U.S.O has published an interesting post about the sound and music of Saving Private Ryan, a film with the sound design of our Julys’s featured: Gary Rydstrom.

Gary Rydstrom (an excerpt from Surround Sound, Second Edition):

Since we hear all around us, while seeing only to the front, sounds have long been used to alert us to danger. In Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, the battle scenes are shot from the shaky, glancing, and claustrophobic point of view of a soldier on the ground. There are no sweeping vistas, only the chaos of fighting as it is experienced. The sound for this movie, therefore, had to set the full stage of battle, while putting us squarely in the middle of it. I can honestly say that this film could not have been made in the same way if it were not for the possibilities of theatrical surround sound. If sound could not have expressed the scale, orientation, and emotion of a soldier’s experience, the camera would have had to show more. Yet it is a point of the movie to show how disorienting the visual experience was. Sound becomes a key storyteller.

Also check: Sound and Music in ‘Saving Private Ryan’ at USC Sound Conscious