As previously mentioned, this project was my first attempt at composing for screen. It was a completely new way of working for me, and I really enjoyed it – I found it really helpful to have a visual reference to inspire me whilst making the piece, and I think I definitely chose the perfect film to score as there was so much imagery to bounce off of.

I think this is the mix that I am the proudest of this year, and listening back to my earlier pieces I can definitely hear improvements both conceptually and technically. I’m also happy that I managed to bring the electric guitar (my primary musical instrument) into the piece, and I hope if I keep doing this it may help me develop my own unique voice within my art. I think I’ve also developed my technique in terms of using distortion in my work – this is something I have shied away from in the past as I’ve never felt like I could successfully implement it into a piece, however I feel as though I’ve been developing a good ear for how to implement it when needed.

However, I do believe there are points I could improve on. I found it hard to get the master level of the track to stay at an adequate volume – I appreciate that having a varied dynamic range in a track is part of what can build and release suspense, however there were times when the master fader would clip at 0.4db, and if I tried to turn the master volume down as a whole this made the quieter parts too quiet, in my opinion. I did try to use compression but I didn’t really feel like I was getting the result I wanted without the piece losing something.

I also think that I could’ve potentially introduced more new elements into the score for the section in the morgue. I really liked the creepy breathing sound that I used, however I feel like I could’ve had something extra come in halfway through, as in my score there is around a minute of just the drone and the breathing. When watching it I feel conscious that nothing new is coming in, although maybe this is more an insecurity on my part as the composer, and I could learn to embrace moments when there is less going on as a means to making the busier moments stand out more.

Overall, I am very pleased by how this piece turned out, and I really look forward to improving further in my second year at LCC (and doing more film scores!) Although there were definitely aspects I feel that I could make better, I’m happy to have learnt lessons now that I can bring to future units.

Today, I completed the rest of my rescore of ‘Persona’. I started where I left off yesterday, which meant It was time to score my least favourite shot – the killing of the lamb. This shot would have been a part of the sequence I would’ve taken out if I could, however because it’s right in the middle of the clip it would’ve been very difficult to do so. I find it more unpleasant than meaningful or interesting, and scoring it has definitely been my least favourite experience whilst working on this project.

I like the idea of foley being slightly mismatched with what’s on screen – it gives a sort of creepy, disjointed effect. For the sound of the lamb’s blood coming out of its throat I used the Zoom H5 recorder to record the sound of water coming out of my tap:

I also added a small convolution reverb, just to make it sound like it was coming from a slightly bigger room. I’m not sure why I preferred the sound of this, but it seemed to work better with the visuals.

It sort of reflects the image of the blood coming out of the lamb, but has a very calm sound to it which in a way makes the imagery seem more disturbing. I suppose it’s akin to the uncanny valley phenomenon, where robots that look sort of similar to humans but just slightly different can appear very unsettling. The idea of things mostly seeming normal but something just seeming a little off can often be more terrifying than pure gore.

The next shot of the scene is an image of someone’s hands being nailed to a crucifix. This was quite easy to score as all I had to do was record a few hitting sounds and match them up to the video. I recorded myself hitting the side of my kitchen sink with a lighter. This sounded good when I was recording it, however when I played it back it sounded a lot thinner and less metallic than when I had recorded it:

As I couldn’t find any better sounds to use in my home, I decided to stick with this and just edit it in Logic. I added EQ, distortion, reverb and a noise gate – the result sounded like this:

Whilst this doesn’t sound exactly like a hammer going through a hand (I could’ve added a squelching sound from fruit), I think it has a similar effect to the water in the previous shot. It sort of looks like it works, and it’s lined up well, but something’s not quite right – I think this does give the shot a certain charm and creepiness, even if it’s not the most accurate piece of foley.

