Episode 04: Look Who's Talking

The podcast discusses the importance of mindset and the relationship between the composer and filmmaker in film scoring. It then focuses on scoring music to dialogue sequences, particularly in limited productions. The host emphasizes the need to serve the filmmaker's vision and not be heavy-handed. He also discusses his theory of film music, stating that all music is narrative. He categorizes film music into overture/title music and underscore, with five categories of underscore: thematic, commentary, reference, montage, and transitional. The host provides examples and explains the purpose of each category. Hello, my name is Karl Erwin and this is Spotting Cues, a podcast for the amateur and hobbyist film score composer. The first three episodes that we've had have dealt a lot with mindset. What are the minimum resources you need and how should you approach your relationship with the filmmaker? I start with these episodes because I think they're vital. I think they're very important. It's very difficult to go on to the more technical aspects of composing music for a picture without addressing these issues because I think every technical conversation that we'll have from here on are going to refer back to some element that we've already discussed in terms of the setup and the mindset. So now let's look at a technical issue. This comes from actually a request from the VI Control Forum when I first announced this podcast, a request came out about scoring music to dialogue sequences and especially in the context that if you're a hobbyist, an amateur hobbyist film score composer and you're working with student-type productions, the productions themselves are going to be limited. This is good for us because music can actually help in this way. You can take a relatively plain or understated or maybe even an overstated acting performance and it can be improved by the score. Now I think it's important that when we're writing music that we're not really trying to be overt about doing any such thing. We're not trying to improve someone's, you know, picture. We're trying to serve their picture. It's different than trying to really put our thumb on the scale and we're going to talk about putting our thumb on the scale quite a bit in this episode. We're not really trying to be heavy-handed about what we're doing but we do want to keep in mind the advantage that music plays in a limited production. It can really help and if we do it in the right way, we can be very helpful and our music can survive the process of integration. So how do we manage this to the best of our ability and with the best outcome? So I'll give you my experience. Again, this podcast is really about my experience and nothing more. I will give you my opinions. I'll try not to be too preachy about it but I'll just tell you what has worked for me and you can relate that to what has worked for you or you can test these ideas out and make up your own mind about it. I think all of this needs to start with a theory of film music. You need to have some kind of a theory for film music. There's actually been quite a bit written about this. I know people that have gone to music school for film music probably would study this at some degree and would have read materials on this. That's not my background. I went to school for music but I went for music education and then when I returned for an advanced degree, a graduate degree, it was for music composition which only very slightly dabbled in film music and that was mostly because it's what I brought to the table at the time as I started to get into scoring films. It wasn't something that the studio professor was requiring anybody to do but it was something that a number of us chose to do. So if you got any kind of standard education on film music, you probably would have read materials about this and discussed it at length and a lot of what I'm going to say is not going to be revolutionary. It's going to line probably very well with things that you've already discussed and already learned. But you've got to have this first before you can address the technical issues. So very quickly, here's my theory of film music and on later episodes, we'll dig deeper into this. So first of all, my theory is that all music is narrative. There is some theory on film music in particular that says some music is narrative and other music is not very narrative. You know, it can really be quite abstract. But the very fact that it has a listener, someone who is listening to it and interpreting it means that it really has, in my mind, it has to be narrative at some level. That doesn't mean that the composer really has a control over what the narrative is. But I believe it is narrative. So when you look at music and film, because of my feelings on music in general, I really don't see any way in which music is never narrative or not narrative in film. I think it's always narrative and I try, personally, I'm up front with filmmakers about this. Whenever I talk to directors, I say, look, I find that music is narrative. Whatever I'm going to be writing is going to be providing some kind of narrative. I can't help that. You can't help that. I just don't see that it's any other way. So what I need to know, as I said on previous episodes, is what is the message? Because I want to make sure that whatever I'm creating, if it is indeed narrative, as I believe it is, that it's actually on message. I think that's