Soundtracks

Music has accompanied film from the very beginning. Early films were themselves silent, but audiences often experienced them accompanied by live music, which was usually provided by a pianist working for the theater. The first commercially distributed “talkie,” The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson, came out in 1927, and the landscape of motion pictures was never the same again. The first Academy Award for Best Original Score was presented in 1935 to Victor Schertzinger and Gus Kahn for their work on One Night of Love, a musical romance set in the world of opera singers.

Any good soundtrack must complement and enhance the sensory world of the film. So, soundtracks for scary films must be some combination of unnerving, unsettling, and uncomfortable. Every composer will do this in their own way, but there are undeniably some tried and tested techniques.

One key concept: extremes. Scary movies can be quite extreme—extremely suspenseful, extremely gory, extremely upsetting—and the music must keep up. Many composers accomplish this by going to extremes with elements of their musical language. Take for example, texture. An extremely full, thickly orchestrated texture can overwhelm the senses and intensify whatever emotions viewers are experiencing (think Danny Elfman’s score to Sleepy Hollow (1999), which makes use of a full palette of strings, brass, percussion, and chorus). On the other end of the spectrum, an extremely sparse, bare texture can put viewers on edge, in a state of nervous anticipation (think Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s score to The Shining (1980), with its plain cantus firmus melody and spans of near total silence).

Extremes also play into which instruments that have a reputation for being particularly ~spooky.~  In this case, it’s extremes of pitch and tone. Instruments with extremely high registers, such as the violin or piccolo, or extremely low regsiters, such as the double bass, are often considered to be more eerie. Instruments with extremely pure tone (tubular bells, the theremin, and the soprano or countertenor voice) are also generally thought of as ethereal to the point of being unnerving. What horror film soundtrack doesn’t feature at least one violin tremolo or soprano descant?

In the age of the “talkies,” music is only one component in the overall sonic landscape of a film. There are also all of the voices and sound effects that occur in the course of the story.

Two main sound categories needed for horror films are screams and gore sounds (bones breaking, dismemberment, etc.). A Sound Effect has a great horror sound design guide, which includes a whole section devoted to gore sound effects. Generally, the goal is to produce sounds that are not realistic but hyper-realistic. Viewers should not just hear but viscerally feel the physical trauma the onscreen bodies are undergoing. Common tools for making such sounds include humble fruits and vegetables: watermelons, carrots, tomatoes, etc.

When it comes to screams, again the goal is to convey through sound the type and intensity of emotion and sensation that the onscreen character is feeling. Is it the long drawn out scream of someone falling into an endless pit? Does it trail off into a gurgle as someone’s throat is cut? The job of screaming falls not so much to the character actors as to sound design professionals and voice actors. They may hold recording sessions entirely separate from the filming, just to capture a satisfactory palette of screams (and perhaps other exertions too).

So next time you watch a scary movie, take a moment to think about all the work that went into making it not just look but also sound scary.

Broadly speaking, home recording advice can be divided into two general categories: equipment (what you use to record) and process (how you go about setting up and recording). We’ll focus mostly on equipment here, as that seems to be the area about which people tend to have the most questions, but we’ll also include a few process tips towards the end.

Recording Equipment

There’s no exact consensus on how much equipment you need to set up a functional home studio, but most sources recommend between 5 and 10 different items. And of course, what choices you make for the various components will affect the overall amount of gear you need to acquire. Here we’ll be breaking things down by function.

1. You need something to capture the sound of your instrument (and yes, the human voice is an instrument too): that’s your microphone. Pickups and MIDI interfaces can also be used, but microphones are the most flexible in that they are compatible with the largest number of instruments. Different microphones have different frequency responses and thus may work better for some instruments than others, but most beginners will be well served by getting just one or two pretty good all-around mics. Gearank has a guide to mics under $100 that can help you pick an affordable option than suits you.

2. You need something to get your sound from your microphone to your computer (yes, I am assuming you are using a computer to record): that’s your audio interface. There are your traditional standalone box audio interfaces, such as the PreSonus Audio Box. There are also some USB mics that can connect directly to a computer and record without a separate audio interface. These are great if you want to hit the ground running and get right to recording with minimal setup. However, their sound quality isn’t always as good as a traditional XLR mic connected to an audio interface. You can also save money by buying a microphone and audio interface sold as a bundle. For guitars and violin-family instruments, our CloseUp® system is a great example.

3. You need something to edit your sound once it’s on your computer: that’s your DAW (digital audio workstation). If you just want some basic track alignment, cut-and-paste, and fade-in/fade-out capabilities, you can probably get by with an freeware audio editor like Audacity (open source). Audacity isn’t a fully featured DAW, but it can get the job done in a pinch. If you want more sophisticated controls, such as a larger palette of post-production effects, graphical EQ, and maybe some virtual instruments, then you’ll need to pay for some software. ProTools (Avid) is the “industry standard,” but you can also make perfectly good music with something a little cheaper like Audition (Adobe) or Reason (Propellerhead). If you make sample-based music, you’ll want to check out Live (Ableton) and FL Studio (Image Line).

Recording Process

Now that you’ve got all your basics, what will you do with them? How will you make the music you want that sounds the way you want? Possibly the best advice we can give is to work with your recording set up. There’s nothing wrong with technological limitations. You don’t need all of the latest gadgets to make really cool music. In fact, limitations can drive creativity rather than stifle it. CHVRCHES made their debut album, The Bones of What You Believe, with very few synths at the home of one the bandmembers, and yet it’s one of the lushest, fullest albums made in recent years. The shaker in Tegan and Sara’s “Back in Your Head,” off their iconic album The Con, is actually a jar of chocolate covered sunflower seeds. The best percussion sound I ever made was achieved by rubbing crumpled paper sandwich bags on the floor. You never know what’s going to work until you try it. So get experimenting.