After reading this article from Brett Ashleigh where she notes her thoughts about the techniques and approaches towards the sound design and story telling used in “We Need to Talk About Kevin”. I found it interesting how she mentions the decisions with the stems was to split up the the story to the audio. That they all worked together separately, the music/score, sound effects, and dialogue.
The narrative spoken with separate mediums working divorced from each other as Brett says is a new way of communicating story. As is two messages are happening at once. The use of acousmatic sounds to convey a feminine message isn’t something i was aware of but it does make sense. To not rely on on language to convey the message.
Helen Cixous’s revolutionary treatise The Laugh of the Medusa introduced the theory of l’ecriture féminine says Brett. Feminine cinematic art has the ability to display a narrative that depends on emotional and affective techniques rather than those based in language.
I think this technique is really interesting, i’ve always known that sound/music can effect the viewers perception but i never thought it in a patriarchal sense. I guess male and female humans have a different way of embracing their sonic landscapes and it wouldn’t make sense for the movie to depict the trauma the mother is going through with the same techniques used for a male leading movie. This blog post has made me think about sound techniques to convey story differently than before. I never thought to think about conveying the thoughts of character on screen from their specific POV (point of view) soundscape experience.