Tracking sounds: Approaches to audiovisuality

This paper looks at the possibilities of exploring the relationship between sound and image in such ways that step outside the traditional ‘soundtrack’ usage as well as the various traditions prevalent within popular culture (the music video for example). What does it mean to interrogate sound through the visual or vice versa? As well as looking at certain canonical texts such as Deleuze or Chion, it will aim to look at the author’s own practice in order to answer these questions. In particular, a new work Via di San Teodoro 8 will be discussed; this film looks at the relationship between sounds/space/location/performance in a specific context: the house of the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-88) in Rome and the documentation and rediscovery of the sounds of the ‘Ondiola’ an electronic instrument developed in the late 1940s on which Scelsi improvised his music. This is seen as a form of experimental documentary, one that attempts to develop its narrative clusters exclusively through the relationship of sound and image. It looks at the space of artists’ film as one to explore such new relationships between the visual, sound, and music.