Symphonic Sound Design
What is it?
People call them extended techniques, gestures, textures, atmospheres or just plain noise. A basic example is at the end of nearly every movie trailer you hear a big rise in the orchestra from low to high or in a horror movie where you hear a high note the bends in and out of tune. It is noise made by an orchestra but not really a tune or theme. While there are a few libraries on the market, notably Symphobia, most serious film composers want their own collections. They often need custom material that works sonically for a particular project.
I got my start doing this type of thing on a film called When a Stranger Calls. Jim Dooley, the composer, wanted some special effects. We had a chat and shot around some ideas and the general direction was "slimy and slidey, very soft and in D minor". Example 1 is one of the things I came up with. Sometimes I write the material, we record it and it is mixed, cut up and put it into a sampler before the composer starts on the project. Other times they have started and I hear what they have done and can use it as a starting point. In the past few years I have also had calls to add the SSD after the composer is finished. I work with several composers such as Paul Haslinger, Cris Velasco and Sascha Dikiciyan who blend industrial music with orchestra. When I work for them I listen to what they are doing and add textures to it. I started doing it just for fun, filling in the gaps but it usually ended up staying and then it become expected that I would add it.
I first started exploring these extended techniques while working on a TV show called Invasion. It was all about aliens so required lots of effects. It was not a huge orchestra (34) but it was big enough to make some noise and see what we could do. I was also conducting and we had the same players for 22 episodes. I was being paid to experiment! I have made a few demos using the material from some of the projects I have worked on. Each one uses only sounds from that collection, no other samples. Apart from a little bit of pitch bending and some reverb the samples are all raw, no processing. However there is so much that can be done to them to twist them even further. I fully notate all of the music, this is not aleatory, there is nothing left to chance. It is rather expensive to do this so I have developed standard notations for some not so standard things and have honed them over the last 3 years.
