Le Spectre Rouge

audiovisual fixed media

2021

Duration: 5'47''Sound diffusion: stereophonic

Le Spectre Rouge (Pathé Freres, 1907) Courtesy of Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino.The music of this version of Le Spectre Rouge are composed by Nicola Cappelletti e Nicola Fumo Frattegiani for the SMC Sound and Music Computing Conference 2021. 

The soundtrack was created using a very narrow palette of timbres, to accommodate the claustrophobic and alienating inclination of the events that come to life within a place that is instead kaleidoscopic, deep and surreal. Sounds are mostly coming from manipulations of white noise and concrete sounds that play on different environmental levels, underlining, with a current point of view, what today appear as errors or inaccuracies in video editing and post production. For the same reason, few selected sound processing techniques were used, which guaranteed synesthetic unity between listening and vision: time-stretching, pitch-shifting, ring modulation and granular synthesis. The incursion of musical fragments from different periods and different styles aims to outline an ideal path between different historical eras, as in an intuition of possible futures (up to nowadays), affirming the visionary and avant-garde nature of the film, where the magical and surreal appearance of screens and containers that transmit images in motion constitutes a dazzling foreshadowing of the television medium, of streaming habits using devices and wall mapping techniques.