Some thoughts on the sound and music in Green Valley,
with sound designer and composer Darren Miller.
with sound designer and composer Darren Miller.
The foundation of all music in Green Valley is the natural soundworld of the farm. Though we initially put together a lot of “note-y” music demos while cuts were coming together, the final film really called for all of the more traditionally musical stuff to take a pretty distant back seat. Most of the time there was enough musical and sonic interest in the natural sounds themselves, that we could just let them BE the music. Which was a real treat!
Oddly enough, that actually meant working on the natural sounds quite laboriously. There are only one or two things you hear that got popped into the mix exactly as they were recorded onsite. Almost every really natural feeling sound moment required a ton of alteration in terms of pitch and speed, sweetening, filtering, amplifying, editing, resonating, compressing, even (gasp!) cheating with additional (phony!) sources. Which isn’t to say that those sounds don’t really sound like you hear them in the film (I’ve been there! I’ve heard many of them in real life!) it’s just that the process of recording sound carries with it all sorts of its own baggage and colouration and quantum-like influence through observation.
And as much as we relied on natural sound sounding natural, we also explored the playful/generative aspects of sound manipulation when coming up with almost all of the more traditionally “musical” layers that made it into the mix. Almost every note or rhythm or sound quality or gesture comes from a natural sound at some level.
There’s a really obvious and simple example in the scene leaving the turbines; where we hear some solo cello notes, a bit of a cello quartet, and finally an electroacoustic mix - bordering on “lush” - containing the celli, some synthetic resonances, and some textural layers pulled from early demos. But the very first cello note we hear enters super subtly under the long droning turbine whine that Max initiates at the waterfall. We sweetened them to be uncannily steady and pleasing to the ear in terms of volume and tone colour, but the actual turbine screams themselves really jumped out in their raw form as something that could be blended or morphed into an instrumental texture super effectively. They have a really musical gesture to them as they get turned on one by one.
That’s an example where we just kind of took a real-world sound whole cloth and leaned on its musical qualities of pitch and sound colour. But we also extracted only the tiniest of notes hiding in some natural sounds too, slowly dropping their more dominant noisy qualities to generate very smooth sounding musical “pads”. These soft comfortable layers can then live firmly in the background as more natural sounds come into the foreground and scenes move on. For example there are a couple of super abrasive machinery squeaks in the potato harvest that get sustained only at their smoothest, softest, most flute-like frequencies throughout most of that sequence, and even I usually forget where those sounds originated from.
We do the same with little repetitive rhythms hidden in sounds too. Especially when it comes to machines. Most of the harvesting equipment gets rhythmic layers emphasized and extracted: from the hay-o-vator to the potato harvester to the pea tumbler. Some of the last sounds we hear in the whole movie are little traces of Henry’s thresher and bailer sounds getting looped and thinned out to a repetitive little ticking swish that blends off into the wind and restrained pitch layers that takes us to the credits.
That little pitch layer brings us to the only real exception to the primacy of natural sounds as music in Green Valley. It’s a softer orchestration of the notes from the piano solo that we hear during the Sam and Anne night barn interlude (played backwards). The sound of those piano chords on their own are the only material that I really came up with as a set of pre-written notes meant to be played on a traditional instrument. It’s divided into five really really slow bars of music, one for each season in the fall-winter-spring-summer-fall cycle of the film. Before we got super obsessed with all of the amazing natural sounds and their hidden internal contents, my idea was to have only these notes used throughout the film (with each season only containing the notes from its respective chunk of the cycle). And though we shifted natural, the seasonal blueprint of notes condensed into the piano solo IS still the only collection that I relied on when I was either layering pitches underneath natural sounds and/or re-tuning/filtering natural sounds to sound a bit more like instruments - but they’re very much a background structure in the final version. I really liked the idea of presenting them all together, in order, on such an exposed and delicate solo instrument when the film also takes us to an extremely intimate, fragile place with the couple in the barn.