very important. So all music is narrative. Let's start with that. There are different types of music inside of film. There's the first category I call overture, title, or credit music. So you have overture, which is, you know, from opera, meaning opening a door. It's the music you hear at the beginning of the opera production. This applies to many other genres of visual collaborative music and art, dance music, musical theater, and so on, and of course in film. And that is that there's some kind of introductory quality to the music that can be played over the opening credits or the opening titles, or a summary quality that can be dealt with at the very end of the picture. Again, we'll talk more about that some other time. But that's the first category, not really part of the subject matter today. The second category is underscore. Underscore, and this is the bulk of everything. Now some theorists about film music will say that underscore is a particular type of music in the film. I actually consider underscore to be all of the music within the picture that is part of the story narrative. That is where acting is going on, images are being shown that are divulging a plot and a direction for the story. So any music really in the picture, I categorize as underscore, something happening underneath. It can be very saturated in the forefront and highly thematic and driving the action or the emotion, or it can be very, very understated in an extensive dialogue sequence like we're going to talk about today. But I consider it all to be underscore. And I have five different categories of underscore. The first one is thematic. Thematic underscore in my theory deals with characters and situations that recur. So you get it once, but you get it again at some other point. It happens again and it develops a pattern that is associated with characters and situations that come back. Okay, and we know this is like theme, the theme music for a character. The second one is one that I call commentary. Commentary underscore. And I call it commentary underscore because I believe that this is the kind that is putting its thumb on the scale and giving an opinion on the emotion or the intellectual kind of goings on. Right? It is actually giving a commentary apart from the acting itself and apart from the imagery that is giving weight. It's adding weight to the scale. Okay? It's giving a commentary or providing an opinion on it. I think the bulk of music falls into this category. And by the way, none of these categories are exclusive or mutually exclusive. In fact, most of these categories will operate in cooperation with another one, if not sometimes all of them at the same time. Okay? Commentary. We're going to be focusing most on this one. Okay? So commentary gives an opinion on the emotion or the intellectual context of the picture. It's putting weight onto the scale. Okay? And influencing the perception. Reference underscore is the third one. I call this reference because I believe it gives a frame of reference. If you're, you know, flying through the air like Superman, you don't really have a frame of reference until you have clouds passing by. Right? You have a frame of reference. You know what speed you're going, your spatial reasoning kicks in. That's a point of reference. Now, reference underscore, I believe, deals with setting. It creates a point of reference. It demonstrates time and place, but in musical vocabulary. So this is music like if you're watching a spy thriller and suddenly you see a large city and you see lights and skyscrapers and everything. And before the little title comes up that says what city you're in, you hear music that might have a cultural bent to it that tells you that you're in a particular place in the world. Okay? You know, very common in those superhero, spy movie, grand adventure sorts of films. You might see a jungle, you know, or a forestry, but you don't know exactly where you are, but you might hear music that kind of gives you more of a point of reference. Music that tells you, oh, this is happening perhaps in South America, right? Because of the instrumentation, might be more of a cultural bent to it. And I don't want to talk too deeply about this because some people find this sort of use of music to be highly racist. I think there's a tasteful way in which this can be done that is not cheap, but is still weighing in on the fact that, yes, there are geographic cultures and this can be useful in determining time and place and setting. And especially for time, like you could have a period piece where you see a town that looks underdeveloped, but it could merely be kind of an underdeveloped town. But if you hear a Victorian kind of score going in the background, you know, oh, this isn't merely underdeveloped. It's actually a period situation. You're in a certain time frame and locality. So that is reference underscore. The fourth category is montage music. And this is more of a functional type of music. Montage music can be any of these other types as well. It often must be. It can be thematic. It can be commentary. It usually is. It can be providing reference. It often isn't a montage because a montage is a sequence of film that is condensing time and space. It's bringing together spaces that are otherwise not near each other or it's condensing time periods that do not necessarily flow quickly and provide a narrative that helps the audience appreciate this visual condensing of time and