradbury in the source text—carries a central symbolic weight: in simple yet resonant language, it conveys a sense of sadness and nostalgia, the recognition that what was once beautiful has irretrievably ended and cannot be repeated. This intertextual layering enacts a metasemiotic reflection on language decay and cultural memory (Kristeva, 1980; Smalley, 1997).
and spectral analysis to examine Memories of Mars as an intermedial reconstruction of Bradbury’s The
Martian Chronicles. The methodology rests on three pillars:
1. Chronological Juxtaposition
Each track is aligned with Bradbury’s internally dated chapters (1999–2026), allowing analysis of temporal translation from literature to sound (Rajewsky, 2005).
2. Semiotic Reading
Tracks are interpreted according to their symbolic, affective, and narrative correspondences with Bradbury’s themes of colonization, nostalgia, and extinction (Jakobson, 1960; Nattiez, 1990).
3. Spectral Analysis
Examination of frequency stratification, harmonic density, timbral layering, and spatial diffusion, following Smalley’s (1997) spectromorphology framework (analyzing sound by its shape and texture). Each composition is treated as a soundtext, with meaning merging through interplay of symbolic reference and acoustic phenomenology. The study prioritizes qualitative interpretive rigor over conventional score-based analysis, reflecting Hirsch’s use of integrated techniques, where sound objects themselves convey semiotic, temporal, and narrative information.
reflection—while transposing narrative temporality into acoustic experience. The album becomes an
editorial reauthoring of literary time, where sound performs memory, atmosphere, and thematic
resonance (Rajewsky, 2005; Clüver, 2007).
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| Vladimír Hirsch / Memories Of Mars (CD digipak - outer) |
A tonal ignition of planetary warmth. Low-frequency oscillations (~40–60 Hz) evoke planetary mass, while high spectral glissandi (>8 kHz) introduce fragile luminosity. The track enacts temporal ignition, translating the rocket-induced melting of winter into harmonic warmth, marking the transition from Earthly past to Martian future (Smalley, 1997).
Bitonal harmonic layering destabilizes nostalgia. Metallic resonance evokes human technology, while
spectral decay mirrors the ephemeral nature of utopia. Indexical ambiguity allows the listener to
experience both memory and alien otherness simultaneously (Nattiez, 1990).
Percussive pulses and suspended chords emulate arrival without permanence. Temporal compression
mirrors settlers’ transient presence, highlighting colonization as industrial intrusion on Martian space
(Clüver, 2007).
Bimodal vocal textures (Feir, El) chant in sustained intervals of one second and a tritone. The invented
Martian phonology functions as phonosemiosis, conveying presence without semantic meaning. Extended reverb simulates telepathic distance, creating an auditory metaphor for delayed communication across space-time (Jakobson, 1960; Smalley, 1997).
Ensemble strings oscillate between consonant clusters and blurred glissandi over a D minor harmonic field. Spatial diffusion and binaural panning construct a shared dreamscape. Repetition serves mnemonic insistence, paralleling the collectivization of consciousness in Bradbury’s narrative (Rajewsky, 2005).
Unstable harmonic intervals critique colonial nomenclature. Overlapping E minor and F minor triads
produce psychoacoustic tension, simultaneously evoking familiarity and alienation. Low-frequency
beating (~6–8 Hz) functions as a Martian heartbeat underlying the sonic texture (Schaeffer, 1966).
Intertextual semiotics: Byron’s “So, we’ll go no more a roving” is embedded within post-industrial textures. Deep synthetic resonance (~70 Hz) and slow harmonic beating simulate acoustic interference of memory, situating human words as linguistic fossils in Martian dust (Kristeva, 1980; Smalley, 1997).
Mechanizes migration via staccato bursts that accumulate into a sonic swarm, translating colonization as industrial entropy. The basic sound theme imitates the attacks of insect clouds, with envelope compression and rhythmic iteration producing a visceral, machine-like motion (Clüver, 2007).
Translates Captain Wilder’s confrontation into spatial hollowness and resonant percussion. Harmonic
suspension and spectral layering evoke architectural decay, preserving themes of erosion and ethical
reflection (Bradbury, 1950).
A tonal placeholder of arrested time. Narrow spatial imaging and sustained harmonics evoke temporal
stasis, inviting recursive listening and interpretive engagement (Nattiez, 1990).
