Sonic Arrangements in Film
By an Audio Engineer Working in Film & Games
There’s a moment in every film—if it’s done right—when sound ceases to exist as an element and instead becomes an environment. You don’t notice the score. You don’t notice the footsteps, the wind, the doors, the silence. But you feel them. And that’s the difference between a good film and a great one: sonic intention.
As an audio engineer in both film and games, I’ve watched this truth play out a hundred times over. We like to think of a film as a moving image with sound glued to it. But sound isn’t glued. It’s integrated, sculpted—arranged. And if the arrangement is even slightly off—if the mix is flat, the sound design is cluttered, or the score lacks restraint—you don’t just hear the imbalance. You feel it. It’s subtle, but unmistakable. The film becomes uncanny. Untrustworthy. Amateur.
It’s easy to overlook sound when chasing great visuals. But sound is 50% of the film experience—often more. And like a good piece of music, good film sound must be arranged. That means the score, the design, and the mix aren’t three separate tasks—they’re three movements of the same piece. And if one plays out of key, the whole thing collapses.
Too much reverb on a footstep can make a hallway feel like a cathedral. Too much midrange in a score cue can bury a critical line of dialogue. Too much low-end in a design element might make your mix feel sluggish. The spectrum is finite. You don’t get unlimited sonic bandwidth. You have to choose what lives where. Something always has to give.
It’s about knowing when to let something go. Sometimes the best sound design choice is no sound at all. Sometimes the score needs to take a step back and let the atmosphere do the emotional lifting. Sometimes a single breath is more effective than ten sound layers and a swelling cello.
And then there’s bleed. One of my favorite moments in any mix is when the lines blur—when ambience bleeds into the music, when the score is written with the textures of the diegesis in mind, when a mechanical whir becomes rhythmic, when a distant explosion tucks perfectly under a bass line. That’s not an accident. That’s arrangement. And it takes time. A ridiculous amount of time. Tweaking the tail end of a reverb so it doesn’t cloud the next shot. EQing the low-mid hum of an air conditioner so it doesn’t fight with a voiceover. Choosing which of three footstep recordings sounds just right on wet gravel in this specific shot at this specific emotional beat.
People think audio is technical. And yes, it is. But it’s also architectural. It’s spatial. And it’s emotional. A good sonic arrangement supports the story invisibly. A bad one? You don’t need to be an engineer to know something feels off—you just do. It’s like staring at a crooked painting. You might not be able to explain why it’s wrong, but you know it is.
So, if you’re making a film—don’t treat the sound as an afterthought. Don’t slap on temp music and call it a day. Invest in it. Prioritize it. Respect it. Because when score, design, and mix are in harmony, something clicks. The film becomes immersive. Cohesive. Alive.
It might sound obsessive. It is. But art without obsession isn’t really art—it’s content. And we have enough of that already.