puts it together in a way that is digestible. The last one, the fifth category, is source music. The $5 word for this is diegetic music. Diegetic music. So source music is music that comes from a source. It is something that the characters are otherwise aware of. They're not aware of the score, but in this case they would be because they know that there's a source from where the music. You're in a restaurant. There's a piano. There's piano music in the background. And for a moment you might see on camera the pianist kind of blurred out back deep in the depth of field, but you see them there and you know that the music is coming from that. That's music that does serve the underscore. It is providing some kind of weight to it and some kind of commentary in some kind of context, maybe even some kind of references to setting time and place. But it is actually something that the characters know about. So some people like to differentiate source and diegetic music from the underscore. I don't see a way in which that really works. I think it's always part of it. And really, really good filmmakers, thoughtful filmmakers and thoughtful composers will consider what the diegetic source music is doing in terms of these issues, the thematic content, the commentary, the referencing. What is it doing in terms of the condensing of time and space? So these are the five categories. We're really going to focus on the commentary aspect and we're going to dig a lot deeper in this on other subsequent episodes. But for this first technical episode, I wanted to go through that. You need to have a theory of film music to answer all technical questions. If you don't, you really won't know where to go. And your reasoning will always be about very subjective matters. We want to be more objective in our decision making. There is one more category in my theory of film music, and that is concert suite arrangements, commercial release of that soundtrack that has been formatted for an orchestral performance. And that is part of film music. Again, a lot of people that say they love film music, this is really what they enjoy the most. Casually, those casual film music lovers. And that is something to consider. And on the previous episode, we talked about how as a composer, you can feel OK about the reduction of your music in the film in various kinds of uses, either by cutting it or by reducing it in volume or burying it. You can really feel OK by that because there exists this other category of the concert suite arrangement. This music can have a life that is associated with a film apart from the film itself. And you've just got to keep that in mind. All right. Let's get into the technical issue. That was a good about two thirds of a typical episode so far. And this will probably be a little bit longer than normal because of the technical issues. But we need that theory to start. Let's go on. Dialogue. So we're dealing with dialogue. How to score dialogue. This is my experience on it. And this is just some, I think, guideposts that have helped me. The number one thing I want to say about this is that perspective is everything. Perspective is everything. And this is, again, going to focus on the commentary aspect of underscore, that part that gives an opinion on the emotions and intellectual content of the picture. Perspective is everything. So I think it's important that you establish the perspective of the narrative. Where is the source of this music coming from? Not in terms of diegetic music like source music, but sources. And where does it flow from in terms of perspective? And where does it flow to in terms of perspective? Whose benefit is this music for? Now, all the music is for the benefit of the audience. But I think that you can distinguish the perspective if you're being highly reductive into three specific areas, OK, in terms of where is the flow going to or where is it coming from? The first is the speaker. Who is speaking in the sequence? Who's talking? Who's the person doing the talking? Does the music flow from them? Is it for their benefit? Is it putting their weight on the scale? Is that what the music is doing? This is very important. This is a little more rare, I find, in a lot of movies, as I observe and pictures I've worked on, shorts that I've worked on. But this can be a legitimate establishment of the music. The speaker is the one establishing what the music is doing and what the commentary is saying about the picture, right? So the speaker, the second one is the listener. Obviously, you got a speaker, you got a listener. People that are listening to this, the people that are taking the message in, the one to whom the message is being given. OK, this is a little bit more frequent. I think that music often more so has this perspective in mind. It's not so much where the dialogue is flowing from, but more so who is it flowing to? Where is it going to? So you have the speaker, you have the listener. And then the third category is the third party. The third party, this could be it could be third party observers. You have two people having an argument in a public place and then you have a bunch of other people that are there that are observing this argument. The music could be putting the weight on the scale to their end as they're watching this. But I'm actually thinking more so of the audience. I think you always have the audience is the third party. Is the music putting the weight on the scale, putting its thumb