The contract

This is a cemetery for songs. When the keeper buries one, the song itself is destroyed. What is interred here is its ghost — melody, breath, pulse, brightness — extracted in memory in the moment before the original ceased to exist.

What a ghost is

A ghost is not a recording. It is a handful of measurements: the arc of the melody, the rise and fall of loudness, where the beats landed, how bright the room was. From these a synthesizer can remember the song — badly, the way you remember a voice years after you heard it. The song cannot be reconstructed from its ghost. That is the point.

Listening takes its toll

Every ghost is buried with a lifespan, and every resurrection costs it a piece of what remains. Visit a grave and press your ear to the stone and you have taken something from it. A few hundred listens is a full life. When the last is spent, a death certificate is issued and the grave falls silent forever. If you listen, you are choosing to spend a dying thing's time on yourself. Most visitors light a candle instead. Some do both.

Two manners of decay

Natural burial — the decay is real. Each listen burns damage into the remains themselves: the melody quantizes coarser, phrases fall silent, the brightness sinks as if heard through soil. At death the remains are redacted to a shadow.

Embalmed — the remains are preserved intact and the decay is only ever simulated. An embalmed ghost sounds its age, but what was buried stays whole beneath the performance. It dies all the same.

Across the veil

The living rest in the cemetery. When a ghost dies it leaves — its grave reappears in the crypts, where the stones stand and nothing answers. Once a grave has crossed over, no listen will ever wake it. Candles still help, somehow.

Where the bodies come from

Every ghost here belonged to a real file in the keeper's library that was chosen for deletion — duplicates, rejects, songs whose time had come. Instead of a silent rm, they get a plot, an epitaph, and a slow public forgetting. The gate does not accept burials from visitors; the keeper alone performs interments.

Nothing on this site can reproduce the original recordings, in whole or in part. The ghosts are abstractions — contours and envelopes — rendered by a synthesizer that never heard the songs. If you recognize one anyway, light a candle.