surface of Elliot Goldenthal’s mixture of orchestral sound with virtually un-notate-able synthesizer and percussion timbres — timbres which greatly add value to the punishing images of sunlight.11 The higher range, longer sustain, and dissonant combinations of notes help the timbres of each excerpt become, as I observed earlier, exercises in pure sound or tone color that leap out of the filmic world. But if this kind of deep timbral design permeates all film music — not just my extreme musical sound effect examples — how can we describe and analyze it, besides just giving details of instrumentation or using evocative, poetic words like sizzle, bite, hammer, radiate, or heat? The Soundworld Before putting notes to a page or a sequencer, a film composer must build a sonic or timbral lexicon that works with the visuals for a project. At the very least, a composer must know what musical forces are feasible given a project’s budget and timeframe: will the score be for full orchestra? Or will it be for synthesizer, or for solo guitar? As composers build their lexicons, some sounds work, and some do not. Thomas Newman, the composer behind the timbrally-adventurous and influential score for the 1999 film American Beauty, starts each project by improvising along with the film: “often when playing, bonking instruments, or bowing them, sounds come out, and they come out at you with emotional or dramatic content — wow, what if we put that particular sound there?” (Note that Newman only mentions sounds or timbres here.)12 Composer Alexandre Desplat corroborates this, while
The concept of “added value” also comes from Chion: he defines it as “the expressive and/or informative value with which a sound enriches a given image, so as to create the definite impression (either immediate or remembered) that this meaning emanates "naturally" from the image itself. Audio-Vision 221. 11
OxfordUnion, Thomas Newman | Full Q&A | Oxford Union, accessed July 6, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeHNUJ-hNmE&t=564s. 12
5
