Welcome back to Scoring for Films by Vito Lo Re and Fabrizio Campanelli. So Fabrizio, what lies underneath the dialogue? There’s a big problem to solve. There are joys and sorrows. Yes, mostly sorrows, honestly, because as I’ve said in many videos: dialogue is the hardest part for me to score, because it’s so easy to step on the dialogue’s toes and the first thing a composer should never do is "kill" the dialogue. If you want to keep scoring that movie...

If you want to keep doing this job! Then, if you’ve treated the dialogue well, if the dialogue liked you, and you liked it back, maybe you’ll even win an Oscar... We’ve identified six “Commandments,” we called them that a bit pretentiously. Six commandments of what to do and not do under dialogue. So, the first thing is to pay a lot of attention to voice-overs, In dialogue we must neither distract attention, nor, of course, prevent the audience from perceiving what the actors are saying. The wrong music can end up stepping on the dialogue’s toes.

But if that’s true for regular dialogue where you see two people talking, with voice-over we don’t even have the help of seeing their lips move. Understanding becomes even harder, so maximum attention! The brain uses resources. When it receives a stream to decode, it uses resources, like a computer’s CPU. To avoid overheating it, you have to keep the range of resources fairly limited. Be careful not to develop too many lines, because too many lines engage the brain and make the music too demanding, unpleasant or at least a kind of music that would require full attention, right?

The so-called absolute music. It’s absolute in the sense that the brain must focus solely on it. But here we’re decoding a stream with spoken words that, as you said earlier, are not visually anchored, and therefore are not aided in comprehension by the movement of the lips, so even more care is needed, attention, and we must avoid overloading those brain resources that are engaged in paying attention to what the voice is saying. And now we get to the second Commandment. Textures, meaning those sound complexes that come from the interaction of multiple lines, assigned to various instruments, which can also evolve into what are called "pads": sound clusters that may even be not particularly defined. Even drones, actually...

Textures free us from the risk of unintentionally grabbing too much attention. If the music is full of accents, if it’s full of erratic rhythmic elements... The brain bases its decoding also on the level of disorder in the stream. So a low level of disorder, that is, high predictability, a steady rhythm, few accents appearing at least in a regular pattern during the musical flow, require less effort from the brain, because the brain is soothed by predictability. It says: okay, I’ve grasped this pattern and so now I can pay attention to something else that’s less predictable. In the most common situation — though it’s less interesting from a musical standpoint — like a soap opera, where there are long dialogues.

What’s underneath these dialogues? These big chords, these pads, these layers: chord movements that shift the listener’s attention as little as possible. Artistically speaking, this is really the most basic and lowest-level thing, no doubt. But many times it can help you get through a tough scene, or if there’s no time to come up with a particularly original idea. These homogeneous chord clusters that move very little still get the job done. Of course, they won’t make you a genius.

You won’t go down in the history of film music. Whereas others, perhaps, have made it into history... in different episodes, we’ve touched on this topic; those composers were able to bring into their musical language under dialogue creativity, imagination, communication, even entire worlds with very rich orchestration. Just think of John Williams: in one of our first episodes, there was a helicopter dialogue scene, with an incredibly rich orchestration. But handled masterfully, both in the choice of which timbres to let interact while the characters speak, or — as in the case of Thomas Newman — by always working with that lack of definition, that kind of ambiguity that’s his trademark, Thomas Newman doesn’t push hard on harmonic material; Thomas Newman uses a lot of open fifths without the third. And he also uses very little indication of tonality.

Or maybe he throws in something that makes you think of a certain tonal area in the harmony and then the melody goes into completely different keys. Always using very simple, non- redundant elements, the famous lines that our brain picks up indirectly while listening to the film: lines that are essential but not overwhelming. You need to avoid chords that are too “definite.” If you do a I IV I V I with full chords, you’re not going to get good results. What we need are chords that are fairly undefined. The classic type of chord to use is either —as Fabrizio suggests—removing the third, or adding a ninth. So a major chord with an added ninth but no seventh softens the texture.

And that brings us to another very important point: John Williams is able to be very undefined. John Williams’ richness lies in his wide use of timbres, his wide exploration around a tonal center that is never stated, in a way that we can't clearly grasp at first because it’s touched by intersections of lines, but with an instrumental use that pays attention to another fundamental element, which is the Third Commandment. The Third Commandment concerns the individual voice of each of us; even if it may sound strange, our voice has a certain tonality; not tonality in a musical sense, of course, but it has a certain range. If you think of Bud Spencer’s voice, you imagine a deep, booming voice of a big man. All of us have this kind of tonality in our voice. Now, when scoring dialogue, it’s crucial not to step on that range, and how do we do that?

