r/filmscoring

I organized an AMA/Q&A with Johnnie Burn, Oscar-winning sound designer, editor, mixer, and supervisor. He's known for his work on The Zone of Interest (which he won the Oscar for), Hamnet, Poor Things, Under the Skin, Bugonia, Nope, The Favourite, The Lobster, Waves, 28 Years Later, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and tons more. He's probably the world's best working sound designer.

It's live here now in r/movies for anyone interested in asking a question:

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1tjiitz/hi_rmovies_im_johnnie_burn_oscarwinning_sound/

He will be back at 3 PM ET today to answer questions. I recommend asking in advance. Please ask there, not here. All questions are much appreciated!

His new movie, Tuner, is out in theaters everywhere next week, starring Leo Woodall, Havana Rose Liu, and Dustin Hoffman, directed by Oscar-winner Daniel Roher.

Trailer:

https://youtu.be/rdlOZhl-nSA?si=fl-EMvv72dK-vdFS

Synopsis:

With his once-promising musical career over, he works across New York with his mentor Harry Horowitz (Academy Award-winner Dustin Hoffman), encountering a range of characters, including composition student Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), with whom he forges an unexpected connection. Niki’s safecracking work threatens his budding romance with Ruthie and pulls him into increasingly dangerous territory. Blending romance, drama, and the taut suspense of a heist thriller, Tuner also features performances from Tony Award®-winner Tovah Feldshuh, Lior Raz, with Jean Reno.

Thank you :)

Hi reddit - I’m Will Bates, Award-winning composer, and multi-instrumentalist behind Dumb Money, Immaculate, Imperium, Another Earth, The Looming Tower and many more! I’m thrilled to have composed TUNER alongside sound designer Johnnie Burn, from Oscar-winning director Daniel Roher — ask me anything!

• Release Date: May 22 (NY/LA); May 29 (Nationwide)
• Distribution: The film is being distributed by Black Bear Pictures
• Trailer: https://youtu.be/rdlOZhl-nSA?si=fl-EMvv72dK-vdFS
• Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Leo Woodall, Havana Rose Liu

Synopsis:

With his once-promising musical career over, he works across New York with his mentor Harry Horowitz (Academy Award-winner Dustin Hoffman), encountering a range of characters, including composition student Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), with whom he forges an unexpected connection. Niki’s safecracking work threatens his budding romance with Ruthie and pulls him into increasingly dangerous territory. Blending romance, drama, and the taut suspense of a heist thriller, Tuner also features performances from Tony Award®-winner Tovah Feldshuh, Lior Raz, with Jean Reno.

I'll be answering your questions on Thursday 5/21 at 12 PM PM PT/3 PM ET.

Ask me anything!

Hey everyone!, I have been a musician for about 21 years. Ive been composing for 3, Started a business film scoring and doing sound design 3 years ago and have amazingly somehow managed to get several short film jobs, one feature length and a lot of sound design jobs.

The last 6 months ive been slowly compiling a bunch of small compositions to challenge myself in my spare time. I know im not brilliant at arrangement or structure but I turned my practice into an album. Im self taught, never had a music lesson in my life. Taught myself mixing and mastering i was just wondering what some of you think of this work and if you have any criticism or thoughts? If you do i would love to hear!

Here's the link!

https://open.spotify.com/album/0wRZQpnLn1U1UZB9py09V7?si=gNzeRcl8SGGilY-0Kf\_wEw

Hi, I'm yakyubukomon
I made an orchestral piece inspired by everyday life called “Ordinary Days.”

I’d really appreciate any feedback or advice on the composition, orchestration, and overall emotion of the piece.

Also, I want to become a film composer in the future.
How do composers usually build connections and enter the film industry?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVMCDJAF9jw

Thank you for listening.

My best friend is creating a fantasy video game, he asked me to make something fun to walk around to in the world, here’s what I wrote:

Hello! We just released RESERVOIR, a MIDI/MPE pattern explorer , after a year of work and a lifetime of interest. Posting here because it was built around kinda forgotten scoring techniques and I'd value your feedback. There's a two week free trial at our website, long enough to figure it out and make something unexpected. It is not an AI music generator! Based on user selections there are a million + possible patterns, not considering automation lanes in a DAW or keys, meters and dynamics.

https://nomn.jp/en/product/reservoir

*Initially I posted a reduced description of the software which caused some confusion in comments around it being an AI music generator, when it is not! It's more like a post-serialist nerd tool for Xenakis lovers that can also do normie harmonic stuff as in the example. Below is the more complete description and listen to weirder examples on our website and make something even more particular on your own, there are zero presets :)

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RESERVOIR is a platform for exploring new (and old) musical pattern — a way of thinking about notes and their mathematical relationships as producing and erasing culture.

