Hollywood director and producer J.J. Abrams is (in)famous for over-using the so called “lens flare effect” in his movies. An example of this is in his 2009 Star Trek reboot, where I noticed them first as an obvious stylistic choice.

As annoying as these lens flares can be when watching a movie, one of the several explanations by Abrams of why he uses them so much stuck with me:

I want [to create] the sense that, just off camera, something spectacular is happening. (J.J. Abrams)

It occured to me some time ago that something similar could be done in music: Adding small elements, little sonic touches that hint at something happening beyond the current musical context. Those will make for a richer sonic landscape, like the illustration of a mythical creature somewhere on a medieval map: There might be dragons around the next bend or beyond the next island.

Some examples

First, a couple of more subtle examples of the lens flare effect in Phaneronaut music.

In Movement 3 of “Tape Concerto“, the second, more energetic half starts with a heavily syncopated ostinato in Flute and Clarinets and some counter-rhythms from a prepared piano sound. This is already a quite tense musical moment, but to add a little more depth to it, and even more explicit sense of “something is about to happen”, there are almost buried in the background small chromatic gestures from a kind of a fretless bass sound in its highest register:

“The Machine Awakens” from “The Song of the Machine” starts off with a more chamber-music-like orchestration, with instruments that sound like they were not played by an expert musician (because they weren’t; those samples mainly come from two libraries by Ink Audio). Progressively, more professional orchestral sounds mix in, and in one moment there is a quick little string crescendo happening in an otherwise quaint passage that foreshadows the full-fledged orchestral arrangement that will take over the piece a little while later:

Now for some much more agressive, obvious uses:

In what I call the “feedback section” of the “Professor Pepper” album, bits and pieces of later parts of the album, sounds or rhythms, float into and out of the feedback bed below them, hinting at things to come or picking up something that already happened:

Another example is “A Máquina Canta” from “The Song of the Machine“. Here the intro and the middle section countain samples that are from instruments not part of the main instrumentation of the song, like a full orchestra, slide guitar, organ, harp. These open up the sonic vista to something beyond the actual piece. Maybe there is an orchestra recording in the same studio complex and some sounds bleed through? Maybe the song wants to break free from its constraints itself?