on the scale to the benefit of the audience as a third party watching things unfold? Now, this can then not necessarily be mutually exclusive from the other two categories. The next question is, if it is doing that, is it sympathetic to the listener or the speaker? OK, what what is the situation there in terms of perspective? Now, I don't want to belabor this conversation, but you do need to know you do need to know what is the point? What is the score supposed to be doing in terms of its influence and what perspective matters here? And this is something you need to establish with the filmmaker. First of all, perspective is everything. Establish the perspective of the narrative, the speaker, the listener, the third party, which can include the audience. What matters in terms of the music? OK, once you've done that, I think the the second thing you want to establish is what is going to be what I call the saturation, the saturation of this score. If you think about visual art and you think about color theory, saturation, and I think this hits a little closer to music, how how vibrant are the colors or is it desaturated, meaning that it's more muted in tone and more grayscale? You need to establish how saturated this commentary is going to be. Now, how how do you change the saturation? What we're talking about is how obvious is the music, how obvious is the music more obvious and in putting a lot of weight on the scale, or is it barely touching the scale or or trying very hard to be understated and neutral? OK, and if you establish from the filmmaker how saturated you want it to be, you can talk about it in these terms. How much weight should this music have? You can better define technically what your job is going to be in terms of writing over this sequence. OK, so first you have the establishment of perspective and then you need to know what is what is the expected saturation of this? How vivid is it going to be? Right. How active is the music going to be? Not necessarily just how loud we'll talk about volume at the end, not how how vivid in terms of loudness or uniqueness is it supposed to be, but just how active is it supposed to be moving a lot? Right. That that increases the saturation of the music and its presence. Should you be using thematic material in it? Because the more thematic material you introduce to the underscore over dialogue, the more saturated and self-aware it becomes. Right. Should these ideas be stretched out and augmented to make them less stated, to make them more understated? Should you take a fragment of a theme? And we'll talk about intervals here in a little bit. You know, choosing what fragment of a of a theme you use is vital. That really matters because certain fragments might portray sentiments that are helpful and it might portray sentiments that are self-defeating to the message. So you've got to decide what this is. And again, augmentation, stretching things out. These are questions in terms of saturation. Drones, you know, one of the comments made on this is they find that they just end up droning the music underneath. They just create some kind of ambiguous drone underneath the dialogue. And it seems like an incredibly cheap and unimpressive, you know, to the filmmaker. Well, I find a lot of filmmakers want that. That's a that's a very common choice today. And I think what filmmakers are getting at with that is a desaturated score. They don't want the music putting weight on the scale. They don't want it pushing the thumb down on one side of the scale. They really want the audience to be making up their own mind about things. And they want it to be abstract and ambiguous. And the best way to do that, we'll talk about chord qualities here very shortly and intervals and these kinds of technical issues. But a drone is a blank canvas, right? Very popular. It's just blank. It doesn't it doesn't say a lot. It's very, very it's very zen. It's very meditative. And that's really the purpose of that kind of music in a lot of movies today, I find, is to be ambiguous and leave a lot up to the viewer. So there's a use for that. There's a use for doing that. And if that's what the filmmaker wants, then you should know that, right? Chord qualities themselves have an emotional context. I mean, when I say chord qualities, I mean, usually Western kind of chord qualities, although very exotic chord qualities with odd intervals, chordal harmonies where you have a fourth or a fifth, you know, separated or augmented kinds of interesting or scale-based, exotic scale-based chord qualities can also, I think, fit into this. But our Western understanding of chord qualities, they create emotional context. If you take that a step higher, harmonic intervals change how we perceive emotions, right? So when you take a chord changing from one chord to another, just the pairing of two chords, one going to another, that has an emotional context. And I highly recommend that you sit at a keyboard or you sit with an instrument, a chordal instrument, and you play various chords and you make a catalog. When I go from this chord to that one, really pay no attention to functional harmony. Just what does chord pairings, what kind of emotions do these overtly imply? And make yourself a key that you can always reference back to, because this is very helpful in Dialogue Underscore, to be able to just grab a chord pairing, one chord goes to another, and use that as a device to accentuate the narrative that is going