Sound Seam, image courtesy of Aura Satz

Aura Satz’s Sound Seam is a collaboration with the musician and gramophone specialist Aleks Kolkowski funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Starting with the abstract imagery of close-ups of gramophone grooves, Sound Seam gives voice to the idea that every surface, in particular parts of our anatomy, is potentially inscribed with an unheard sound. The soundtrack’s musical composition will be interlaced with a voice-over which draws on Rainer Maria Rilke’s text ‘Primal Sound’, where he reflects on the possibility of playing/hearing the coronal suture of a skull.

The soundtrack for the minute-long rough edit posted below is provisional, but Aleks has more ambitious plans for the for the finished film: ”Work on a specially composed score for horn and string instruments including an automatic zither is currently underway. As with the spoken narratives, this music will be inscribed onto wax cylinders and acetate disc records. Thus, through patinae of surface noises and filtered resonances the sound is aged, enabling us to listen to the present through the recording technologies of the distant past.”

Current technologies also play a key role in Sound Seam, which will use microscopic photography, scanning electron microscopy and sounds of bionic hearing to uncover haunting aural bonescapes.

You can see more of Aura Satz’s work at www.iamanagram.com and watch APEngine’s interview with her here.

Credits
A film by Aura Satz
Sound Seam is supported by the Wellcome Trust.