High‑frequency sheens suggest vertical ascension, while cyclic shifts in stereo placement and Doppler‑like phasing create environmental spaciousness. The soundscape evokes Martian winds transporting human remnants—memories of the idyll of original life—represented through the image of airships pulled by birds. This layering transforms outer space into an expressive sonic topology (Morton, 2018).
Channels Poe through industrial decay and architectural fragmentation. Midrange harmonic density mirrors psychological erosion, while orchestration references Gothic literary aesthetics (Eco, 1979).
Conceptually present but deliberately absent from public metadata. Spectral erosion and filtered harmonics embody deserted civilization, extending Bradbury’s thematic irony (Bradbury, 1950).
Also omitted from public metadata. Granular noise and high‑frequency automation imitate mechanical
birdsong, gradually decaying into sub‑bass drones (~40 Hz) that symbolize the collapse of
anthropocentric order (Smalley, 1997). The soundscape reflects the robotic functions that continue to
serve absent inhabitants, dramatizing the futility of technique in the wake of human extinction and the
inevitable failure of mechanisms once their purpose has vanished.
Elongated pacing and tonal distance reflect the irony embedded in the Czech translation. Sparse
harmonic layers evoke reflective nostalgia and posthuman temporality (Braidotti, 2013).
Closing sequence in mirrored restraint. Hirsch deliberately chooses the archaic spelling Reflexion,
signaling active reinterpretation rather than passive reflection. Ascending F minor against descending
C major forms an aural palindrome, with a 12‑second reverb tail enacting Derrida’s différance, folding each sound back into itself. Martian phonemes embody Barthes’ “grain of the voice,” restoring a prelinguistic presence (Barthes, 1977; Derrida, 1967). The symbolic resonance extends beyond sound: echoing Bradbury’s narrative, a man from the human family destroys documents in a fire, the last to burn being a map of the Earth. In the aftermath, he offers his sons a gift in the form of a new world, introducing them to the Martians—revealed as their own reflection in the water.
positioning music as a site where language, space, and emotion converge into post-verbal cognition.
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| Vladimír Hirsch / Memories Of Mars (CD digipak - inner) |
7. Theoretical Framework: Semiotic and Cognitive Design
recursive listening akin to literary interpretation (Rajewsky, 2005). Each sound object is simultaneously:
● Poietic: Hirsch’s compositional intention translating literary imagery into sound
● Neutral: Material sound itself (frequency, texture, dynamics)
● Esthesic: Listener reconstruction of meaning (Nattiez, 1990)
situates Memories of Mars within intermediality, where literature is translated into sonic experience without reduction (Clüver, 2007). Philosophically, Hirsch’s soundscape embodies posthuman temporality and dark ecology: Mars becomes an epistemic environment where human emotion coexists with nonhuman ambience (Braidotti, 2013; Morton, 2018). Hirsch’s refusal to reread Bradbury, composing instead from emotional recollection, reinforces this posthuman cognition: his memory itself becomes a medium of transmission, an archive in which human and nonhuman perception merge.
The dialogue between Hirsch and Mares P. W. extends this framework toward cosmological semiotics. If the universe possesses an effective pressure, its fluctuations behave as sound—ripples through the
medium of existence. Hirsch’s spectral logic mirrors this principle: where pressure (β) is low, narrative and memory dissipate into silence; where it intensifies, structures condense into harmonic form.
This β-analogy redefines Memories of Mars as a microcosm of structure formation: every resonance
acts as a miniature cosmogenesis, determining whether recollection dissolves or crystallizes into order.
Composition here is not depiction—it is world-making through resonance, a sonic cosmology of
persistence.
● Sub-bass (20–60 Hz): Gravitation and planetary mass
● Midrange (200–800 Hz): Textural interweaving of orchestral and electronic timbres
● High partials (8–12 kHz): Light, atmospheric thinness
Bitonal and microtonal juxtapositions (e.g., E minor vs. F minor in Deceptive Idyll) create psychoacoustic tension, low-frequency beating (~6–8 Hz) functions as Martian heartbeat (Schaeffer, 1966; Smalley, 1997).