on, the approved perspective in the dialogue. Just moving from this chord to that chord can confirm for the audience what the perspective is and who it is for, OK? So make yourself a key in that way. Intervals do the same thing, by the way. You just take two intervals and you just put two intervals together. It's more ambiguous. So chord is when you have at least three tones or more. Intervals are more ambiguous. Intervals are getting closer to drones. But you can have two intervals that go to another set of intervals. And that also can give you an emotional context, but it will be less obvious. It'll be more ambiguous because of the lack of an additional tone in there. So if you find that you want to have harmonic change to imply emotional context and action, but the filmmaker is saying, look, I don't want this to be so heavy handed, you might rather than use chords, use intervals, just intervals alone. That's two simultaneous tones moving to two other simultaneous tones or one of those tones changing against the other. That can help you get there without having to wholly go to a drone. That is one way to do it. We talked about harmonic changes in creating a bank of two chords, but we can also talk about melodic intervals. So this is not harmonic intervals, moving two intervals from one to another. But this is actually dealing with one interval moving to or sorry, one tone moving to another tone intervalically. They do the same thing as chords. Again, it's not quite as heavy handed as chords, but they can. This is a really, really useful tool. You can have no harmonic basis at all, no root position tone, no drone going underneath, no pedal point at all. Just moving tones maybe on a solo instrument or a section of an instrumental section. Strings do this well, you know, the celli in low range. I'm sorry, this is worth talking about if we're going to talk about chords and intervals and tones and pitches. You want to try to keep your music outside of the tessitura of the speaking. So you don't want to have your music in terms of pitch interfering with the dialogue. And we should be saying that I think it's good. Usually it's better to go low and try to find lower pitch instruments or go very high over top of it or more ethereal and more pad like if you're going to use synthesizers. But you want to stay away from the range where the speaking is at since we're on this topic of pitch. But you can use just tones moving and morphing around even without a theme. And this gets you a really long way. You can have just that and score a whole dialogue scene that is very, very impactful. And that is something to play around with. We'll talk about timing in a minute because it is, I think, important to know when to change notes and when to move. This is where you can also incorporate themes if it, if incorporating a theme is going to satisfy the perspective that is established. So let's say that the perspective is of the speaker and the speaker is a hero and the hero has a theme. Obviously, using that character's theme in the underscore, if it makes sense to do so, is useful. However, if that character is a hero and what they're saying is not particularly heroic, you know, you don't want to throw that theme in there. But what you could do is you could change the theme. You could change its modality so that it better portrays the emotional weight of what's going on. Or you might just take a short pitch collection from the theme, a pitch collection chosen, curated specifically because it helps to portray the emotional context and the perspective of the moment. OK, so the underscore will point to the speaker. It is putting the thumb on the scale to the benefit of the speaker, but it is not necessarily giving the qualities of the speaker as we know them thematically. It is contorted and changed to better portray the context of the dialogue. Now, this can also be done in the other side of it, right, for the listener. You can use themes in the same way and it might be the theme of the speaker, but it's being contorted or augmented or changed for the benefit or for the perspective of the listener. And of course, we can say the same thing again for the third party or the audience, the audience perspective from the outside, looking in at the situation as it is unfolding. OK, so themes can be used in this way. I find that this is not that you should this is not going to be very frequent. I think film score composers that are just getting into this, they really desire to lay out their genius themes everywhere they can. And you want to avoid you want to be careful about that. Right. Don't be so quick to throw thematic material and make sure you're reserving thematic material for times when it makes sense and it's doing good heavy lifting to the benefit of the picture, not to the not to your benefit. Again, those first three episodes really matter. That's why they were first. OK, you've got to understand the perspective. So that's it. I think I think that's pretty much in a nutshell the qualities of the of music in terms of chords. So it's just a recap here. You have chord qualities in and of themselves have emotional context. You have intervallic qualities are kind of the understated version of chords. And they can do that, too, and get you closer to the more ambiguous side of the emotional context of chords. If you're just using two intervals, changing intervals, rather changing a set of intervals or changing chords from one