Adventures in sound design

I've become increasingly interested in sound design over the last few years, especially since I discovered that one of my old students is a real live professional sound designer, James Harrison. In fact, he's more or less the reason I stared teaching film music courses: when I was a postgrad at Birmingham University, he was one of a group of four friends who, knowing I was interested in film music, came up to me one day and asked me if I would offer a course on it for the following year, because they would all take it. So I did, they did, and the rest is history. A couple of films recently have had some really stand out sound design,

We Need to Talk About Kevin
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1242460/
Oh, this was a good film. And right from the word go, really sonically interesting. The composer was Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, and the sound designer was Paul Davies, but it was really difficult to know where the music ended and the sound design began due to the way Greenwood works. His music isn't thematic in any conventional sense, but very textural. The opening sequence really sets up this sense of integration between sound and music, and that's the approach for the whole film. The score is very sparse: I've been really encouraged recently by the lack of wall to wall music in several really good dramatic films recently, this one, Contagion, and.....

The Ides of March
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1124035/

One of the things music does in a film is tell you how to feel, tell you who people are and how you should feel about them (for example, music will often tell us who the love interest is, or who the hero is, and just identifying someone musically as the hero of a film automatically starts telling us how we should feel about them). Kevin, Contagion and this film all reduce the music to something that largely appears at transition points between scenes and montages of sequential events with no dialogue. Here, music acts to provide continuity, and sometimes a sense of pace or tension, but it doesn't tend to score specific characters and their actions in a way that starts interpreting the narrative for us. Things are left open: we have to make up our own minds, work harder to make sense of events and decide how individually to interpret what is going on and what we think of different characters. Very important in this film, as music could too easily tell us who the good guys are and who the baddies are, and here the characters are not black and white, so not using music allows those complexities and ambiguities to exist more easily. There is, however, one particularly fabulous sound design moment. In the second half of the film, Molly, a young intern (Evan Rachel Wood) commits suicide following an abortion of Governor Morris's (Clooney) child, the result of a one night stand that he instigated. Myers (Ryan Gosling) helped arrange the abortion (unknown to Morris) but had just been sacked from the campaign for a political mistake he made. At the press conference where Morris and his campaign team attempt to limit the damage that the suicide has caused, Morris's phone stars to vibrate, and he sees that the caller is apparently the late Molly. As he looks at the phone, and then around the room to see if the caller is there, all the ambient sound starts to drop out. He sees Myers, phone to ear, watching him. By this point, all the surrounding sound has gone except for the buzzing of the phone and the clicking of the press cameras. It's a fantastic sonic creation of the physical feeling of blood draining from the face, bottom dropping out of the world. It's a moment unlike any other in the film, and arguably it is the (or certainly, a) 'ides of March' moment, a reference to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, who was assassinated on the ides of March, dying with the famous "et tu, Brutus?" as the man he thought was loyal to him also stabs him to death.