Tracks mirror narrative logic acoustically:
● Ignition: Epigraph
● Encounter: Ylla / Telepathic Romance
● Erosion: Sacred Ruins
● Automation: There Will Come Soft Rains
● Reflection: Reflexion
Phase blurs and staggered attack times simulate collective dream states (Summer Night Concert), while
Locusts compresses envelopes for mechanized swarm effect (Rajewsky, 2005).
Stereo imaging, spectral diffusion, and binaural panning construct a dense Martian topology. Windboats’ cyclic stereo shifts simulate rotation; Doppler-like phasing conveys Martian winds carrying human remnants (Morton, 2018).
Early tracks emphasize metallic resonance—symbols of arrival and construction—while later tracks
dissolve into granular noise (Silent Towns, There Will Come Soft Rains), signaling technological decay
and the erosion of meaning.
Martian phonology oscillates between liturgical chant and glossolalia. Elongated vowels and sibilants,
amplified through cathedral‑like reverb (and TrueVerb) spatial delay, transform the voice into a resonant texture that hovers between ritual and abstraction—half human, half mechanical. Detached from syntax, the vocal line becomes a semiotic residue—an imprint of consciousness without language, embodying Barthes’ notion of the “grain of the voice” (Barthes, 1977).
8.6 Intertextuality
Byron’s verse in Track 7 performs a metasemiotic gesture, embedding human language as decayed
material within Martian acoustic space (Kristeva, 1980).
Byron’s verse in Track 7 performs a metasemiotic gesture, embedding human language as decayed
material within Martian acoustic space (Kristeva, 1980).
1. Temporal Correspondence – The years 1999 to 2026 function as tonal epochs, producing an
aural timeline in which frequency and harmonic density replace prose chronology.
2. Linguistic Transformation – The invented Martian phonology and Byron’s verse trace the decline
of human language from communication to echo, articulating post-semantic meaning.
3. Spatial Semiosis. Reverb, spatial delay of cathedral and similar types, stereo spread, and spectral
width function as grammatical markers, guiding listener perception. Together these axes form a cognitive architecture of sound, where listening itself becomes a form of
temporal literacy (Nattiez, 1990).
affective architecture so that each track functions as a sonic ruin, layering harmony, phonemes, and
echoes of extinct dreams. Long sustains and delayed attacks translate literary time into acoustic
resonance, establishing a temporal topology where memory lingers as sound (Rajewsky, 2005).
The result is a performative correspondence between fiction and frequency: meaning is not narrated
but resonated.
emerging paradigms in artificial intelligence, augmented cognition, and human–machine symbiosis.
Treating sound as a computational medium of narrative information, the album anticipates how musical
architectures might serve as cognitive substrates for AI-mediated perception.
The album’s temporal precision and layered semiotics offer a model for machine interpretation of narrative structures. Each track functions as an algorithmic sequence encoding literary logic into spectral data. AI systems could employ similar mappings to translate complex temporal narratives into multimodal outputs—sonic, visual, or haptic—allowing machines to reconfigure human cultural memory. Hirsch’s phonemic abstraction and spectral temporality point toward a framework for processing meaning beyond lexical semantics, privileging resonance, causality, and structure.
By externalizing reflection and temporality into acoustic form, Memories of Mars acts as a cognitive
prosthesis. Listeners reconstruct temporal sequences recursively, paralleling augmented-cognition models that scaffold attention, memory, and decision-making. The translation from Bradbury’s text to Hirsch’s sound prefigures interfaces in human–machine augmentation, where spatialized semiotic architectures enhance creative reasoning or memory retention. Spectral layering and binaural panning thus offer prototypes for spatialized memory systems or adaptive neural feedback loops.
Hirsch’s hybrid orchestration—merging acoustic, electronic, and computationally informed sound—models a proto-symbiotic relationship between human intention and synthetic process. The album exemplifies a co-creative environment: composer, performers, and algorithmic structures act as an integrated system. In future research, such symbiosis could inform AI platforms where human sensitivity and machine optimization co-produce art or knowledge (Braidotti, 2013).
11.4 Implications for Future Research
Memories of Mars functions as a conceptual laboratory, illustrating how sound can encode temporal,
semiotic, and narrative complexity. Potential future directions include:
● AI-driven compositional analysis: training models to identify temporal logic, affective markers,
and spectral symbolism in multi-modal art forms.