I decided after this to give the score some room to breathe as the film moves on to a shot of a brick wall. Because the piece is very sonically busy towards the start, I wanted to let it calm down for a couple of minutes. As the film takes us inside a building (possibly a hospital or a morgue), a slow, heavy breath recorded through a contact microphone on my neck comes up in volume, as if the camera is alive – maybe we are seeing the point of view of a real person, walking through the building, staring at strangers, breathing over them. Or perhaps this could be the breath of the unconscious people in shot, lying there as we watch them sleep:

This is actually a recycled recording that I used in my first piece for the course. There’s something about it that’s so strange – it sounds like a ghost breathing down your neck. Although I try not to reuse sounds I’ve used before, I found that this recording worked well with what I was trying to achieve so I put it in the score. I did try to rerecord it however I didn’t manage to get the same sound, and after a while I didn’t see the point in recreating a sound I had already recorded anyway.

When the scene reached the shot of the boy waking up and getting out of bed, I decided I wanted to add a new sound to make it seem as though the boy was being woken up by something. I recorded some layers of harmonics on my bass, which I then faded in to get rid of the plucking sound. This creates a similar sound to an ebow, which I would’ve used if I’d had access to one. Here is the end result of what I recorded:

This sound was achieved using the same plugins that I used for the guitars at the start of the piece – a stock distortion plugin and some reverb, with absolutely no amp simulations used.

Slightly after the harmonics come in, I began to slowly bring up the volume/cutoff of the LFO synth from the beginning of the piece, just to make the clip start to feel a little more busy and overwhelming. This all to start to build up towards the climax of this scene.

As the boy gets up and walks towards the camera, more sounds start to come in to increase the noise and businesses of the piece. I recorded a short clip of me sliding my finger up the neck of my bass, looped it, and then put it onto four different tracks starting at different times:

To match the reveal shot of the boy feeling the screen with his hand, I recorded some more guitars playing different chords all at the exact same time. I think this atonal noise works well when it is synced with the reveal, as it tells the audience that something isn’t right – they don’t know the story of the film yet, and they don’t know who any of these characters are, but the unpleasant noises in the score let them know that something isn’t right.

I let this noise carry on until the end of the piece, and I recorded some more nonsensical noodling on multiple guitar channels, as well as bringing back the banging sound from the crucifixion. I then cut the piece very abruptly, as this is where the title card comes in, and that was the end! I went back in the piece to edit a few levels and add little touches of automation here and there, but after that I decided it was time to finish working on the piece – sometimes it just feels like the natural time to stop.

Here is the unlisted YouTube link to the final result (I will put this at the top of my next blog as well):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzM0LkJWAM0

When I started making my piece today, I didn’t really know where to start – I didn’t want to recreate the atmosphere of Werle’s original score, yet because I had already listened to it so much through analysing it I found it hard to imagine the scene with a new piece of music.

I decided to just push through this feeling of not knowing what to do and found a sound I liked and just went on from there. The sound that I chose was the ‘Metamorphosis’ patch made my Spitfire Audio, a company that specialises in making free plugins and software instruments. It’s very droney and quite breathy – it comes under their ‘Glass Piano’ category of sounds.

Here’s how it sounded on its own:

I decided this sound was a good bedrock to build my piece from.

Having originally started my journey in sound as an electric guitar player, I’ve been really keen to involve this aspect of my musical vocabulary in the sound art I make for the course. Around 15 seconds into the clip, there is a big white flash of light that I thought could use an ‘explosion’ of discordant electric guitars. I layered lots of tracks together with the exact same plugins, but all panned in different directions to give a full stereo sound. To lead up to this explosion, I recorded one track of me playing a harmonic on my guitar whilst pushing down on the tremolo bar. I then used automation to fade it in and to pan it from right to left, giving it a sort of swelling effect:

The explosion of guitars comes in halfway through the ‘swell’ guitar track, and sounds like this:

Two of the tracks in the explosion are played on a conventional six string guitar, whilst the other two are recordings of me sliding up and down the neck on my fretless bass. I wanted the guitars to sound very distorted, but not necessarily as though they were being played through an amp, so I took the dry signal of each track and just ran it through Logic Pro’s stock Distortion plugin.

I also added some convolution reverb to the tracks:

I found that the heavy, distorted tones of the guitar were clashing a little bit with the softer tones of the Metamorphosis synth, so I added on a very small amount of distortion onto the synth and slowly automated it in to help them gel together a little better.

