THE SOUND READINGS OF FREQUENCIES

Redazione Seeyousound
June 9, 2026

Images are speaking again, but above all they are making themselves heard again. In the ecosystem of Seeyousound International Music Film Festival, Frequencies is confirmed as one of the most fertile spaces for research and experimentation: a laboratory in which silent cinema stops being an archive and becomes living matter, rewritten by contemporary sound.

Curata da Riccardo Mazza, the Frequencies section invites musicians, producers and sound designers every year to take on a challenge as simple in its formulation as it is complex in its outcome: to give images their voice back through an original live score. It is not a matter of accompanying cinema, but of rereading it, deforming it, expanding it. In this encounter between eras and languages, the film is never a static object, but an open field of interpretation.

For the twelfth edition of the festival too, the films selected for the finalists were chosen in collaboration with the historical archive of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino, a heritage of extraordinary value for the history of cinema. The archive holds thousands of unpublished documents — screenplays, letters, contracts, notes — that bear witness to the life and work of companies, directors, screenwriters, actors and technicians of silent and sound cinema, both Italian and international. A body of over one hundred fonds and collections, made up of dossiers, papers and materials that are heterogeneous in origin and nature.

From this heritage, four pieces of archive footage were selected that, through live scoring, speak to us again today. Engaging with these images from the past means recognising ourselves as part of a common flow: costumes and outward forms change, but the essential gestures of being human endure, reminding us that we are part of one and the same destiny that runs through us and binds us.

The finalist works of the contest are now available online, accessible to everyone: a sound archive born from the encounter between contemporary sensibilities and materials from the Archive of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema. A historical heritage that, thanks to these new compositions, is reactivated and transformed, becoming something different from its original form.

The result is a set of “new sound readings” that do not merely illustrate the images but interrogate them. Sound becomes a critical device: it can alter the rhythm of a sequence, change the meaning of a glance, shift the emotional centre of gravity of a scene. It is in this tension that Frequencies finds its deepest identity, that of a bridge between cinematic memory and musical imagination.

The finalist live scores of this edition were created by Antonietta Milone, with Preambolo. Vagabondaggi filmati, da Matteo Sarotto with Birmania, da Anna Balestrieri with Afghanistan e da Leonardo D’Angelo with Nepal. Four works, distinct in approach and sensibility, united by a shared gesture: giving silent images a voice that does not accompany them, but reinvents them.