Comments on: Remembering Alan Splet

By: Siddharth Dubey

Siddharth Dubey — Mon, 19 May 2014 00:28:14 +0000

Very true the entire article. The small little details that are spread throughout this article really teach a lot of stuff you wouldn’t normally learn unless you were mentored by the likes of alan splet or randy thom. I totally agree with David lynch on how sound selection is so much important to begin with. The fact that we try to twist and process the sound so much is not right and the original sound should be what you want to begin with. I recently wrote an article on cutting backgrounds for film/tv/games on my blog – http://filmsoundreview.wordpress.com/ . I mentioned sound selection as the starting point to design anything good.

By: Samuel Justice

Samuel Justice — Sun, 18 May 2014 15:13:18 +0000

In reply to Randy Thom.

Randy, this comment is fantastic and something I wholly agree with. I have become concerned with game audio recently where a huge effort has been pushed on interesting ways to implement content and have it manipulate in realtime. This has shifted the focus away from the content that goes into the game, and places the “skill” on how the content can be manipulated. This is leading to more and more people believing that their project only sounds good if they are doing (sometimes overly) complex things with their sound – they have completely forgotten that it’s the sound that should tell the story and convey the emotion needed to support the story and/or gameplay elements.

By: Randy Thom

Randy Thom — Fri, 16 May 2014 00:23:06 +0000

And David Lynch is right about another thing… the sound you choose to begin working with should, with minimal or no processing, already have the emotion you’re trying to achieve. The hard work is always finding and choosing the right raw material. Trying to begin with mediocre raw material, and inject magic into it by processing it through a plug-in, is an attempt to deify gadgetry, not a good idea. Good sound design is like casting actors. You try to find someone with the right kind of innate character, you don’t rely on make-up to do the job. Splet was as great a caster of sounds as we’ve ever known.

By: Randy Thom

Randy Thom — Thu, 15 May 2014 23:11:13 +0000

It’s wonderful to see Alan’s name coming up again. He was a sweet man, with a charming dry sense of humor, and absolutely sincere and engaging no matter who he was speaking with, and of course he was so deeply creative. The creative process David Lynch describes is exactly the way the best work happens. It’s all about having the patience and intuition to try stuff until you discover something that works. You have a hunch; you do some experiments based on the hunch; often the experiments don’t produce anything useful for what you need at the time, but eventually if your ears and heart are open in the right way you’ll discover, often accidentally, a magical association between a certain sequence of visual images and a certain set of sounds. They enrich each other, and become one compelling thing, more deep and interesting than either alone. Alan was a true master at this process, and he thrived working with people like Lynch, Carroll Ballard, Phil Kaufman, and Peter Weir, who encouraged that approach.

I have to say again that these directors provided incredible canvases on which Alan could work. They opened doors, and he walked through them. Screen the great Splet sequences, and you’ll find they have certain things in common: There is very little dialog. There is very little music, or the music is more like sound design than what we normally think of as musical score. And the visual images are full of mystery. They are sequences that are designed visually, and staged, and edited in ways that invite… beg… the participation of the ear. Alan seized the moment, and filled our ears with enchantment.