‘Listen to the Sounds': Sound and Storytelling in Twin Peaks: The Return

Loydell, Rupert ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2730-8489 and Marshall, Kingsley ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2518-7305 (2018) ‘Listen to the Sounds': Sound and Storytelling in Twin Peaks: The Return. In: Mapping Spaces, Sounding Places: Geographies of Sound in Audiovisual Media, 19-22 March 2019, Cremona, Italy. (Unpublished)

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Abstract / Summary

Throughout the third season of Twin Peaks, subtitled the The Return, writer, director and sound designer David Lynch and his collaborators deploy a complex combinaton of sound and visuals in order to depict mysticism, the impossible and bring to life the birth and spread of evil in the Twin Peaks universe. Lynch makes use of intricate sound design, score, existing source music and music performed within the diegesis to articulate and distinguish real world geography from the supernatural spaces of the season, and how sonically distinct liminal spaces connect these places within a rhizomic narrative. The season as a whole makes use of intertextual connections to conventional and experimental film form and creates a complex relationship between sound and visuals – and the manipulation of these media – lending an otherworldly quality to Twin Peaks: The Return and allows the season to further extend established Lynchian worlds.

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