Sehnsucht through Sound Design

As film making tools and techniques continue to evolve, the role of the film composer diverges along two paths. There is one path toward creating “flexible music,” composed of modifiable pieces, or stems. This aligns with an increasing flexibility in video editing by allowing the filmmaker more freedom to adjust the cut and to rapidly iterate alternate versions.

The other approach is one to create music so meticulously tailored to the locked picture that it bridges conventional scoring with sound design. John Belanger’s project being the latter, this spurred me toward two linked questions. How should a composer think about sound design? And, how should a sound designer think about music?

Speaking the same language

John and I worked together in a class at Johns Hopkins that grouped student filmmakers, composers, and audio engineers into teams. The final project for this class involved a blend of musical material and atmospheric sound similar to the Pacific Overlander video.

For this short video, John wanted to heighten the drive and expanse of the visual storytelling, and saw organic sounds as both grounded and disorienting. We built our shared language for the piece from a video John had sent for reference.

Carving up the story in sound

I started spotting the film and talking with John about natural act breaks. I focused on dialing in the pacing and accenting the visual cuts and transitions. Then I went about searching for and creating sounds for this world.

In my head, I divided the sound material into three groups corresponding to the visual transitions. Sharp, fuzzy, and diegetic. The diegetic sounds were the strongest anchors to the picture and only used sparingly. Kettle and skillet sounds bookend the piece, in both cases bridging the abstract montage with the quieter narrative scenes. The highway sounds, car door, and waterfall are other pieces of diegetic sound that pop out of the texture and appear in time with their corresponding visuals. Distorted, crunchy sounds line up with light leaks and similar distortions to the image. Sharp, percussive hits emphasize jump cuts.

Sehnsucht, an artful longing

Sehnsucht is a German word for "longing," but carries with it broader implications of the incompleteness and imperfection of life. Here the music and sound design work together to create a world that feels both grounded in referential sounds yet detached from coherent meaning.

The music cues are meant to sound incomplete in service of a larger notion of Sehnsucht. The sounds design strives to play with reality.