● Cognitive augmentation interfaces: employing auditory and spatialized semiotic architectures to
enhance memory, attention, or creative reasoning.
● Human–machine co-creation: exploring collaborative frameworks where composers, AI agents,
and performers dynamically generate adaptive soundscapes reflecting emergent narrative
structures.
● Synthetic archives of cultural cognition: translating literature, history, or philosophical thought
into semiotic sound environments, enabling preservation and reactivation of human knowledge in
posthuman contexts.
cognition, and technology, demonstrating that sound can operate simultaneously as a medium of
reflection and as substrate for augmented intelligence.
Hirsch himself resists the idea of artificial cognition as currently conceived, emphasizing that “where words end, music begins.” His skepticism reveals a crucial boundary in AI discourse: the inability of algorithmic systems to embody affective resonance, emotion, and imagination—the very media through which music communicates. The dialogue between composer and analyst therefore enacts a dialectic between computation and consciousness, revealing that while AI may model narrative structure, it cannot yet inhabit its affective core.
posthuman ontology, where analog and digital electronics emulate organic resonance and strings mirror
spectral smoothness. Reflexion closes the cycle through an aural palindrome that enacts Derrida’s (1967) différance—sound perpetually deferring its own meaning. Editorial authorship becomes crucial: through deliberate selection, sequencing, and omission (Silent Towns, There Will Come Soft Rains), Hirsch transforms absence into meaning, decentering the composer within a collective sonic identity (Braidotti, 2013). Mars, in this sense, becomes a metaphor for fragility not only of civilization but of significance itself.
Figure 1: Field encounter with Memories of Mars — Material, elemental, and mnemonic convergence,
Mares P. W.
The encounter with the album above the charred ground (see Figure 1) is not merely aesthetic; it
constitutes a field experiment in which human memory, material medium, and elemental forces converge. Within this moment, the act of perception itself becomes analytical: the listener’s cognition, the physical artifact, and the natural environment form an integrated semiotic system. Because the author is a language synesthete, language is apprehended not as abstraction but as sensory
event. Fire, ash, and water therefore operate not as imposed symbols but as pre-existent
scripts—grammars inscribed within the elements themselves.
● Fire as inscription. A compact disc is written by a laser’s heat; fire thus becomes an emblem of
memory etched into matter. The burning process materializes language as heat—an act of searing
the immaterial into permanence.
● Ash as forgetting. When combustion ends, residue remains: a syntax of erasure, the trace of
meaning fading into silence.
● Water as recollection. Rain intervenes as a counterforce, cleansing yet continuous. Across mythic
and philosophical traditions, water functions as an archive of origins, returning what was lost to
circulation.
Physics as Semiotic Continuum
The extension from semiotics to physics follows naturally. Physics, too, constitutes a language system—a script of forces and relations through which matter communicates. In the early universe, matter itself “spoke” through oscillations: pressure within the primordial plasma resisted collapse, generating acoustic ripples that determined whether energy dissipated or condensed into form. Physicists describe this equilibrium through the parameter β, a ratio defining the balance between pressure
and density.
● When β is small, pressure smooths irregularities: structure dissolves into uniformity—an act of
cosmic forgetting.
● When β is large, pressure amplifies fluctuations: matter clumps into galaxies and stars—an act of
inscription and remembrance.
Thus, β functions as a measure of whether existence forgets or remembers, whether it erases or records
its own emergence.
Viewed through this lens, Memories of Mars becomes both experiment and metaphor. The physical
gesture—holding the disc above embers in the rain—materializes the dialogue among the elements. Fire, ash, and water form the alphabet of memory; physics provides its grammar; and Hirsch’s soundscape becomes its literature—fragile yet enduring precisely because it is exposed to dissolution.
The field encounter thus signifies the convergence of three languages:
1. the elemental script of fire, ash, and water;
2. the cosmic script of β and sound waves;
3. the musical script of Hirsch’s spectral architecture.
At their intersection lies the synapsis—the connective spark through which all languages of memory
communicate. In this liminal zone, matter, sound, and consciousness coalesce, ensuring that memory,
though mutable, persists.
but temporal literature—a language through which existence remembers itself.
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Maria Petrova (aka Mares P.W.), November 2025
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