Incorporating spectral composition techniques in film

When composed for film, spectral music calls for a specialised aesthetic approach that takes into account film music’s rôle in influencing emotive response.
To remain in compositional ‘control’ of a semantically complex sound world, and as a way of ensuring that new harmonic languages are in keeping with nature’s ways of shaping timbre, standard-bearing spectral composers for the concert hall, such as Tristan Murail, have advocated strongly an aesthetic which venerates naturally-occurring spectromorphologies.
While natural sounds can be used emotively and their abstract beauty brought into extraordinary close-up, this approach is not necessarily useful to the film composer who wishes to forge coherent and effective musical languages across different ways of listening.
This presentation presents work from François Evans’s score to the feature film 'Martyr', for brass ensemble and electronics. Techniques used in the soundtrack’s production, demonstrate ways in which composers can incorporate spectral techniques into traditional approaches for film music scoring, as the film composer confronts nature for control of pitch to emotive ends.