Titanium playthrough

This collage poem.

An analysis of sorts.

Ghost town and haunted love.

Musicological and social science analysis are unhelpful here i.e. trying to translate sonic content into a system. First-person self-referential writing won't cut it either, because such an approach produces reductive fictions of experience, and makes for boring prose. Let's go for something more and less faithful to the personal... poetics as an excavation of experience (sonic, online, social), overturning of personhood via internalising black-hole focus.

Poetics sets in motion meaning-making as play as meaning-making...

What do I hear?

'Titanium (Ti) is a lightweight, high-strength, and highly corrosion-resistant metal with atomic number 22, widely used in aerospace, medical implants, and automotive industries.'

X listened back to this track via headphones many times, alone at home and on the move, and each time, this time, being no exception, the digital, sonic space-form and spatial textures initiate an instant feeling of presence as transportation, moving in and through the song.

The first pre-chorus and chorus are characterised by synchronised, consistent and near-symmetrical spatial motion articulated through spectral transformations (frequency filtering). Smooth, sustained digital synths sound out as clear, curving, synthetic arcs, suggestive of the smooth lines and surfaces of synthetic materials such as plastics or metals.

'I listen to it every day.'

'Titanium has a unique ability to bond with bone.'

Cut me down, but it's you who'll have further to fall. 

It is used in aircraft frames, engine components, and other critical parts.

Rhythmic frequency filtering applied to digital synthesiser parts produces not only ascensions in pitch, but in the perceived height of my listening perspective, leading to a series of dramatic musical inclines reminiscent of upwards movement on a rollercoaster before exhilarating free-fall, or Soldberg's peak experience EDM 'drop'. 

Synth textures move up and out, from near to distant, propelling me forwards through a bright, virtual sky-scape. 

Low bass rumble establishes a sense of the ground beneath, of ambient expanse and digital horizon.

'This song is encouraging to all people who lost someone or just feel like they're down it's just makes you go up and feel good about yourself.'

I'm bulletproof, nothing to lose.

'Titanium is biocompatible, meaning it is not harmful or toxic to living tissues. This makes it widely used in medical devices such as implants and prosthetics.

It is resistant to corrosion.'

In my identification with the protagonist, with ‘I’ as me, I’m afforded a metaphorical and perceptual spatial model that enables the imagining of spatial textures articulated by ambient synths as the ‘titanium’ of my surroundings, or my own virtual body.

When Sia sings ‘I am titanium’, the voice is presented as a vocal multiplicity spread out across the stereo field, implying not an intimate exchange but an outward declaration, becoming increasingly reverberant, merging with the virtual sounding environment.

'2020: the Corona Virus can't kill me, I'm Titanium.'

'this song is helping me to get out depression'

'Biocompatibility: Non-toxic and not rejected by the human body.'

Stone heart, machine gun

In each chorus, the electronic ‘kick’ sample, which is aggressively side-chained to rest of the musical arrangement, rhythmically squeezing out the other elements, has the musical function of emphasising the ‘4s' beat. 

Encountered loud through headphones, this element suggests both the listener’s own heartbeat (dominant, quick, pounding) and the sonic masking effect that is experienced when a person’s own feet hit the floor as they dance or run while listening to music on headphones. 

The kick drum’s relationship to the musical arrangement in the chorus of Titanium has a comparable effect to that of the feet of the personal music listener as dancer, runner, or gym user. 

Com-pounding presence as virtual body ownership. 

'Titanium is the ninth most abundant element in the Earth's crust and is found in almost all living things, rocks, water bodies, and soils.'

'i love how the voice seeps in to my ears like a titanium dagger at very loud volume'

'Stop asking who’s here because we never left.'

I'm criticised, but all your bullets ricochet

Just as the song lyrics introduce narrative ambiguity, leaving the identity of ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘there’ open to listener interpretation, so too the perceived relationality and reciprocity between sound environment and situated self leaves open the possibility of shifting interpretations and blurred boundaries between digital vocal performance, virtual space, sonic materiality and embodied listener. 

If my hearing of Titanium’s (heart-)beat brings my own body into the frame, is it the shifting spatial texture that comprises the virtual musical environment that is made of titanium, or is it, as the lyrics suggest, me? 

'me: YOU SHOOT ME DOWN, BUT I WONT FALL- *falls out of chair*'

'They don’t make songs like this anymore.'

'24th March 2k26 anyone with me?'