After the explosion I recreated the sound of the of the reels of film running through the projector, much the same as in Werle’s piece. However, although in the original Werle uses an actual audio recording of a machine playing back the film, I decided I wanted to recreate a sort of, but not exactly, similar sound using a synthesiser. To do this I opened up the Retro Synth plugin on Logic and set the oscillator to only generate white noise. I then used an LFO with a reverse sawtooth wave to create the rhythmic sound of the machine. Here is what it sounded like:

I recorded another big ‘explosion’ of guitars to match the flashing black and whites of the film as the imagery gets more intense, and this time also recorded a few tracks of nonsensical noodling to build up a longer wall of sound to last until the children’s animation starts playing:

I particularly like the sounds of the fretless bass as it sounds almost like a low rumbling siren.

I then let the Metamorphosis and white noise synths carry on uninterrupted whilst the animation plays out. I gradually lowered the cutoff of the white noise synth so it would slowly fade out to leave the drone by itself, which gives a creepy atmosphere as the stopmotion film and footage of the spider play.

This is as far as I got today, and I think I’ve made good progress. I may only be just over a minute in, however now that I have a more concrete idea of the concept and sound of my piece it should be much easier to get going on it tomorrow.

(WordPress won’t let me upload the video of my progress so far as the file size is too big, so have linked it below as an unlisted YouTube video.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LiILSalXTw

As this is my first time rescoring a film, I wanted to look at a famous example of this practice – namely, Giorgio Moroder’s 1984 rescoring of the classic German film ‘Metropolis’, originally released in 1927:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD-2I2BoSEg

I watched Metropolis a few years ago when I was 15, and couldn’t quite remember the original soundtrack so I looked it up on YouTube and had a quick listen:

The original score is composed entirely of orchestral instruments (not at all surprising for the period), and I found it a little jarring as I don’t feel that the timbres of those instruments necessarily match the dystopian aesthetic. Obviously there wouldn’t have been synthesisers available to use when the film was originally scored, and I’m sure at the time the music would have seemed less disjointed from the film however I think I conceptually agree with Moroder in the thinking that the aesthetic feel of the film definitely seems to suit electronic music over classical, orchestral music.

Moroder’s rescore also came with a new restoration and edit of the film, as the original had been cut considerably at the time of its release, against director Fritz Lang’s will. It features many famous singers of the time, including Freddie Mercury, Bonnie Tyler and Adam Ant. It’s vastly different from what I was expecting before watching it – I was expecting to hear a sort of ambient slow soundscape, with a few bits of synthesised foley here and there. However, having heard Moroder’s other work plenty of times in the past, I should’ve known better. Of course, there are parts of it which do follow my original expectations, such as the sequence around the 2:00 minute mark which has a good amount of metallic-sounding foley. I really like the bell-like sound that ticks with the clock around the 2:45 mark, it’s a nice addition that helps create a certain industrial aesthetic.

However, there are definitely parts of the rescore that I have a problem with. Moroder puts a lot of emphasis on synthesised pop songs that don’t seem to add anything useful to the film at all. I really didn’t enjoy hearing the vocals on these songs as I feel as though having lyrics somewhat takes away from the actual film being shown, and it’s definitely these moments that make the rescore feel a bit dated and disjointed from the film in my opinion. I think perhaps the problem is that Moroder’s score is too intrusive. In my opinion, the score would have been much stronger if he had stuck to instrumental tracks as the vocals make the film seem too separate from the score – the score should always serve the film, and not the other way round.

A lesson to be learnt from this is to keep my piece relevant to what is being shown on screen. This doesn’t necessarily mean adding sounds for everything that is shown on screen, but it should flow nicely and make sense with what is being shown. It’s also important to make sure the aesthetic of the film matches up with the general sound of the score. It doesn’t have to be period correct for when the film was made (in terms of instruments), however it shouldn’t sound so separate from it that it feels obvious that this a rescore, a separate project from the original film.

