This week we explored the practice of Spectral music/spectralism. Spectral music is where the harmonics from a single sound are used as the basis for a new microtonal scale. This interested me as it made me think about how sounds within films and other media can be used to then generate chords or tones which feel specifically related to a scene in a way that more common western scales and modes cannot do. 

I decided to take a short snippet from the beginning of the scene where we can hear the sound of a windmill turning. The sound was very short and had a limited number of clear harmonics. However, I was still able to generate a chord from the scale. I then built from this chord making notes pitch shift adding some depth to the original chord as well as adding in some extra notes. 

At first, I placed this string section at the start of the track. This created a very strong sense of unease from the beginning of the scene. After showcasing our work in class a few people suggested that this sense of unease maybe came too early. This was a fair observation. The scene feels like it takes us on a journey between the character of the killer Anton Chigurh and the older shopkeeper so I decided to rearrange the track and move the spectral strings to the point where the tension within the scene comes to a climax. This is the coin flip section, in which Chigurh flips a coin to decide whether the shop keeper will live or die. In moving the string section to this point, I think it gave the scene and tension within it more of a space to grow.