Dea et Luna

Abstract

The soundtrack to Dea et Luna marks a departure from the conventional approach in which music and foley constitute two separate strands occupying two distinct planes (typically, music as non-diegetic underscore, versus foley as diegetic sound directly connected to the screened images). This work, instead, exploits psychoacoustic principles and electroacoustic techniques to make the musical material itself function as sound environment for the images, without ever resorting to the specific foley sounds that would normally be associated with the screened images (e.g. steps, wind, rustling, etc.). This is achieved by treating the musical material itself, through studio production techniques, so to provide auditory indices of space and setting (i.e. auditory information conveying the sense of space, perspective, motion, trajectory, 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 (even though we do not actually see the female character singing, the vocal lines can be read as her ‘internal voice’). Similarly, the piano part seems to overflow and seep into the diegetic space through an interplay of resonance and silences that functions 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.