The Sound Ideas Blog
This is the perfect space for sound ideas.

January 2023

We are delighted to introduce Randy Thom, a prolific and well-respected Director of Sound Design, Supervising Sound Designer and Re-Recording Mixer as the guest blogger for Sound Ideas. Randy is one of the best in the field with Oscar, Emmy and Grammy nominations to his credit; as well as receiving C.A.S. Career Achievement and MPSE Career Achievement awards. You can learn more about Randy here: https://www.skysound.com/people/randy-thom/

Author: Randy Thom

Can You Make It Like Nothing I’ve Ever Heard Before, Please?

Randy Thom Guest Author

When a film director asks for designed sounds that are absolutely unique, what do you say?

Lots of film directors have asked me to find or design a sound that is unlike anything anyone has ever heard. When I get this request, I always respond politely, of course, but I know that they are not only asking for the impossible, they are asking for something that would not help their movie even if it could somehow magically be produced. Here’s why …

The perception of a sound has two parts: sensation and interpretation.

Sounds Must Make Emotional Sense...

Any vibrations in a gas, a fluid (a gas is a kind of fluid), or a solid, if they are somewhere
between 20Hz and 15,000Hz, and if strong enough in amplitude, can be detected (sensed) by the hearing apparatus of most people. But categorizing a sound and deriving meaning from a sound is a completely different process from merely knowing a sound is happening. We categorize and interpret sounds by comparing them to other sounds we’ve heard, and how we and others responded to those sounds in the past.

To interpret a sound as speech, an animal call, music, thunder, etc., our brains rely heavily on comparison to sounds previously experienced. Though it’s true that certain kinds of sound dynamics: a sudden, “startling” sound for example, can have an emotional effect on us even if we have no idea what the sound is, that’s a pretty low bar in terms of the potential storytelling power that film directors depend on. You can “jump-scare” me easily and cheaply, and that can be fun, but that’s not going to bring me into the story in the ways that sounds I can relate to and already have feelings about can.

Newborn infants can be jump-scared with sound, and they are more likely to be soothed by harmony than by dissonance, but once again that’s a very low bar. Experiments have shown that infants don’t respond any more positively to intricate harmonies than they do to a steady set of two tones that are harmonious rather than dissonant.

There’s a strong myth that some of the most emotionally powerful sounds in film history were unlike anything previously heard. Did you know that voice of the Wookie in Star Wars is a bear? And not even an exotic kind of bear, just a normal black bear that most of us have heard since childhood in nature documentaries and in zoos. The main element of the T-Rex voice in Jurassic Park is an elephant, barely manipulated at all.

But part of movie magic, when it really gets to us, is that we are easily “hypnotized” by it, and we go into a state where we stop being analytical. If somebody plays a recording for us of a black bear vocalizing, most of us would guess what it is if we heard enough of it. But the fact that this reasonably familiar sound seems to be coming out of this very exotic-looking Wookie creature somehow shuts off the part of our brain that would normally and consciously compute “bear.”

It's extremely difficult for most directors, when they are watching scenes from their own movies, to stop being analytical and simply fall into the dream of the film. So their “bear detector” or “elephant detector” tends to be on constantly. They forget that the audience,
caught up in the story, is very unlikely to know or care in that moment exactly what they are hearing as long as it makes “emotional sense.”

So, directors, please don’t ask me to create a completely unique sound, one like nobody has ever heard. Even if I could produce one, and I don’t think anyone ever has, it would be very close to meaningless, and completely non-evocative to your audience.

You don’t want that.

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Functions of Sound in Storytelling

Randy Thom Guest Author

Functions of Sound in Storytelling

In this blog’s word graphic you see twenty storytelling jobs that sound can perform in almost any kind of artistic medium that has a sound component … certainly in film, video, and games.
Some of Sound's Jobs in Storytelling:

help define a character        Draw attention to a detail, or away from it

suggest a mood or evoke a feeling        set a pace     

clarify the plot   heighten ambiguity or diminish it    describe an acoustic space

smooth otherwise abrupt changes between shots or scenes   
emphasize a transition for dramatic effect    
connect otherwise unconnected ideas, characters, places, images or moments
indicate a geographical locale         startle or soothe                  
heighten realism of diminish it        foreshadow events
indicate a historical period          create themes
indicate changes in time     exaggerate action of diminish it

One Sound Can Accomplish Many Tasks

A given sound is usually doing several of these tasks at once. Being aware of all these roles sound can play is useful not only when figuring out what kind of sound to play where, but also when collaborating with directors, editors, etc. to plot out a plan for how sound is going to function in the project.

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Cacayanga or Useful Noise

Randy Thom Guest Author

Cacayanga or “Useful Noise”

Cacayanga is a term invented by Alejandro Iñárritu.  One quick way to define it might be“useful noise,” but it’s more specific and interesting than that.
 
When the bear in “The Revenant” is standing over Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), extremely close to the camera, and she pulls away, her paw rises off the moist mossy ground and gently scrapes across his clothing as she momentarily leaves him alone. As many of you know, the visual image of the bear is entirely computer graphics, so there was no production sound for this or any of her other action. The foley and effects work for the bear was tough as hell to get the way Alejandro wanted it. What wound up in the film is pieces from lots of different recording sessions, some on foley stages and some outdoors, mostly in a redwood forest at Skywalker Ranch.

