Santé
Duration
Year
Topics
Language
Subtitled
Romanian
7 min
2018
non-verbal communication
trauma
mental health
Lithuanian
A non-verbal sound design piece that translates the struggle of living a normal life, while dealing with the memory of a past trauma and its triggers. Its purpose is to describe, without using any words, the pain and loneliness of being hurt, acknowledging the reality of mental suffering as something as serious and debilitating as any other type of physical pain. By using binaural sound, it suggests a better understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder, from the sufferer’s mind’s point of view.
The character’s mind gets overwhelmed by the constant stimuli, shuts off or filters the outside world in defense, and tries to cope with the uncontrollable urge to revisit the memory of the traumatic event. Sound triggers pull the character’s perspective away from the present moment into snippets of her memory. By choosing what to hear and process, her mind seems to have its own voice.
The binaural effect has been created by using an audio editing technique developed through personal research. The recording was made without a binaural installation.
Santé is a self-produced piece awarded at Grand Prix Nova 2018, Bucharest.
Producer Ana Teodora Popa
Animation Emilija Juzeliūnaitė
Ana Teodora Popa
Sound engineer and composer from Iași, Romania. She studied at Ontario Institute of Audio Recording Technology and worked as a live sound engineer for the London City Music Theatre. In 2013, she started her dream job at the National Theatre in Iași, Romania, and later became the Sound and Video Department leader. To stay involved in more creative projects, in 2017 she became a freelancer. In 2018, she won third place in the Grand Prix Nova competition with a nonverbal binaural piece, created using only mono/stereo files and a unique editing method. She takes part in innovative and challenging independent projects, including theater plays, experimental performances, sound installations and films. She worked with Regenerator and Descentrat projects, and participated in Sonic Future Residencies. She currently writes music and works on her own binaural audio research and technique. Her artistic goal is to reach the listeners at a level where they can relate and be moved by what is already inside them.