chord to another has an additional emotional context, which is in action. The change of one note to another in an interval can do the same. And you can do that just by itself without a pedal point can get you a long way. And this also incorporates the use of thematic material when it is contextually appropriate to do so. So that is the vocabulary you're dealing with. Now we get to the next thing, which is the establishment of timing. I think this is really the biggest issue. I think this is the issue that people have the greatest concern about. When? When do you do this stuff? When do you change the music? Now, here's a bit of a theory that I'm going to draw in from another kind of aspect of music performance, and that is conducting. I'm a conductor, I'm a music educator, so I conduct ensembles. And I can say that my theory on conducting is very similar to my theory on this part of music in movies. A conductor should really gesture only when something is changing. The conductor is not really there to keep a time. That is a role that they can play, particularly for less developed ensembles. To maintain the establishment of timing. But really, the conductor should be relatively out of the way so that when they make a gesture, it's demonstrating an upcoming impact that is communicated to the ensemble. And it tells them, in cooperation with the sheet music that they're looking at, how that is to be interpreted. So as I'm going along, I establish a tempo and then I generally get out of the way. And then I make a gesture ahead of what is to come to establish the impact that I expect as the director, as the conductor, so that they can interpret that gesture to have a meaning in their performance. Right. So I'm out of the way until I need to demonstrate change in the music. I think this is true of the score as well. You really should be changing when you're demonstrating change in the scene. So as you're watching the picture and you need to demonstrate a change in quality that is being driven by the dialogue, actually, I would say even more so by the acting itself. I think the acting probably drives more of this than anything. If you're looking at the expression that's going on and what is the acting that's happening in the scene more so than what is being said, you might even turn it off. Turn off the sound of the dialogue sequence and score what you see. That can really help a lot. And then turn the dialogue back on and see if that matches the response that you're looking at. But what you're looking for is the change. When is something adjusted? When has a change occurred? What does the actress portrayal seem to be indicating? When this shot changes, there's different shots that are part of this that demonstrate the perspective. You have the shot and then the shot reverse. So if you have a dialogue scene where you have two characters talking to each other, you can be looking at the speaker. This is the shot. And then you have the shot reverse, which is kind of the over the shoulder looking at the listener. It's looking from what the speaker is looking at. I tend to focus more on the shot reverse because that's going to demonstrate, I think, more of the change that is actually happening in the scene. It's looking at the message that's being given, but it's looking at the response to the message. What is the outcome of this dialogue? And that tells me what the change is happening when it is happening emotionally. Then that's when I want to think about changing notes if I'm using intervals or a melodic kind of sequence or chord progression when I'm changing from one chord to another. So that's something you want to be considerate of. Is that that reverse shot, the acting itself, what is that portraying? Score the response. The placement should be indicated by the response to the dialogue. Start at the macro level. Start at the macro level. So start first at the baseline. If you want to start, you know, if you want to start with a drone and a tone that gives you kind of a grounding in a canvas and then from there build a melody on top of it, that can be helpful. Or maybe just start with two chords or two intervallic sets of notes, right? And then you add a third note in there to better establish what is the quality of this interval and what chord is it. But let's say you establish that there's a change that's happening in this one spot. I have a chord that is being laid down ahead of it. The change happens and then I have a chord that justifies that change that has occurred or confirms it. And it goes to another set of intervals or to another chord. That is what I'm looking at and that's my baseline. And then from there I can add some kind of a melodic quality if that's even necessary. Maybe that's enough just to have a chord going from one to another. Start at the macro level and then build up from there the musical gestures that are confirming what's going on. Be careful of Mickey Mousing. Don't be careful that I bet you don't just automatically score the change of the shot. You might have a shot and then the reverse shot. Don't I would avoid just putting your music a change right when that shot changes. Let the shot change. Then look at what is the outcome of the change of perspective. And then after that happens that's when you want to create your change. OK. That is my advice there. So start macro then add elements to that to the micro level and then go from there. Here's my piece of advice. Once you do that