The semantics of sound design

Cormac McCarthy (left) and les frères Coen. (image courtesy “Thompson on Hollywood“)

Writing in the New York Times about the Coen Brothers’ latest film, a western called No Country for Old Men, Dennis Lim draws attention to the film’s creative balance of silence and sound. “This is not a popcorn movie,” he writes, commenting that “…in some of the most gripping sequences what you hear mostly is a suffocating silence” and that it is silence, in fact, which comprises most of the sound track. Composer Carter Burwell is interviewed for the piece, and although he composed only sixteen minutes of score for the film, “submitted it for Oscar consideration, partly at the request of the distributor, Miramax, and partly, he joked, “to stand up for all the minimal scores in the world.””

• Read “Exploiting Sound, Exploring Silence“…

~ by Hugh on January 22, 2008.