Independent Research Task - soundtrack

Independent Research Task 2

 

How to soundtrack a horror film

My group has two Music Technology students in it, including myself, so we can use our knowledge and resources available to us to create our own soundtrack from scratch that is tailored to our own vision.

Although I have watched an obscene amount of horror movies, I find that I generally focus on the action a lot more than the soundtrack (with a few classic exceptions of course, think Hitchcock's 'Psycho') so I definitely had to seek out tips on the music composition side of horror audio production.

What I Researched

I watched a couple of youtube videos following a musician building a horror soundtrack whilst explaining their thought process and sharing tips on how to get a good sound, I found this video very useful;

I also began listening to horror soundtracks as I did some of my other work - a very interesting experience that may have made homework feel even more stressful, but certainly very dramatic.

One of the soundtracks I listened to was from Halloween (2018) as I'm a big fan of the very talented John Carpenter, but I wanted a more modern and clean sound to get inspired off of, hence the more recent film choice.

I particularly liked this specific track from it as it included a sound achieved by running a violin bow across guitar strings, I found the creativity behind this very inspiring and motivating;

What I Found Out

I learnt a lot of useful tips on how to build a scary and off-putting sound, such as the use of 'Tri Tones'.

Without getting very specific into music theory, a Tri Tone is a chord build from three notes that are three whole steps apart from each other, resulting in a very unsettling sounding chord nicknamed 'The Devil's Chord', these chords were actually banned in very early Catholic music because of their evil tone.

I also learnt that a good way to emphasise a jumpscare, which our sequence will include, is to just play a jarring note at a significantly higher level than the rest of the track right at the moment of the scare, this is fairly self explanatory as it would very simply add to the element of surprise and cause the viewer to jump.

There are two main easy techniques that are commonly used for simple horror soundtracking;

Technique 1

This technique is called a 'Tone Cluster' and involves playing multiple notes that are one semitone apart (basically, two notes next to each other on a piano), sounding very dissonant and uncomfortable, these are simple background chords to create a good basic foundation.

Technique 2

This technique is called 'Sound Mass' and relies a lot more on the tone of the instrument, achieved by playing a group of notes in any way you want, such as basically pressing your hand into any group of piano keys for an easy unpleasant "chord", and then focusing more on (digitally) changing the nature of the sound by adding effects usually. I like the creative freedom this method gives you and how little musical ability it requires, meaning anyone could produce this simply by messing around with any software. 

My Take:

Finally, I decided to test myself and speed run a very short sample of a horror soundtrack within 5 minutes, although it is clearly not a very good track, it definitely taught me how easy creating creepy music was by applying techniques from this research;