A Quiet Place | Film Music Central

I have a mixture of thoughts about A Quiet Place, and its soundtrack. Regarding the movie itself, I’m slightly ashamed that I haven’t seen it yet (but most of you know my feelings on horror by now, and the entire premise of this film terrifies me). As for the soundtrack…believe it or not part of me finds it funny that the film has a soundtrack at all, as given the premise, it would almost be appropriate for the film to have no non-diegetic music at all. But have a soundtrack it does, and Marco Beltrami did the honors.

In this fantastic interview (full credit to Ashton Gleckman), Marco Beltrami discusses how he came to work on the score for this film, and talks about some of the things he did to give the film its unique sound.

(again, I give full credit to Ashton Gleckman, whose video this is, for this awesome interview with Marco Beltrami)

Having listened to the interview, I have to agree with Beltrami: having a film with almost no dialogue would be a golden opportunity for a film composer. Think about it, most of the time the film score is structured around dialogue, which means the music mostly stays in the background while characters are talking (this isn’t always true, but it usually is). However, in a film like A Quiet Place, with almost no talking, you basically have a blank slate to work with, and it sounds like Beltrami took full advantage.

Another detail I liked from this interview is when Beltrami talked about how he arranged parts of the music to reflect the terrifying world the family of A Quiet Place live in. It was something to the effect of “they’ve been living in silence so long that any sounds they do hear will sound wonky to them.” And that makes sense. If you get used to silence, sounds will start to sound abnormal. To that end, one thing Beltrami did was de-tune the black keys on a piano (to de-tune means to deliberately put something out of tune), which would automatically create a weird sound when you play the instrument.

I’ll leave you to enjoy the rest of the interview, and I hope you enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at how the score to A Quiet Place was created. Let me know what you think of A Quiet Place (and its soundtrack) in the comments below and have a great day!