Soundtrack Research

We wanted to find some inspiration before deciding our soundtrack, so looked at other famous horror soundtracks to hopefully give us an insight at what sound we do and don't like.

The first soundtrack we looked at was The Conjuring, the music used was extremely dramatic and loud and build up a lot of suspense, making me especially, feel uncomfortable and scared even though I knew nothing was going to happen. The increasing volume of the instruments Is something we want to incorporate as it builds suspense and makes the audience tense as well as filling them with thrill and excitement. a negative on this soundtrack is that it only has one movement which is the dramatic music increasing then decreasing. For our soundtrack we are looking for several movements to build suspense slowly but then gets dramatic when reaching the climax of our scene.

The next soundtrack we look at was Insidious, this soundtrack captured the theme of eeriness and also a creepy feel, especially the almost repeated screams in the background. Insidious' soundtrack is more like the sound we wanted to use in our opening scene compared to The Conjuring, which moves straight into dramatic music. Despite it being closer to the themes of our opening, it lacks the loud dramatic music that The Conjuring has, as we aimed to use a more louder suspenseful sound towards the end of our opening scene. Hopefully if we can find a non-copyright track that incorporates both themes of dramatic effect, like The Conjuring, as well as eerie and creepy effects, like Insidious, then our search will be very successful!

When looking at different non-copyright websites for the non-diegetic sound (soundtrack) for our opening scene, we came across and very useful, simple and easy website called Imcompetech. This website provided a very simple process to finding the most effective music we can. First it gives options to the type of Genre you are looking for, and so out of the choices given we obviously chose Horror. Next to the options of the genre, it gave options for the Feel of the music you aimed to find. From the options you could pick as many as you wanted to match the theme you wanted to achieve. We chose: Dark, Eerie, Unnerving, Mysterious and Suspenseful. After we chose both our genre and feel, the search gave us hundreds of differents soundtracks that were amazing and really captured the theme of a horror genre we wanted to show through our opening scene; if we could, we would have incorporated all of them but evidently we could only really chose a few. The soundtrack we believed we could use the most was called, Evening of Chaos. The track includes a semi-beautiful and flawed piano melody, which contrasts with industrial percussion. This piece has three distinct movements and I personally think this will help develop the themes and ideas of our opening.
After looking around even more we chose a few more soundtracks and are planning to use different sections of each sound in order to increase and decrease tension, as together they all create a perfect soundtracks for our opening scene. As a result the soundtracks we chose were, Evening of Chaos, Reign Supreme and Spider Eyes.