More Beautiful Areas: Performativity and Presence in the Integrated Soundtrack

In her chapter, “Soundtrack's Liminal Spaces” (2020), Danijela Kulezic-Wilson discusses several filmic examples where the "musicalization of sounds" (27) or an overtly sonic approach to scoring serves to blur the conventional lines between sound design and score. Described by David Lynch as "the most beautiful area" (27), the resulting aesthetic is conceived as a liminal space where sound and music merge.
In many ways, Kulezic-Wilson's discussion resonates with a further concept: Donnelly's notion of the soundtrack as spectre. For Donnelly, it is the "seemingly insubstantial presence" of film music – the fact that it "posits no time or space within the illusory world on screen" – that is partly responsible for the soundtrack's ability to manipulate its audience.
By revisiting examples explored by Kulezic-Wilson (You Were Never Really Here, 2017, The Rover, 2014) this paper discusses to what extent Donnelly's analogy may be expanded to consider instances in film where the foregrounding of tactile musical gestures and spatial placement within the audio mix results in a quasi-physical presence that challenges the insubstantial status of his sonic spectre, not least, by – rather unusually – drawing attention to the bodies behind the music we hear: the musicians. Drawing on theoretical concepts from embodied cognition and musical liveness, I offer a complimentary perspective to Kulezic Wilson's chapter, that spotlights the inherent performativity behind the sensuousness characterizing many examples of sonic integration.