The Invariance of the Threshold Duration Perception and Spectral Organization in Éliane Radigue's Trilogie de la Mort

The critical reception of Éliane Radigue's Trilogie de la Mort (1988–1993) converges on a constant experiential datum, namely the alteration of duration perception produced by prolonged listening, which the literature has so far recorded without explaining, resorting to the vocabulary of meditative suspension or deducing the effect from the work's Buddhist spiritual program. The present contribution advances an alternative thesis: temporal dilation does not depend on the program, but on a determinate set of compositional choices, namely the suppression of attack markers, the use of extremely-low-frequency beats as non-articulating periodicity, and the placement of spectral evolution below the threshold of conscious detection of change. Through the spectral analysis of the three movements, conducted on homogeneous samples of stasis, transition, and emergence and grounded in the measurement of spectral flux and partial stability, it is shown that this regime remains invariant notwithstanding the heterogeneity of the symbolic programs (Buddhist in Kyema, visual-pictorial in Kailasha, Christian in Koumé). The invariant is not the value of spectral flux, which varies considerably across passages, but the absence of articulation: at no point in the cycle, whatever the magnitude of change, does change present itself as an event. Since three distinct programs produce the same perceptual regime, it follows that the threshold condition evoked by the titles is not represented by the work, but produced in the organization of listening. The threshold is not a content; it is a perceptual structure.