SYNEMUSE-XXI -Synthèse et Exploration des perspectives sur la musique et le son à l’écran au XXIe siècle

SYNEMUSE-XXI est un nouveau séminaire de recherche international porté par Chloé Huvet (Université Évry Paris-Saclay, RASM-CHCSC/IUF) et Aurélie Huz (Université Paris Nanterre, CSLF), avec le soutien de l’Institut Universitaire de France. Ce séminaire pluridisciplinaire réunit des spécialistes du son et de la musique à l’écran développant des approches novatrices de la musique et du son dans les médias audiovisuels anglophones contemporains (cinéma, télévision, jeux vidéo, etc.). Il s’agit à la fois de réfléchir collectivement aux différentes manières d’appréhender et d’analyser les bandes-son des productions audiovisuelles à l’ère numérique, notamment par des propositions terminologiques et méthodologiques stimulantes, mais aussi d’examiner les transformations des processus créateurs, des démarches esthétiques et de questionner l’expérience spectatorielle qui en découle. Le séminaire ambitionne de couvrir un large éventail de sujets, de corpus et d’approches. Il vise en outre à impulser la constitution d’un réseau international et multidisciplinaire, et à renforcer les collaborations existantes avec les spécialistes invités.

 

• Lisa Coulthard (Professeure en cinéma, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver) : « The Terror of Vocality: The Voice as Sonic Object in Horror Cinema »

This presentation will seek to align vocality in horror cinema as an aspect of sound design, score, and atmosphere. Many have drawn parallels with the scream and the musical stinger, but increasingly we are hearing vocality in horror films as a more widely used element of sound design tied to disembodied noise, atmosphere, and visceral score. From the haunting of sing-songy nursery rhymes in It, to the haptic and ASMR voice of the Babadook, to the use of vocality as score in Shirley, vocality is an understudied sonic and musical element in the genre. Focusing on the voice as a sonic object that extends beyond the vococentric dialogue of contemporary cinema to encompass and bridge sound design and score, this presentation will dig deep into theories of vocality and the voice as object to interrogate its horrific potentialities.
 

• Kevin J. Donnelly (Professeur en musique de film et cinéma, University of Southampton) : « ‘Presence’ at the ‘Seance’: Physical Manifestation and the Materiality of Film Music »

Film and the supernatural have significant parallels (Sconce 2000, Ruffles 2004), and this is perhaps most evident in terms of sound (Donnelly 2005). This paper addresses the sense of a material ‘presence’ created by music in film alongside a sense of music as having a ‘presence’ in itself, giving a feeling of corporeality. Indeed, music marks a distinct feeling of materiality in many films, particularly supernatural horror films, where music can manifest particular entities that may be cognitively clear (eg. a ghost) or vague (supernatural miasma). Significantly, this can be more than simply a narrative effect, and rely directly on being a perceptual phenomenon.

The materiality and presence of music will be addressed with reference to films including The Witch (2015, Robert Eggers) and The Sound (2017, Jenna Mattison), where Adorno and Eisler's concept of the “Ghostly Effect” (1947) is reversed: instead of music furnishing a pacifying effect for the audience facing the unnerving nature of the medium, it opens up a disturbing or potentially terrifying effect by exploiting a sense of the feeling of presence.