then overstep a little. Overstep your bounds a little bit and put a little extra weight on as the musician. You're going to want to give this to the to the filmmaker with a little bit of extra on there so that you can get some criticism. You may very well find that they look at the little extra that you placed on it without you pointing it out and say yeah this this suits very well and then that's the way it is. And now you've been impactful in a way that that is truly collaborative. However if they say oh this is a little overt and a little heavy. Well now you know exactly what to remove don't you because you know the little bit of extra that you added. That helps you later on when you get the criticism to say OK well I know I'm going to take this out and that gets me back closer to that baseline which I was already comfortable with and then you can submit that. So plan for criticism by just overstepping a little bit. It's just a little bit of advice that I give to you. Something that I do often I'll do a little bit of extra knowing that this is a little bit of me being thrown in there and I know that if there's some criticism coming back that say it's heavy handed I know what to take out and I'm quick to do it. And then the last element I think has to do not just with the change it goes on but the use of music as summary and segue. You can really be a little more heavy handed when you get to the end of the sequence because there's inevitably going to be a summarization of what has happened. Now again the summary the musical summary that you're going to give and this is a great place to throw in a theme some kind of character theme or situational theme that recurs. You can use that theme to summarize what has happened as long as it is in it is compatible with the perspective that has been established again perspective being the one of the speaker of the listener of the third party other third party that is either present or the third party is the audience or the third party with extra weight from the speaker or the listener. So you summarize at the end when the dialogue has generally ceased or is waning down at the end of the sequence and the music can become a little more active to summarize what has just occurred and then it can bleed through as a segue into the next shot or the change of scene in which case this becomes kind of a reference music and it's changing the setting the time and the place as you segue out. So these are things to consider in terms of timing and purpose of the music. From there I think we can look at other material issues. The biggest one I think remaining that we haven't discussed is volume. Volume. How loud is the music? I think this is really important. I find particularly with dialogue sequences and really I do this with everything I have come to a place where I no longer submit normalized audio. I don't usually write the music and submit a normalized audio. Because I think that requires the filmmaker and the editors that are looking at the content to use too much of their own imagination to figure out how this music should be mixed. I submit mixed level music plus a notch. I say look this music really should be mixed down under the dialogue or under whatever is already existing in the track. And even if there might not be sound effects that are in there I'm going to imagine what will be added later and I will mix my music down to a place where it fits at a final mixed level where it should be at least from my point of view. And then I knock it up a notch or two. So it's a little bit louder than that. And the reason why I do this is because I really want the filmmaker to hear the music. I want them to understand its value. I don't want it to be hidden away. I'll let them hide it away if they want to. I want them to hear it but I don't want them to have to use their imagination to put it at the right level because if they're required to use their imagination to perceive how this will be used they will automatically find the music to be overbearing and heavy handed. And I don't want them to do that. I want them to think about the music that I've written knowing that I think this works well to support their picture. I want them to see my point of view and I can't get them to see my point of view if it's too darn loud. If the music's too loud they won't see that perspective. It will be too hard to get them there. There'll be too much explaining on my end to say, well, if you mix this down it'll work. They won't buy that. So mix it down already and then give it one extra level just to give it a little bit of a boost. And then from there they will mix it further. They absolutely will. They'll bring it down further into another place. So that brings me to the end. That brings me to the end of this discussion, at least in terms of, I think, an approach. First, you need to have a theory of music to start with. If you don't have a theory of music and film, you really can't answer the tough questions that are technical. Next, I think that perspective is everything. You need to establish with the filmmaker, you know, have a conversation about this. Who is the perspective from? I'll give you a story on this. Actually, not too long ago, I was scoring something and I totally missed the perspective. I think we actually just failed to have that conversation. I scored a sequence in the picture. This wasn't even a dialogue shot, actually. Now I think about it wasn't even a dialogue sequence. It