music serves in the place of most of the sound effects. . . . Music is in essence performing the function of rendering [the] impossible sound [of the debris], relating how the experience feels rather than how it sounds. Underscoring feeling has, of course, long been a common function of film music, but [here the music mimics the] energy of the lethal objects much more than any subject’s inner emotional life. (HtM, second edition, 503)For students who might want to explore the treatment of music and sound in Gravity further, we recommend a remarkable pair of blog posts by Kristin Thompson: Gravity 1; Gravity 2. These may be called blog posts, but together they add up to an in-depth backstory and scholarly analysis of all the main aspects of the film, including sound and music.
Here are the headings:
Gravity 1: Two Characters Adrift in an Experimental Film
[Introduction]Gravity 2: Thinking Inside the Box
An experimental blockbuster
Who needs psychological depth in a crisis?
Challenges and goals
Motifs and causal motivation
Character motivation, fortuitous events, and religion
It all worked
Screaming on the set
Follow the bouncing axis
The LED Light Box
Previs as environment
Staging without a stage
Iris in
Puppeteers and eyes
The sounds of silence
The space between
The section on "sounds of silence" in Gravity 2 consists largely of quotes, but taken together they offer a good summary of the director and composer's goals and methods.
