In my work across all media, I am drawn to observing and creating emergent systems, whose defining parameters change as they come into being. To me, composition and performance are manifestations of evolving consciousness and embodied thought. These two components of musicmaking are inextricable ways of participating in and shedding light on the human experience. When we take the perspective of embodied cognition, it’s clear that we live in a dynamic, fluid network of subjectivities; and it’s necessary to contemplate our human instruments as we create and seek to understand our experiences.

I feel that I am always in conversation with the feedback loop of listening/perceiving and speaking/creating. In our nervous system, the networks for receiving information and responding to it are linked, and how we understand the world defines what actions we have available to us. Another throughline of my work is the integrating experience of synesthesia. While certain artists may describe themselves as particularly “synesthetic”, I think that all humans experience a baseline level of synesthesia, since we all blend information from different perceptual inputs through shifting states of attention and focus.

FRACTAL is an amazingly fertile place for these musical travels. Since we access the world through the subjectivity of Tamir, a young deaf boy, music will play an unusual role. The goal is not to mimic a sonic experience of deafness, but to invent a language of threads and thoughts, patterns and tactile identities, actions and responses that can express the furthest reaches of emotion. It’s paradoxical that sound and music are essential to telling Tamir’s story. I hope that my multi-sensory approach to the music will help to communicate his experience to the audience in a meaningful and cinematic way.

The development of the Creature figure in FRACTAL also speaks to my personal fascination with generative systems, and the idea of a seed engine which continuously creates new families of related forms. The Creature itself embodies fractal, scalable structure, as an entity whose microscopic (or microsonic) qualities can grow to take on epic proportions. The effect that a form has on us at an epic scale is completely new. When it’s magnified and amplified, it can seem almost unrecognizable– and that has just as much to do with our subjectivity and the limitations of our instrument as with its nominal size. On a psychic level, the shadow can occupy a tiny, compressed space, or it can expand and spawn a whole spectrum of action that was previously unthinkable. There are musical ways to express this breathtaking range of potentials, and I am energized to explore these uncharted territories through my score.

The Reel Change grant will allow me to record the score for FRACTAL with an orchestra, bringing to life the vibrant textures, dimensions, and energetic shifts that I imagine for its musical universe. In early formative conversations with director Anslem Richardson, I have envisioned a hybrid scoring palette where deeply designed sounds interweave with an undulating flow of live instruments, to create a truly unique and tactile musical experience. The visual elements of the film will have been very specifically crafted, and the recording budget assistance from Reel Change will allow the music to come into being with the same level of precision, detail, depth, and expansiveness. We will also be able to give the score a proper mix which allows it to articulate expressively through space.

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Recognized in the press as “an extremely original voice” with “a virtuoso touch,” and “a truly unique force in the entertainment industry”, Ronit Kirchman is a composer, music producer, songwriter, singer, conductor, and multi-instrumentalist. She creates music for film and television, theater and dance, multimedia installations, and the concert stage. Her work has garnered accolades from many organizations including Hollywood Music In Media, BMI, IndieWire, Jerry Goldsmith Awards, Time Warner, and Sundance. Perhaps best known for her innovative, genre-bending score for the Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated series The Sinner, Ronit has also gained attention for her powerful scores for dramatic horror feature film Evil Eye (Amazon, Blumhouse); dystopian thriller series Limetown (Peacock); and a wide-ranging trail of films and documentaries, including the newly released feature Manscaping. Ronit’s soundtracks and composition albums are commercially available through Lakeshore Records and Wild River Records.