We do it by avoiding those instruments that might interfere with the voice. With Bud Spencer, it wouldn't have been effective in a dialogue to use a bassoon in the lower register. We’re often asked what is the best microphone. There is no such thing as the "best" microphone; it depends on the timbre it’s paired with. Likewise, here, if we have a very thin, very bright, very sharp voice, then we might be able to use, even effectively, the timbres in the lower register: bassoon, bass clarinet... otherwise, it will clash with what we call "masking": a phenomenon where our brain does a selection by prioritizing the strongest element within the same frequency range.

So if many things fight in the same frequency range or create confusion, our brain tends to isolate the strongest one. So, what can be used instead? Frequency cutting. I often cut the high frequencies of the piano. This makes the piano a bit thinner, a bit more muffled... but still rich in harmonics and frequencies...

so it manages to coexist much better with the voice. Fourth Commandment. Accents and solos always belong to that group of entropic elements that our brain tends to seek out... If we do this, people will start following the finger, because the finger, besides being in front, is also very unpredictable. Where will this finger go— this way, that way? So accents are like a finger waving in front.

That’s why too much rhythmic accentuation is distracting. Just like we said, solos are also distracting, because the brain, if it hears an important phrase from an instrument, it will focus on it, and therefore take attention away from the dialogue. Of course, let’s always take these rules cum grano salis. We’re not saying you can’t ever use a solo under dialogue. We’re saying that it’s better not to unless perhaps a thematic fragment refers back to something that the actor is saying, something that happened earlier in the film. Then that’s a different story.

But as a general rule, avoid solos. And Alex North used to say to pay close attention to the timbres he assigned solos to— he preferred, for instance, the alto flute or the piano with just a few notes, to be treated a bit more delicately in the film’s mix than usual—in other words, mixed lower. This is another very important aspect: the mix. And this is why the composer should always be present during the mix. Marco Streccioni once told me about a score he recorded with Fiorenzo Carpi; they finish recording, and Carpi says: "Gentlemen, goodbye." "Maestro, but we still have to mix!" "I’ve done my job, now you do yours!" Well, Fiorenzo Carpi could afford that. Those were different times; today it’s best for the composer to be fully present, especially because many times they might do things you don’t like...

Small note: Alex North never used trumpet solos under dialogue. Fifth Commandment: Avoid extremes. Extremes are harmful in life, and they’re harmful under dialogue as well. It’s best not to use instruments that are too high-pitched or too low-pitched during dialogue. Which instruments work best? Strings, certainly.

The English horn, the oboe in its first octave—avoid the high register, obviously— and french horns, which have this wonderful ability to tie the orchestra sound together: a single held horn note can beautifully bind a sequence of chords. In fact, many great mix engineers say they prefer the horn texture under dialogue, because it’s effective and soft. In fact, it sits just beneath the central part of the human voice in frequency and so it creates a real complementarity that is both remarkable and very effective. And speaking of complementarity, let’s say that ideally you shouldn't write over dialogue, but rather around dialogue. What’s the difference? Take advantage of the pauses between one sentence and the next.

That’s where, with intelligence and taste, we can intervene. In those spaces we can fill in even something a bit fuller, but always with intelligence… and taste. Sixth and final Commandment. Don’t overdo it, then. We’ve said it on several occasions. During analysis you always see a rational use of the timbre, melodic, and harmonic resources we have at our disposal.

We already mentioned it at the beginning. The brain is a processor that decodes a stream. We have to make that decoding very focused on what is being described. The decoding must always support the dialogue, and so we should not overdo it with all those elements that, in the end, we inevitably organize and give to the mix engineer when we export the final mix of our music, which happens both in complete form and split into stems: multiple exports of instrument groupings so that the main mix can be split into different components; the mix engineer, if needed, can then work organically, not only in relation to the music, but also to the dialogue, and must interact with sound effects, ambient noise— a whole sonic landscape that will likely force the mix engineer to do a sort of re-mix of the music, because maybe the presence of ambient noise or some sound effect will require lowering perhaps a solo or certain instruments—the piano maybe louder than the guitar; and that’s why, besides full mixes, we also provide stems. Those were the Six Commandments; now here’s one I’ll add myself: don’t easily give in to the temptation some directors have of scoring absolutely everything, because in some dialogues, the best thing might actually be to leave out the music. The problem is, in many cases, directors are afraid of silence—or they ask you for that little “assist,” convinced that an acting performance that may not have fully worked can magically turn into an Oscar-worthy one thanks to the music...

We’ve done all our deep thinking, so now we’re ready to make every film dialogue Oscar-worthy and win the next BAFTA... we’ve got the Commandments clearly in mind, and then what happens?... A nice song chosen by the distributor or producer who doesn’t care at all about timbres or vocal registers… boom! Dropped right under the dialogue— you hear the sung voice hyper-compressed and everything we’ve just said goes completely out the window... See you in the next episode, bye!