Output details

Dea et Luna

Current aesthetics in soundtrack composition tends to favour strategies that blur the distinction between music and sound design. But while the general trend has been towards a ‘noisification’ of the musical element, the soundtrack to Dea et Luna explores the opposite possibility: that of a ‘musicalised’ sound design.

Exploiting psychoacoustic principles and electroacoustic techniques this work makes the musical material itself function as sound environment for the images. By combining appropriate musical material with techniques of studio production, specific auditory indices are created to convey the sense of space, perspective, motion, trajectory, etc. Thus, a diegetic soundworld is conjured up without ever resorting to the specific sounds that would normally be found associated with the screened images in a conventional approach (e.g. steps, wind, rustling, etc.).

The sung part in Dea et Luna, for example, though technically a non-diegetic element, is made to behave as diegetic sound through studio production techniques of spatialisation, i.e. the vocal part is not static, but moves and changes perspective following its visual counterpart, the female character with whom the vocal part is consistently associated. Similarly, the piano part seems to overflow and seep into the diegetic space through an interplay of resonance and silences that function like an airy halo of distant echoes travelling through the stillness of the night. Such a consistent strategy results in a very distinctive soundtrack that inhabits a liminal, ambiguous space in the diegetic/non-diegetic continuum. This places the work in a more rarefied narrative space, dematerialised and floating rather than anchored in the empirical (sound)world. The silence and stillness of the night portrayed in the images are thus effectively brought out by the soundtrack and foregrounded as a main narrative element.