Thinking about what makes music Spooky, I decided to consciously avoid the classic culturally-conditioned, received notions of musical spookiness that I could easily fall into, e.g.: Tolling bells, pipe organ, theremin, harmonic and Hungarian minor scales, etc.
I tried thinking of recent films that had spooky soundtracks, and the first recent one that came to mind was The Favourite. Its soundtrack falls into a kind of āuncanny valleyā between music and not-music. I read a bit about it and the filmās sound designer, Johnnie Burn, has said basically that: āThere was no composer on this film; we were working a lot in that space between music and soundā¦ā
I also recalled another recent-but-not-quite-recent film with a spooky soundtrack: Under the Skin. Turns out Johnnie Burn was also the sound designer on it! I guess I am now officially a fan. (Though I still consider myself an āElfmaniacā.)
I wanted to make sounds that could resemble something familiar, but not quite.
To make this track, I started with a public domain recording of a Sedge Warbler: https://freesound.org/people/SiliconeSound/sounds/475048/
I reversed it, applied a gliding stretch so it starts out at full speed and slows to 1/8 speed by the end (i.e. down 3 octaves). I chopped it up into 7 pieces and made the pieces overlap at tail to head. Automated pans make each piece move gradually toward the center.
Additional tracks:
I played two analog synth tracks (on Prophet Rev2) using bespoke patches. The tonal patch is using a 7-limit just tuning that repeats every septimal tritone (not-octave-repeating).
I applied distortion to the kick drum part I played (using puffy legato mallet) for āI am the Sweeperā by Diane Marie Kloba: https://music.dianemariekloba.com/track/i-am-the-sweeper
Everything was mixed with multi-tap delay and nonlinear reverb.
