Without sound, a video is dead on the reel
When it comes to creating a captivating film, visuals alone are not enough. Even during the time when the Lumiere brothers were playing their movies on the silver screen, and “silent motion pictures” became a rave, before technology even was around to match movie and sound, sound was an element of the show. This was either with a single pianist playing in the corner, an orchestra playing in a pit, and even sometimes with percussionists acting out sound effects.
And so, the role of sound designer thus emerged at about the same time as video maker did. A video without sound is dead in the water. It’s a complete failure in its ability to capture an audience. Without noise, it blends into the background visuals and adverts our brains have trained to ignore.
To appropriately design the sound in your film project, you must understand how it all fits together, and thus understand how to divide it up. There are four kinds of sound in most videos:
- Diagetic – The music that characters hear
- Incidental – The music that the audience hears, which is divided into:
- Score – The music that’s engaging and attracts the attention of the audiences, overtures, themes, etc. Loud and upfront, works to gear people up and get them excited
- Underscore – More quietly written, designed to subtly manipulate the emotions of a scene
- Sound effects – The sounds that the objects in a scene make, or incidental sounds that purvey other messages
- Spoken dialogue – The sounds of people speaking
Understanding how these sounds relate is crucial to an engaging video sound experience. At times, you must mix each section differently. And you must usually back background sound out of the way of dialogue. Underscore needs to usually be completely out of the way, but raised in moments of tension (watch a Christopher Nolan film and analyze how he uses underscore).
Read our blog on audio ducking
Sets the mood
Both music and sound effects work hand-in-hand in creating a powerful impact on an audience. When these different types of sound are used together strategically, they can enhance each other’s effect and empower the overall l mood of a scene.
Every content creator must consider such factors as genre, tone, and emotions they want to convey. Collaborating with composers and sound designers, or having access to the right sound library (wink wink), can provide options to really widen your access to find the perfect fit for each scene.
Use ominous music to create a feeling of unease and anticipation in the audience, or soft and gentle music for a romantic situation. In action scenes, fast-paced music with heavy percussion and brass instruments is usually brought in to create a sense of excitement and energy. The tempo, rhythm, melody, and harmony of the music all contribute to the mood. Jaws and Psycho immediately come to mind as classic movies that really utilize music in this way. Then there’s John Williams’ scores that make people feel the adventure – consider the effect of the music in Indiana Jones or Star Wars.
Makes transitions smoother
Skillful editing is crucial to having great content. And the right background music and sounds can help smooth over transitions between scenes. For example, I remember one transition craze for a while in travel vlogs where people would throw their coat or blanket on the camera, and then pull it off, and magically they are in another place. Using the appropriate sound effect, a whooshing sound for instance, can help make the transition feel more real and less cheesy.
Enhances emotions
There have been studies done (Psychology Today article) that show how music can ease negative emotions and enhance positive ones. It can also help trigger memories and remind people of important past events. Further, they say it can help people deal with stressful issues or keep their mind off a bad mood. Keeping these things in mind, film makers can employ music in the same way.
Sad music can make a listener help the audience deal with sad situations better, so that the film remains enjoyable. While happy music can get people to share the mood of the character on screen.
Helps the editing process
It’s sometimes helpful to have the music ready first before you sit down and start doing the cuts and transitions. With the music in place, it can help you with the timing of each transition and cut, and it can help you get the overall mood of the project going. It can help inspire you on what direction to take the video. You can cut to the beat of the song, or you can have the track fade out for one scene, and another track or variation start up for another, creating kinds of “bookends” for each part of your video.
Adds depth and meaning
Music can add depth and meaning to your video content in many ways. It can be used to reinforce specific emotions or themes that are central to your content. By using music to represent different characters or emotions, filmmakers can give the audience a deeper insight into the story and characters. For example, using a particular song to represent a character can help reinforce the character’s ambitions, while using a song to represent a place can help apply a mood or tone to that place.
In this way, you’ve got to try thinking less like a marketer, and more like a storyteller. Don’t necessarily use the music that’s expected, sometimes having a jarring musical intervention can be more effective.
Glues it all together
It can also add a sense of recurrency and continuity in your content. By using the same or similar sounds for transitions and effects, and using variations of a work – whether that means a different mix or arrangement – you’re able to give it a consistent feel and tone. That effectively glues your content together, making it feel appropriately like one, full piece. Too many tracks and songs of different kinds might make a video appear fragmented, especially in a shorter social media video.
Choose the right music and sound with Smartsound Cloud
With Smartsound Cloud, getting the right music and sound is a breeze. Each track has a selection of variations, and you can edit the instrument mix as well. That supplies you with a great deal of opportunities to glue it together, add depth, enhance emotion, tone transitions, and so on.
Happy creating!
