Cinematic Cross-talk and Psychotechnological Spaces: Understanding the soundtrack’s materiality, multimodality and embodiment through conceptual blending

Theories focusing on the materiality of the cinematic soundtrack include Mera's (2016) haptic score and the sound-design-as-score of Kulezic-Wilson (2020). Influenced by embodied cognition - specifically Lakoff and Johnson's (1999) image schema theory - our own previous work (Melvin and Bridges 2021) proposed an embodied spatiotemporal contract in which material factors such as timbral structure serve to evoke spatial, temporal and more broadly conceptual relationships, within audiovisual media. Viewed from this perspective, embodied and material conceptual blends (Fauconnier and Turner, 1998) are generated between auditory and visual materials. We argue here that this conceptualisation of the soundtrack via materiality and embodiment is ripe for application in the evocation of communicative experience of the multi-touch and multi-screen age (including imagined future technologies), as well as connecting us to nostalgic worlds of legacy media. The soundtrack's evocation of inner voices and the representation of a character's (POV) phenomenological experience is explored through an embodied concept of headspaces - c.f. Lakoff and Johnson's (1999) container schema - and further extended to consider voices with associated reproduction technologies: tech-voices. Following an exploration of soundtracks whose material focus disrupts temporality and casuality in favour of the associative, we propose a framework of psychotechnological crosstalk: a process by which the worlds of material, media, and embodiment may be treated within adaptive conceptual frames, allowing for relating, delineating, or even generating new concepts and experiences.