Algorithmic composition has a deep history that is part of a continuum of highly inventive and instructive thinking about what music making and "composing" might be. Before the 1960s, when minimalism and pop took over, there was a computational optimism that by pulling apart cultural inheritance and unquestioned norms would allow for a remaking of what's possible.

Serialism and its many branchings was only one early part of this conversation — and not the origins even. Just adjacent was Joseph Schillinger, a Russian theorist whose student Lawrence Berk founded Schillinger House — which became Berklee — and whose students and inheritors were aesthetically diverse, from Gershwin and Gil Evans to Earle Brown. Schillinger's foundational idea was interference of periodicities: the principle that complex musical time emerges from the interaction of overlapping temporal cycles, not from any single pattern in isolation. He treated rhythm as the primary organizing principle of all music, preceding harmony and melody.

Schillinger was not committed to atonality; he was committed to bridging mathematics, nature, and the arts in a kind of early-20th-century mystic way. Others followed with their own approaches — Xenakis among them — and when computers became available in academic settings, "computer music" became a field of research unto itself, with implementations of abstract mathematics, neural networks, and now transformers and diffusion models that will simply "solve for music" based on training data.

RESERVOIR is a resource for exploring the pattern logic of music making, not a solver — a reservoir, not an answer. A reservoir accumulates. It holds material whose origins are diverse and whose interactions are ongoing. What comes out is shaped by everything that has entered and by the dynamics of the holding itself.

RESERVOIR brings this lineage into a real-time DAW-integrated pattern engine — not to compose for you but as a vast tunable landscape. A polyphonic texture orchestrator that generates, perforates, and shapes 12 simultaneous voices of MIDI through a pipeline of mathematically grounded algorithms, each rooted in a specific tradition — and enhanced by a machine learning layer: an Echo State Network whose recurrent neurons hold decaying echoes of the system's own output, producing new patterns through the same kind of temporal interference that Schillinger formalized ninety years ago. It listens to itself and evolves continuously. It's not a step sequencer, though you can make sequences. Not a random note generator, though you can generate quasi-random microtimed clouds. It is a system whose internal logic draws on a century of thinking about how to organize time and pitch with rigor and surprise simultaneously. Future updates will add more logics, but as it stands there are more than 100,000 unique scenarios from which to find material or create textures or new frameworks for whole pieces.

The output is standard MIDI, very particularly timed, capable of microtonality. Route it to any instrument. Record it, edit it, build on it.

What RESERVOIR produces is not raw material. It is patterned material — patterns drawn from traditions and mathematical logics that precede and exceed any individual's claim to authorship. Composition has always been a negotiation with inherited structures. RESERVOIR makes this negotiation explicit, navigable, and productive.

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12 polyphonic voices stacked under a harmonic conductor with automatic voice leading — pad bed, ostinato, melodic line, choir, percussion, all sharing one harmonic spine. Also an index of density generators that mostly start from Joseph Schillinger, whose work in the 20th century was the precursor to the Berklee School of Music.

Output is standard MIDI, MPE-compatible, microtonal-capable, so it routes cleanly into and DAW sending to instruments from Spitfire / BBCSO / CSS / Cinesamples, and lets SWAM / Equator / expressive instruments actually breathe.

An Echo State Network (a type of neural network) sits at the core: recent output feeds back into what comes next, so the result is evolved in a stateful way— has direction, settles on a motif, drifts. Lineage from Schillinger, Xenakis, L-systems, Markov. Nothing to do with "AI Music" but rather the composers who were thinking abstractly about pattern and density for nearly a century.

VST3 / AU, macOS (Apple Silicon + Intel) and Windows. Free 14-day trial, no credit card. Audio + video demos:

https://nomn.jp/en/product/reservoir

To get started drop it in track and send the midi from RESERVOIR to a VSTi and map layer to different instruments and see what happens. .

We would genuinely value hearing how it fits into your work. hello@nomn.jp for bugs/requests.