Music in a Thriller- Jack Merren

The use of music in a Thriller is the key factor in creating tension and suspense. Thriller soundtracks are usually swamped in music stings and high crescendos to relieve moments of high suspense. A common Thriller would start with a gentle hair rising non-diegetic soundtrack that would set the atmosphere of the scene. Normally the scene would be filmed in low key lighting to add to the suspense and the lighting juxtaposition with the soundtrack would build enigma. The vision of highly strung violins creates connotations of an ominous scene as the technique of using violins in a thriller have been adopted by many of the worlds biggest thrillers such as Scream and Psycho to which the soundtracks have become bigger then the movies themselves. The crescendos at the end of a dramatic build up are normally sudden sounds of an orchestra that captivate the audience and release the tension. It is the musical sting that gives people the “fright” from a movie as if you watched a movie without the soundtrack you would not even feel half of the disturbing atmosphere that the film is trying to express. As well at the gentle violins that build up the scene a director could use silence to create tension and then using an overly loud musical sting to show complete power over the audience’s emotions.
The sound of a telephone ringing could create connotations of enigma as it poses questions at who could be on the other side of the phone calling such as in The Ring or When a Stranger Calls. The phone buzz while someone is making a phone call creates connotations of being lost because almost always there is something wrong with the phone or connection that restricts them from the outside world.


freeplaymusic.com is a website that we used to find curtain soundtracks for our Thriller. The music is copyright free so we can use the music without permission. The website was relatively easy to use as you just pick what genre or what type of sound scape you are looking for and the search engine finds tracks that you would be interested in. Also we found a wide range of sound effects that we can use in our Thriller which again has no copyright.

freesound.org was another site that we used to find free music tracks for our thriller. This site was different from freeplaymusic.com as instead of the site providing the music it was created by account holders that joined the site like other file sharing websites as YouTube. freesound.org has a huge library of music that was incredibly helpful as we have used most of our music from this site. Although many specific sounds we were looking for was hard to find because of the shear quantity of uploads on the site.

Unfortunately we were unable to publish our chosen music onto the blog, due to technical faults, the soundtracks we used for our thriller was the Apeture set and Darkscape. We used Herbert Boland's Cinmatic Boom for a sound effect. All pieces of music co inside well with the scenes, and all add to the dramatic effect of the piece.