Silent Sound Design

The silent film era was a time of incredible creativity and invention. Silent Sound Design tries to bring highlights and key moments of the silent era back to life with sound design.

La Roue

La Roue (Abel Gance, 1923,) was ahead of time for its inventive special effects and fast editing. French filmmaker Jean Cocteau later said that “there is film before La Roue and film after, just like there was painting before Picasso and then after.” For the sound in this clip we used Tidalcycles live coding environment (Sebastian Pappalardo) and analog synthesizer (Robert Kroos).

The Wind

In The Wind ( Victor Sjöström,1928), the stunning Lillian Gish is slowly driven mad while the wind never stops blowing. Filmed in a smoldering hot Mojave Desert under extreme circumstances, the wind effects were created from the propellers of eight aircraft. While having intense imagery you never hear the actual wind. In this scene I tried to make the sound as I heard it in my head.

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s horror classic Vampyr (1932) has been given a full Silent Sound Design treatment giving a new dimension to the austere and unsettling atmosphere. The original voices and sound effects have been separated from the soundtrack to stay true to the original film. The soundtrack is then played together with the sound design by the Rotterdam Kinematic Ensemble.

Silent Sound Design is a collaboration between Robert Kroos and Sebastian Pappalardo both sharing a love for classic films and new ways in creating music and sound..