It’s the only moment in the film where we pushed natural sound deep into the background at all, and I feel like this muting of the world really works with the visuals.
Darren Miller,
Composer and Sound Designer
May 7, 2025.
Oddly enough, that actually meant working on the natural sounds quite laboriously. There are only one or two things you hear that got popped into the mix exactly as they were recorded onsite. Almost every really natural feeling sound moment required a ton of alteration in terms of pitch and speed, sweetening, filtering, amplifying, editing, resonating, compressing, even (gasp!) cheating with additional (phony!) sources. Which isn’t to say that those sounds don’t really sound like you hear them in the film (I’ve been there! I’ve heard many of them in real life!) it’s just that the process of recording sound carries with it all sorts of its own baggage and colouration and quantum-like influence through observation.
And as much as we relied on natural sound sounding natural, we also explored the playful/generative aspects of sound manipulation when coming up with almost all of the more traditionally “musical” layers that made it into the mix. Almost every note or rhythm or sound quality or gesture comes from a natural sound at some level.
There’s a really obvious and simple example in the scene leaving the turbines; where we hear some solo cello notes, a bit of a cello quartet, and finally an electroacoustic mix - bordering on “lush” - containing the celli, some synthetic resonances, and some textural layers pulled from early demos. But the very first cello note we hear enters super subtly under the long droning turbine whine that Max initiates at the waterfall. We sweetened them to be uncannily steady and pleasing to the ear in terms of volume and tone colour, but the actual turbine screams themselves really jumped out in their raw form as something that could be blended or morphed into an instrumental texture super effectively. They have a really musical gesture to them as they get turned on one by one.
That’s an example where we just kind of took a real-world sound whole cloth and leaned on its musical qualities of pitch and sound colour. But we also extracted only the tiniest of notes hiding in some natural sounds too, slowly dropping their more dominant noisy qualities to generate very smooth sounding musical “pads”. These soft comfortable layers can then live firmly in the background as more natural sounds come into the foreground and scenes move on. For example there are a couple of super abrasive machinery squeaks in the potato harvest that get sustained only at their smoothest, softest, most flute-like frequencies throughout most of that sequence, and even I usually forget where those sounds originated from.
We do the same with little repetitive rhythms hidden in sounds too. Especially when it comes to machines. Most of the harvesting equipment gets rhythmic layers emphasized and extracted: from the hay-o-vator to the potato harvester to the pea tumbler. Some of the last sounds we hear in the whole movie are little traces of Henry’s thresher and bailer sounds getting looped and thinned out to a repetitive little ticking swish that blends off into the wind and restrained pitch layers that takes us to the credits.
That little pitch layer brings us to the only real exception to the primacy of natural sounds as music in Green Valley. It’s a softer orchestration of the notes from the piano solo that we hear during the Sam and Anne night barn interlude (played backwards). The sound of those piano chords on their own are the only material that I really came up with as a set of pre-written notes meant to be played on a traditional instrument. It’s divided into five really really slow bars of music, one for each season in the fall-winter-spring-summer-fall cycle of the film. Before we got super obsessed with all of the amazing natural sounds and their hidden internal contents, my idea was to have only these notes used throughout the film (with each season only containing the notes from its respective chunk of the cycle). And though we shifted natural, the seasonal blueprint of notes condensed into the piano solo IS still the only collection that I relied on when I was either layering pitches underneath natural sounds and/or re-tuning/filtering natural sounds to sound a bit more like instruments - but they’re very much a background structure in the final version. I really liked the idea of presenting them all together, in order, on such an exposed and delicate solo instrument when the film also takes us to an extremely intimate, fragile place with the couple in the barn.
It’s the only moment in the film where we pushed natural sound deep into the background at all, and I feel like this muting of the world really works with the visuals.
Darren Miller,
Composer and Sound Designer
May 7, 2025.
