Sounds & Music

In a typical thriller film, a multitude of diagetic (sounds that fit the scene/loaction) and non-diagetic (sounds atypical of the scene location). sounds are used to emphasise and help build up tension and excitement. They can also disorientate the audience, especially with non-diagetic sounds. One of the most powerful sounds in thrillers, is no sound at all. Silence is a very effective sound and can make the audience feel very unwary and anxious, because they don't know what's going to happen or where they can go with it. Using other sounds, like screaming for example can alert the audience that someone may be in serious danger, making the audience again feel anxious and tense. The use of music is also often essential in building up tension or helping the audience know what the should be feeling, for example fast-paced, up-tempo music helps the audience feel excited.

After research, I found a video on Youtube that gives examples of thriller sounds and what you would expect to hear in a thriller production, the first minute and 30 seconds show what you'd expect to hear, the remainder of the video lists some common conventions.

Music

Music, as well as sound effects, is essential in not only creating tension, but setting an overall tone of a scene also, and can also be used as a link scenes together by using the same music in two different scenes. A great example of using music as supplement to increase tension is psychological thriller Shutter Island. Martin Scorsese used no original pieces from the film, but instead had his lifelong collaborator Robbie Robertson to assemble previously recorded orchestra dating back to as early as 1876, to as recent as 2006, which in itself creates a fractured music structure to which reflects on the theme of instability within the film.

Sounds and music in my final piece

In my final media piece, I did use conventional sounds in my piece such as explicit use creaking floorboards, I decided on heavy use of this a majority of my film was set inside of the house and I creaking of the floorboards was an ambiguous sound, as the audience would be left guessing as the who was causing the creaking, and if it was the protagonist or someone else? this is a reflection of Hitchcock's ticking bomb theory of the implicit causing more tension than the bang, and I felt this was a good way to build up tension, by emphasising the implicit.