Uploaded February 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago
Sound on Life is about the life of the composer Else Marie Pade (1924-2016) and her music.
Eighty-year-old Else Marie Pade is one of the great phenomena of Danish music history, who has had a renaissance among the techno-audience. She’s become a cult figure. EMP got her inspiration from her isolation and the world surrounding her. As a child, she was often ill and bedridden. She listened to the sounds around her, on the stairs, from the yard and from the room next to hers. This is where her audio universe began.
During the Second World War, EMP was captured by the Gestapo and put into solitary confinement. Rather than despair, she started to compose music on the bare prison walls, where she scratched the notes with the fasteners of her garters. After the war, when hearing French avant-garde concrete music, she realized that the sounds resembled those that she’d heard in childhood, and it was this music that she really wanted to compose. She became the first Dane who committed her life to concrete – and electronic music – but she had to wait 50 years before she was “discovered”.
Sound on Life was awarded the Danish Film Academy Award "Robert" for co-direction of Best Short Documentary of the year 2007.
Produced by sfinxfilmgallery.com in co-production with DRTV
Written and directed by: Katia Forbert Petersen & Iben Haahr Andersen
Director of Photography: Katia Forbert Petersen
Producer: Annette Mari Olsen
Duration: 41 minutes
Sound on Life is about the life of the composer Else Marie Pade (1924-2016) and her music.
Eighty-year-old Else Marie Pade is one of the great phenomena of Danish music history, who has had a renaissance among the techno-audience. She’s become a cult figure. EMP got her inspiration from her isolation and the world surrounding her. As a child, she was often ill and bedridden. She listened to the sounds around her, on the stairs, from the yard and from the room next to hers. This is where her audio universe began.
During the Second World War, EMP was captured by the Gestapo and put into solitary confinement. Rather than despair, she started to compose music on the bare prison walls, where she scratched the notes with the fasteners of her garters. After the war, when hearing French avant-garde concrete music, she realized that the sounds resembled those that she’d heard in childhood, and it was this music that she really wanted to compose. She became the first Dane who committed her life to concrete – and electronic music – but she had to wait 50 years before she was “discovered”.
Sound on Life was awarded the Danish Film Academy Award "Robert" for co-direction of Best Short Documentary of the year 2007.
Produced by sfinxfilmgallery.com in co-production with DRTV
Written and directed by: Katia Forbert Petersen & Iben Haahr Andersen
Director of Photography: Katia Forbert Petersen
Producer: Annette Mari Olsen
Duration: 41 minutes
