Sounding Out Frames

Isabelle Delmotte’s Sounding Out Frames (2013) draws attention to ambient noise and its role within cinematic language, examining the slippages between real and virtual soundscapes. The work is the result of the artist’s creative collaborations with Australian cinema professionals – including a scriptwriter and multiple sound designers – and its primary visual display is a scene from the Australian feature film Noise (2007), directed by Matthew Saville.

Delmotte’s practice aims to evoke ‘silences’ as dynamic spaces – as soundscapes of the everyday. The expression of this paradigm generates a sonic awareness, encouraging the viewer’s attention to multisensory and auditory perceptions. Environmental ‘silences’ can be understood as the absorbed but often dismissed sonic entities of the everyday. These background atmospherics are made explicit in cinematic works, which often utilise ambient noise as a dramatic backdrop, revealing and concealing the subtle soundscapes that belie human interaction. Sounding Out Frames was created by Delmotte whilst undertaking a PhD project at Southern Cross University, for which she researched the ways in which humans interact with discrete environmental sounds.