It is a one-stringed instrument which sounds like a cross between a Theremin and John Lee Hooker. The string is hit with a small stick and harmonics are picked out with knuckles. Depth and fragility resonate within each wavering and haunting glissando. Another main concept I had for the score was to deconstruct Do Ai , the song sung by the women in the floating market at the end of the film. I wanted to use melodic elements from the song as thematic material for the central characters and then have all the themes weave together at the end underneath the final version sung by the chorus.
Vietnamese music has the expressive quality of blues.
There is an intrinsic feeling of compassion and a tangible logic to the phrasing of the ancient instruments. I also wanted to take advantage of the fact that the film was shot in Vietnamese with English subtitles. This gave me a constant stream of exquisite diphthongs to play off of . The poetic inflections of the spoken Vietnamese acts as another mysterious layer of music in the film. Tony Bui, Tim Bui and Lisa Rinzler translated a sense of poem-time into each lingering gesture and fragile glance reinterpreting the meaning of tempo for me.