When I had finished making all of the sound, I edited it into Final Cut Pro so that I could put it with the edited scenes
The music wasn't quite in time with the opening sequence as we wanted to have the loud bass sounds where the credits came up, so we had to move around the credits a bit so that it would match up to the bass sounds.
We used 3 pieces of sound, which was the jack in the box with the bass sounds but I removed the vocals to give the piece more suspense, the diegetic sound of the jack in the box and the chase scene music which I made for this opening sequence.
I added some cross dissolve to the end of the sounds, so that it wouldn't end abruptly or start too abruptly.
I also had to loop one of the tracks as it wasn't long enough to carry on the whole walking sequence.
Here, I started to make the non diegetic sound, based on the practical that Rebecca did with the credits and the film clips.
Firstly, I uploaded the video into logic pro so that I can edit to the video, for more effect, and since the bass sounds need to be in a specific place.
Then, I marked out when the credits would appear, so I would know where the bass booms would go.
I then added the drum sounds and some very low string notes, so that it would give it an eerie sound.
I also automated the volume levels with the drums, so that it wasn't too loud, and that there would be some sort of crescendo to add some suspense.
I wanted the drum to sound like a heartbeat in some places, so I needed it to echo.
So I used the space designer to add some reverb to the drum, and I ended up choosing the "echoing mountains" as the echo sounded very natural.
I then EQed the drum so that the higher and lower frequencies were cut off, so that it would have a muffled, telephone effect.
I also used the pitch bender on the keyboard to pitch bend an extremely high pitch sound, which would happen periodically, which I need to fix up, when we have edited the final thing.
After adapting the nursery rhyme "Ring a Roses" into a scary version, we thought that the vocals were not loud enough in comparison to the rest of the instrumentation and that it still needed a few more tweaks to some of the parts and it also needed to be mastered.
I used Logic Pro 9 again to open up the track before it was bounced into an mp3.
I then put all the vocal tracks into a seperate auxiliary channel, which was bus 1, so that I could edit all of them and apply the same effects to all of the selected vocal tracks in one go.
I opened up the compressor in the bus 1 auxiliary so that I could adjust the gain to be higher, which would make the vocals louder.
Then once I've finished the mixing, I bounce the track into an mp3 and then insert it into a new project on Logic pro where I can start to master the track.
I get up 4 channels on the track for mastering, the EQ Channel, Adaptive Limiter, Multipressor and finally the Multimeter.
I put the track on the loop and I replay the track hundreds of times so that you can tweak each individual part.
I needed to compress the loud parts down and the low parts up, so that it would become one level line or something close to it.
There can't be any clipping of the sound, so I had to make sure that none of the meters were going into the red zone, or was going over 0db, so I put a limiter on the sound so that it did not go over -0.1db.
After an hour or so of trying to get the sound right, I finally adjusted the gain to the overall piece and then bounced the track.
As you can see, the top one was the original version of Ring O Roses, and the bottom is the mastered track, you can see that in the bottom track, it is a lot more level than the top after all the compressing and it will sound a lot louder too after bringing up the gain.
Source of Inspiration - Horror music + Own investigation
I decided to look at the types of music that horror movies usually use.
I took a look at the one of the tracks from 28 weeks later original soundtrack:
After listening to this piece, you can tell that it is extremely repetitive, and there isn't a strong melody, as it is designed to invoke fear or tension to the viewers, so having something extremely dramatic throughout the whole piece, would bring the focus away from the scene and into the music. Throughout the track, you can hear several eerie sounds, which is like an echo, which is probably created by several different synthesizers.
They created a theme for this track, and they kept repeating it in the piece, variating it each time that they played it, so it didn't get boring, and creating a rise in tension when the electric guitars came in, dropping out with a sudden pause.
I then went and listened to one of the tracks from the sinister OST
There is definitely not an obvious melody to this, in fact, there is no melody at all. This is a track which consists entirely of cut up and distorted sound effects, and this is exactly what gives it a scary impression, because when I was listening to this, I didn't want to turn around and look behind me. There is a lot of noise in the background of the song, which gives it a sense of eeriness, because it's not clean cut and you can hear parts of inhuman sounds which is mixed along with a man that is humming something. This piece, that music in the horror industry doesn't even need to have a decent or catchy melody, as long as it invokes fear, it is acceptable.
