Quote from the above article by Douglas Morrey about Godard's "Nouvelle Vague" soundtrack:

The soundtrack to the film – not the music used in the film, but the
complete soundtrack with dialogue and ambient noise – was released on 2 CDs
in 1997 by the German jazz and new music label ECM. This fact in itself testi-
fies to just how sophisticated Godard’s work with sound has become, when
the soundtrack to his film may be considered as an autonomous aesthetic
object in the absence of images. Since the majority of the sounds in Nouvelle
Vague are produced by everyday objects, beings and phenomena, rather than
musical instruments, its closest point of comparison, in terms of a listening
experience, is perhaps to musique concrète. As Pierre Schaeffer has explained,
the goal of musique concrète was to move beyond a listening practice that
simply recognised the source of sounds and into a kind of de-programmed
listening that could appreciate the sound object as a phenomenon worthy of
attention in itself, independent of its source (Schaeffer 1966: 93–94; 1967: 18)
(we are close, here, to Deleuze’s distinction between thought as simple recog-
nition and thought as a challenging process of creation).

From this perspective, the CD version of Nouvelle Vague would appear
as a cross between a radio play and a work of musique concrète. What is
initially striking about the soundtrack is just how little of the sense of the
narrative is lost without the images. The key events of the film such as
Elena’s near-collision with Lennox and the drowning on the lake remain
perfectly comprehensible thanks to a combination of dialogue and sound
effects (screeching brakes, splashing). An article by Claire Bartoli testifies to
this fact: a blind listener to Godard’s film, Bartoli describes how she was
able to reconstruct the story from the soundtrack (Bartoli 1997) (and herD
interpretative ordeal was arguably no more arduous than that of the aver-
age sighted spectator). Indeed, there are elements to the film that appear
clearer in the absence of visuals thanks to the particular timbre of sounds.
For instance, from the tinny quality of Patti Smith’s ‘Distant Fingers’ at the
scene of the accident, it is apparent that the song is playing from Elena’s car
stereo. Meanwhile the cavernous acoustics of the lakeside house are in
themselves enough to suggest the wealth of the characters. At the same
time, the ex-cathedra pronouncements and strange non-sequiturs uttered by
the characters are more easily acceptable as straightforward narratorial
voices or as interjections from some kind of chorus (their frequent accompa-
niment by the good-natured brass fanfares of Werner Pirchner add to this
impression). In addition, the music of Paul Hindemith – both the Mathis der
Maler symphony and the Trauermusik – itself serves as a kind of narration
since it plays for longer than most of the musical passages overheard, estab-
lishing a heavy, portentous atmosphere that leads into the crescendo of the
drowning scene.

Pierre Schaeffer argues that musique concrète can only really be appreci-
ated through a kind of dialectic of the elementary objects and the structures
that make up the piece. The structure is made up of the elementary objects,
but these objects only take on their sense, and are only properly heard, thanks
to the structure (Schaeffer 1967: 37). We can see this process at work in the
soundtrack to Nouvelle Vague. There are a number of sounds that, although
they belong unambiguously to the diegetic world of the film – a barking dog,
the distant rumble of thunder, birdsong, a ringing phone, the sound of cars on
the gravel drive of the house, the gurgle and trickle of water – are repeated
with such frequency that they take on the status of phrases within a musical
composition, structuring the sound-world of Nouvelle Vague. Meanwhile,
certain musical forms – Dino Saluzzi’s bandoneon, David Darling’s cello –
provide such a constant backdrop for the events of the film that they come to
seem like a part of the scenery. Didier Coureau captures this process perfectly
when he writes of a becoming-music of nature and a becoming-nature of
music, the two movements combined in Godard’s film (Coureau 1997: 283).
Within this structured sound-world, there are various isolated sonic events
that collapse the distinction between sound and music. A pulsing industrial
noise takes on the status of a rhythmic beat for the duration of one scene, as
does a chiming clock in another. A soft percussive stroke gradually emerges
as the sound of the gardener sweeping the driveway. A sudden, high-pitched,
sparking noise throws the listener into momentary confusion and discomfort
before being attributed to an aeroplane engine. A pair of voices repeating the
same text out of sync recalls the looping and phasing experiments of Alvin
Lucier or Steve Reich, whilst the electronic shudder of experimental composer
Jean Schwartz’s ‘Charta Koa’ is briefly mistaken for thunder.

The interweaving and uncertain relations of sound, noise and music on
the soundtrack of Nouvelle Vague is typical of the propensity for noise that
permeates the whole of Godard’s film practice. Expanding far beyond the
domains of sound recording and mixing, noise infiltrates all aspects of
Godard’s work, from narrative and characterisation to mise-en-scène and edit-
ing. The concept of noise would be one way of describing Godard’s wilful
tendency to surprise and frustrate the spectator at every turn, constantly refusing to conform to the expected patterns of narrative development,
character psychology, continuity editing or sound design. Godard rejects a
cinema that is known in advance, instead obliging the spectator to pass
through a necessary stage of discomfort and disorientation before proceeding
to the construction of meaning. Here again we see a parallel with Deleuze’s
conception of thought: where the majority of films engage their spectators in
the mode of recognition, inviting us to match what we see and hear to a pre-
existing template and adjust our response accordingly, Godard’s films reveal
the woeful inadequacy of all of our existing models of ‘cinema’, forcing us to
conceive anew of what a film might be and do. The science and philosophy of
complexity lend a new degree of legitimacy to this method, since they have
demonstrated that it is in precisely such conditions of disorder that all organi-
sations – from microscopic cellular organisms to global social networks –
come into being. Order is not born from order, but from noise, from the
random and entirely unpredictable interactions of disordered elements. It is
only from a higher stratum of organisation, or from a point further along in
the development of the system, that this disorder may come to be seen as
playing an essential organising role in the structure of the system. It is in this
sense that Godard’s densely composed and only-apparently self-involved
works take on their true political significance: for the most important lesson
Godard has retained from the work of Henri Atlan and François Jacob is that
to deny, reduce, or suppress complexity is to threaten the very conditions of
life itself.