was a music driven sequence. And I wrote the music. I gave the music back and had the narrative that I saw in the scene. And then the filmmaker said, oh, no, no, no, no, this isn't it at all. And they said this, you know, this should be this seems to be from the perspective of the audience, which is how I was thinking. And I said, yeah, that's the narrative I see. He said, no, no, no. This should be the perspective of the character on scene in the shot. And I said, oh, now that you say that, if I'm going to jump into their shoes, this would have a very different narrative quality to it. So then I had, you know, I went back and re-scored it and I, you know, changed the perspective. You need to know the perspective. What is the perspective of this sequence? OK, if there's dialogue being given, is this for the third party audience? Is this for the third party you're in the shot? Is this for the listener or is this from the perspective of the speaker? Is this putting the scale, putting weight on the scale to their benefit? Know what that is. Establish it. Next. So you have a theory, you establish the perspective. Now you need to establish what is the saturation of the music? How, how saturated should this music be? Should it be more ambiguous and leaving more up to the audience to interpret? Or should this really be putting its weight on the changes in the emotion? Am I scoring the emotional changes more directly or less directly? Should it be vibrant in terms of its thematic character? Should it be more ambiguous and less thematic? Should the, should it be monochromatic in terms of the instrumentation? Should I just use one instrument for this? Should I stick to one family of instruments for this? How saturated should it be? How vivid should it be? Establish what that is. OK. And from that, you then get into chord qualities, intervallic qualities, the changes of chords one to another. Create for yourself a bank that you can draw upon and go back to. I have, I have a couple of these lists where I say, you know what, this chord going to that chord, it means this. This chord going to that chord means this. This minor chord going to this major chord, it means this, usually in music. This is kind of the Western music understanding of chord changes. Not functional harmony, but just what is the emotional quality of this? And I refer to that often. Next, work at, in terms of timing, work at a macro level down to the micro level. Score the changes that are happening. Score what you see in the acting rather than what you hear in the dialogue. Pay attention to the reverse shots more than the shots themselves. What is, what is the, if there's a dialogue message there, who is the recipient? Right. Whose benefit is this for? What is the direction of the message? And score that. Pay attention to the acting. Score the acting after it has been portrayed. Avoid scoring changes in shot. Score the changes in the acting. Do that. Again, macro to micro and then overstep a little bit, add a little bit of extra. And then that will provide the opportunity for criticism if it needs to be there. And then you know what to remove. You know where to pare this back and reduce down. I think, too, if you start at the macro level, it helps you. I've been in situations where I score a scene. The director says, too much. I take some away. It goes back to say, no, no, too much. I take more away. They say, too much. And I take more away and I get myself really down to a drone. But see, in this case, it's not me that determined it. It is the filmmaker that determined this. The filmmaker said, this is where it should be. And now I've confirmed that I've done the right thing. Rather than starting with the drone and having them say, this just doesn't do it for me. I don't, this doesn't, you know, it needs more, but I don't know what. You know, I think it's better to oversaturate a little bit and then you know what to take away. And then you can always work down to a very ambiguous, monochromatic kind of outcome. And that's fine because it's what they want. You know, that's what you should be considering. Perspective is everything. Find out what that is. Get the filmmaker to describe that to you and then have a vocabulary from which you can call upon. Start bigger. Work your way down to the smaller details. Stay away from the dialogue in terms of pitch and then pare it back from there. And eventually you'll find yourself with something that the filmmaker wants and they'll be happy. They'll be happy with what you have. And save what you get cut. Save what gets cut out. That can always be stuff that can be used later in your project apart from the project. So hopefully this is helpful. But this is just my experience again. And you know, you can share on social media anywhere that this podcast is referenced. As we go along, I might create a social media account, maybe an Instagram or something where people can leave some comments. But anyway, also, if you've been listening, please take a moment and review. Offer a review on the podcast so that other people can know when they see the podcast show up. On the various places where this will be provided, it's right now is on Spotify, but this will show up in other places. Please leave a review so people know what they're getting into and they know how useful this can be for them. Be fair about it and take the time to review. Hopefully you find this useful. I wish you the best of luck. Happy composing.