When Standard Foley Fails, Look for "Useful Noise"

The attempts we made at doing “standard” foley all failed. It all sounded “too clean, too much like it came out of a library” for Alejandro. By that, he meant it sounded too predictable. It wasn’t truly believable or compelling. The sounds we got for the bear moving that WERE believable were all done in a very non-standard way… basically just randomly stepping and dragging and throwing stuff around in this forest that lucky for me is about a hundred yards from my studio. The sounds that sold the bear movement were complex. A moist scrape, a quick series of quick twig snaps, a squish, and a mushy thud were nearly simultaneous elements of a single move of her paw in that forest that lasted two seconds. It was real, and alive, and it didn’t sound like “foley” too often sounds like… artificial.
 
The off screen trees creaking and unseen chunks of snow heard dropping from trees in the movie were definitely cacayanga. But so were those improvised and unanticipated elements of bear movement that we luckily caught and dragged into service.
 
None of this means that I think we should record and use only brand new sounds for every project. There is plenty of gold in sound effects libraries too (especially Sound Ideas). We just need to use the pieces we find in ways that feel fresh and unique.
 
Cacayanga is a sound or set of sounds that seem authentic, but embody a mystery that pulls you deeper into the story in part because they aren’t immediately identifiable.
 
Useful noise.

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Sonic Beds Put Me to Sleep

Randy Thom Guest Author

Sonic Beds Put Me to Sleep

I confess I don’t like continuous beds of background sounds (ambiences) in films, unless there is a good story reason to have them in a sequence. I know this is a controversial idea. Lots of sound designers/editors LOVE creating sonic beds, and/or they believe that authenticity and naturalism demand sonic beds. I disagree.

My point is not that there should never be any background sounds. Of course there should, in most cases. The thing I try to avoid is having any non-stop sound element, one with no pauses. In many cases, that kind of relentless bed, usually composed of several continuous, non-stop layers, just clutters up the mix, and its constancy doesn’t contribute anything to story.

Approach sound design with an impressionist mindset

Movie sound design, in my opinion, should be approached in almost all cases with an impressionist mindset rather than an ultra-realist one. What we’re attempting to do is rarely to make a sonic photograph of a moment, where every detail is evident and exactly as you would expect to hear it. Instead, we try to give the audience a strong impression of a place or an action, an impression that will be made even more powerful by omitting or subordinating lots of details. Our tendency is to assume that everything in a scene that could be making a sound IS making a sound. But the way we experience films is absolutely not identical to the way we experience life. A film is much closer to a dream. When we remember our dreams, we don’t remember more than a few details, and they are almost always the most interesting/compelling ones.


The mixes I’ve worked on have received their fair share of criticisms, a lot of them justified, but one compliment I’ve gotten consistently over the years is that my mixes sound “clean,” “precise,” “uncluttered,” with “lots of detail.” That seems ironic, given that I’ve just said I believe in getting rid of tons of details.

The solution is all about choosing the details carefully, rather than splashing buckets of them into the speakers. It’s about featuring the best, most evocative details, and that includes background details. A distant-sounding bird, or car-by, or wave-lap, strategically placed between lines of dialog will read as a background.

But, you say, what about “air?” Don’t we need “air?” Sometimes we do, though less often than you might think, and less complex than you might think. “No Country For Old Men”, directed by the Coen Bros., is a master class in the use of simple, uncluttered air. Hats off to Skip Lievesay and the Bros. I think our team did a reasonably good job on the Bob Zemeckis film “Cast Away” of keeping the ambience on the island simple but powerful.


There are never more than a couple of sounds being heard at once, but they’re evocative and completely plausible as a sonic atmosphere.

​

Obviously, you should give directors whatever they want if you would like to get hired again. But in my career, “too much sound” has been their critique a hundred times more often than “not enough sound.” Often, the dynamic will be that they will seem to want lots of simultaneous sounds initially, but as post progresses and the mix progresses, less becomes more, especially with those thickly populated background ambiences.

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Sonic Superpower of Fruits and Vegetables

Randy Thom Guest Author

A look at the superstars of vegetable manipulation...

Most of us know that vegetable manipulation, especially breaking and crushing them, is a frequent tactic in foley and general sound effects recording for simulating the sound of certain other things being destroyed like bones, chest cavities, and craniums.
But why do some vegetables and fruits have this particular talent?

It’s mostly not their wetness. Strawberries are among the wettest of fruits but kinda suck at producing interesting sounds.

It’s mostly not that they are alive. A carrot snapped in two is pretty boring.

But let’s look at one of the superstars of vegetable manipulation: the bell pepper.

Watermelons are among the most musically gruesome

A simulated bell pepper made of Styrofoam, definitely never alive … but hollow, with a thin but relatively rigid outer shell, would make a very similar sound to an actual pepper when cracked open, though admittedly a bit of wetness would add a useful layer.

The magic comes from the combination of a rigid layer encasing a hollow or at least soft interior. The internal resonance that happens when the rigid layer is cracked is a big part of the appeal, and the sonically delicious icing on the cake is that the resonant frequency changes dynamically as the shape of the cavity changes in the course of the destruction.

Another factor that favors these kinds of vegetables over a carrot, for example, is duration. A snap of only a few milliseconds in length, what you get when you break a carrot, is almost never going to be as interesting as a more elongated rip or tear that lasts more like a second.

That’s why peppers (the bigger and more hollow the better), and celery, and cabbage, and watermelons are among the most musically gruesome of veggies.

And why they’re so good at simulating and creatively exaggerating the fracturing sound of other objects with hard shells and soft insides, like bones and craniums.

Hollow things in general tend to make sounds interesting to humans, which is why so many musical instruments are comprised of at least one hollow component.

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