Audio Landscape Quotes

Everything I listen to is influential in some way.

The conception of background music is changing. You use less and less of it these days.

I think music is like little films, and it's nice to listen to music and really escape.

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

These days people wallow in enormous masses of sound.

There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

Music is the subliminal connecting adhesive in film, or at least in narrative feature films.

Music can help uncover that tone that's in the fabric of the movie. Sometimes it's very plain to see, sometimes it's not.

You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing. To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.

With animated film, you have to create the sonic world; there's nothing there. You get to color things in more and you're allowed to overreach yourself a little bit more, and it's great fun.

The sound world that I created for 'Avatar' had to be very different, really, than anything I ever created before. There is also three hours of music.

I think of each movie as a puzzle. The fun is in solving the puzzle: finding a musical identity for the picture, however that can be summed up.

Music was a vector that we wanted to build a universe around.

There are many, many nouns for the act of looking - a glance, a glimpse, a peep - but there's no noun for the act of listening. In general, we don't think primarily about sound. So I have a different perspective on the world; I can construct soundscapes that have an effect on people, but they don't know why. It's a sort of subterfuge.