Behind the Scenes with sound designer Randy Thom

Randy Thom shares a few thoughts about the audio we've featured.

>About Dry Ice:

Dry Ice is a piece made entirely of recordings done with sheets of metal pressed against blocks of frozen carbon dioxide. Dry ice "sublimates," which in physics means to go from a solid to a gas, skipping the usual liquid state in betweeen. When you press a piece of arm metal against the much colder dry ice, it dramatically increases the release of vapors, which in turn push on the metal in the opposite direction. The result of this back and forth is that the metal begins to resonate and "sing." It also makes random sputtering sounds. I edited lots of these moments together to make this piece.

Dry Ice is obviously "musical," but is made in a way that doesn't use "obvious" musical instruments. Any sound or series of sounds can be musical in the right context. The sputtering, noise-like elements in the piece are even more mysterious than the tonal elements, and the two played together set the mind wondering what is going on. I hope they seduce the ear into wanting to know more.

(If you're wondering where it shows up in Tomb Raider: It is the musical score, for lack of a better term, for the end of a scene about two thirds through the movie at the end of a gun battle in a glass walled laboratory.)

> About Object Piece:

When Erik Bauersfeld and I work together we always try to bring the real world into the process, like doing the recording in acoustically and dramatically appropriate places. This piece was recorded in a vast, dusty dried-up reservoir in western Marin County, California during a drought. Erik was digging a hole with a shovel as he performed. The real-time flies buzzing, the puffs of wind, and even the occasional distant airplane bring a level of life to the piece that you cannot duplicate in a sterile studio, no matter how creatively you add sound effects.

Editor's note:

Randy Thom has written extensively about designing sound for films. We recommend you visit filmsound.org to learn more. He'll be in Chicago this fall for the 2003 Third Coast Festival Conference, joined by his mentor Walter Murch, to discuss both how radio producers can incorporate film techniques, and what moviemakers can learn from radio.