Before rescoring the scene from ‘Persona’, I thought it’d be a good idea to watch the original a few times and look out for aspects of the score that make it work well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8TJ2d7-1e8

The original score was composed by Lars Johan Werle, and I’d say it’s more of a collage of different soundscapes coming one after another than a particularly linear piece which I find interesting as I have never really composed anything that cuts so quickly between different ideas. There are elements of musique concrète interspersed with a haunting string section that comes in and out of the piece. I particularly like the build-up of strings right at the end, they are a good way of introducing tension. The audience doesn’t yet know who the faces on the screen are, but I feel like the soundtrack does a good job of suggesting that there is something sinister afoot, and as we learn later on the image of their faces merging reflects the plot of the film towards the end.

I also enjoyed the sound of the projector near the beginning being constantly interrupted by strange sounds that sound almost like car horns – I’m not entirely sure why but it felt very disorientating. The sudden cut to a completely different section when the stop motion film comes in is also rather effective, and I think that the percussion makes the clip seem rather gimmicky, in a way.

Overall, I find the score to be a really strong piece of composition, and when looking to find elements that I didn’t particularly enjoy I really couldn’t find anything to fault with it. I think it’s going to be a challenge to rescore this scene and produce something that I feel holds up against the original, however I’m still excited to work with this clip and perhaps produce a score that’s more relevant to today’s sonic climate.

When I was trying to research Werle’s process, I couldn’t find much about this film which is a shame as I wanted to learn more about he made it, and what certain sounds were. However, I did come across the fact that this was one of only three films he ever scored, which I find really impressive considering just how good this score is – It’s also a shame he didn’t compose for more films. I had never heard of Werle before starting this project, and I think I will watch the other two films (‘Hour of the Wolf’ and ‘The Island’) that he scored when I have some free time, as I would like to compare them to his work on ‘Persona’.

For my final project of the year, I have decided to create a score to 5 minutes of a film. I’m doing this with a view towards what I want to be creating in my second year at LCC – I’m very interested in making soundscapes for other forms of media as I feel this often gives me the inspiration I need to bounce off of to create something I am proud of. In the past, I have usually written more conventional songs with particular paintings or books in mind. Because of this, I’m really keen to start making scores for films on the course and thought I might as well start with this project!

I have a couple of options for films that I am interested in scoring. The first is ‘The Seventh Seal’, directed by Ingmar Bergman and released in 1957. ‘The Seventh Seal’ has been one of my favourite films since I was around 15, and it focusses mainly on the concepts of death and questioning faith. It follows a medieval knight (Max Von Sydow) as he plays a game of chess in order to bargain with Death (Bengt Ekerot) for his life.

There are two scenes I would really be interested in scoring, however I’m not sure if they’re the right fit for this project. The first is when the knight meets Death for the first time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4yXBIigZbg

This is by far my favourite scene from the film, and the most famous. The imagery is powerful, and the idea of the knight challenging Death to a game of chess is so absurd yet the dialogue is really well written.

The other scene I have in mind is the Danse Macabre from the final scene of the film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4JgsWxFY2E

This scene shows Death leading the knight and a few other characters from the film along a hill, making them dance and hold lands as they walk to the “darklands”, as a travelling actor who is watching on describes it. The imagery in this scene is also quite striking, and the fact that the audience don’t really know where the characters are actually going makes it haunting in a way.

The reason I thought of these two scenes, although they have dialogue in them, is that they are subtitled. This means that they don’t necessarily need to have dialogue over them, as the viewer can understand what is being said from the bottom of the screen. However, the more I think about it, I’d rather create a score to a section of footage that has no dialogue in it whatsoever. That way, I don’t have to worry about compromising the scene in this manner.

A scene that may perhaps be more suitable to my project is the opening scene from ‘Persona’, again directed by Ingmar Bergman and released in 1966:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8TJ2d7-1e8

I think this scene is probably going to be better suited for the project as there is no dialogue and it is very abstract, which gives me a lot of creative freedom. It doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the film, and can be seen in its own right as a 5 minute piece of experimental cinema. There’s also the opportunity for lots of experimentation with foley, which I haven’t tried making before.

The scene is a bit graphic and I’m not fond at all of the shot of a lamb being killed, however I think it’s going to be difficult to find another abstract piece of film that is rich in imagery, that also has no dialogue and is the right length for this project. Because of this, the opening scene from Persona is most likely what I am going to score over the coming days.