When I got into digital
audio and MIDI I became interested in scoring for picture, and
specifically preparing a score for Nosferatu. I’d tended
to shy away from the notion as it had been done before by so many
others. After awhile I changed my mind, deciding that this film
has been scored so many times that it has become the celluloid
equivalent of a jazz standard. But what would be my spin on it?
What I have always noticed about (and been bothered by) many contemporary
scores written for silent films is the lack of or minimal correspondence
between the music and what takes place on screen. This is certainly
true of the other Nosferatu scores I’d heard. So one thing
I wanted to do was score the picture very closely like Bernard
Herrmann or John Barry, might have. This called for allowing some
“space” while keeping in mind the fact that a score
provides all the sound heard with a silent picture.
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Drawing
upon the methods of sample based music producers like Amon Tobin and
DJ Shawdow, I sat down with a minidisc recorder and about a dozen
successive film adaptions of Dracula and recorded any audio that sounded
remotely interesting. This included music and other sounds; animals,
footsteps, thunder, wind, clinking glasses, anything. I dumped all
the audio I’d collected into my computer and edited all the
individual pieces into usable bits. I then organized them into directories
and these became an audio palette for me to work with.
I used and treated the harvested audio in all manner of ways. I mixed,
edited, twisted and morphed all the components together to create
new sounds and to make it fit what was takes place in the film. I
also played sampled instruments and synthesizer pads often playing
off of rhythms or melodies established by the samples. By the same
token I also found ways to make some samples fit melodies I wrote
from scratch. It’s a confused recipe. |
One
aspect of the outcome I enjoy is the low-fi and hissy nature of
combing so many crude sound sources. I think it helped produce an
accompaniment appropriate for a film released in 1922. I’m
deliberately avoiding the words “analog”, “organic”,
and “warm”. (It’s bad enough I used “low-fi”.)
My hope was to create something that meshed “naturally”
with the film. A particularly crystalline or overtly “synthy”
score would have hung like a bad wig. This is what I enjoy most
about early hip-hop, early drum n’ bass, and other sample-driven
music. The product may emerge from raw material that was rough,
aged, and analog but it is obviously manipulated by something quite
“technological”, like a digital ghost.
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