Music is obviously a huge part of KPop Demon Hunters. Songs are how the Huntr/x girls connect to their human fans and keep hordes of demons from entering the mortal realm. But beneath KPop Demon Hunters’ banging soundtrack, there is also a rich tapestry of sounds that each play a role in bringing the movie’s world of magic and monsters to life.
The job of crafting those sonic elements fell to Michael Babcock, a saxophonist-turned-sound designer whose past works includes The First Omen, Heretic, and Dune: Part Two. As a professional musician in his own right, working on a project like KPop Demon Hunters gave Babcock a choice opportunity to flex his creative muscles in ways that other types of movies don’t always lend themselves to.
When I spoke with Babcock recently ahead of KPop Demon Hunters’ return to theaters for a limited run of sing-along showings, he told me that part of what attracted him to the project was how unique its story about monster slayers moonlighting as pop stars was. He loved that the movie felt “like a niche idea on top of a niche idea.” But he knew that sound designing for an action-forward musical built around K-pop would be a technical challenge that required him to find creative ways to compliment the movie’s already-complex soundtrack.
Image: Netflix
“Of all the things that I’ve worked on in my career, this is probably the most wonderfully difficult because every single aspect of the sound had to work with each other,” Babcock said. “The music had to feed the sound design. The design had to feed the music and dialogue. It all had to be very, very cohesive.”
When Babcock first came on to KPop Demon Hunters, much of the movie’s animation was still a work in progress, but co-directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans were flush with storyboards and ideas about what kinds of sounds they wanted to shape the movie. Naturally, fully-produced K-pop songs would feature largely all throughout. But Kang and Appelhans also wanted KPop Demon Hunters’ magical elements — like its demon characters and the Huntr/x girls’ weapons — to have distinct sounds of their own.
”The music had to feed the sound design. The design had to feed the music and dialogue.”
The directing duo sent Babcock an eclectic collection of songs to get his creative juices flowing; some were K-pop tracks, but many were from artists like Billie Eilish and Imogen Heap. And that got Babcock to thinking about how K-pop music production techniques could inform his approach to designing the movie’s soundscape.
“It was a mix of really interesting vocal performances, but also distinct kinds of processing on the songs — whether it was certain kinds of harmonies or the way they were treated with reverbs and delays,” Babcock explained. “Each song emphasized different approaches to music production that K-pop pulls from to some degree.”
Image: Netflix
Layering and reverb became important parts of the “sonic vocabulary” Babcock built for KPop Demon Hunters as he developed a sense of what this heightened world and its magic should sound like. Figuring out things like how demons’ speaking voices should differ from humans was a relatively straightforward process. But action-heavy set pieces filled with music and background noise required Babcock to find clever ways of “sneaking sound design in without getting in the way of the songs.”
”Every creative decision here was emotionally-driven.”
“I had to make sure I was working with music, but — and this goes back to the concept of having a sonic vocabulary — I also wanted the magical sounds to feel organic and music-based,” Babcock said. “For the weapons, I actually bought a bunch of tuning forks and manipulated the sounds they made to create a sword-like resonance. Those weapon sounds also had to be in sync with the music, rhythmically, otherwise they wouldn’t compliment each other.”
During this weekend’s sing-along shows, it might be a little hard to hear how much effort went into making all of KPop Demon Hunters‘ sonic detail harmonize. But Babcock hopes that, as fans (re)watch the movie, they are able to pick up small details like the way sounds of city traffic feed into certain songs, or the fact that the Saja Boys’ forcefield of sexiness sounds exactly like a timpani accompanied by wind chimes.
“What I would love for people to listen for is how much emotion is in every single frame of the movie,” Babcock said. “Every creative decision here was emotionally-driven, and if you’re hearing something that really speaks to you, understand that there was an agreement on the production side that ‘wow, yeah — this is giving us exactly the feeling we wanted.’”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
