Sound Seam

‘Sound Seam’ is a film which gives voice to the idea that every surface, in particular parts of our anatomy, is potentially inscribed with an unheard sound or echoes of voices from the past. The soundtrack’s musical composition is interlaced with a voice-over which draws on Rainer Maria Rilke’s text ‘Primal Sound’, where he reflects on the possibility of playing the coronal suture of a skull with a gramophone needle. The overlapping voices of the narratives tell a forensic love story of yearning, encryption, inscription, decoding, memory and erasure. The film uses microscopic photography, scanning electron microscopy, and sounds of otoacoustic emissions to uncover haunting aural bonescapes. Music composed and recorded onto wax cylinder and acetate discs by Aleks Kolkowski. The voiceovers too are recorded using old sound technology as a filter – writing and over-writing of wax cylinder to create unexpected scratches, glitches, loops and echoes. ‘Sound Seam’, HD, 2010, 14mins, filmed, edited and written by Aura Satz, soundtrack composed by Aleks Kolkowski. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, during a residency at UCL’s Ear Institute, London.