Revealing the Monster Through Noise

One of the earliest ideas I had while thinking about the score for Mora had very little to do with melody, harmony, or even traditional horror scoring. Instead, I became interested in the concept of revelation.

Many horror films are built around a gradual process of discovery. The audience doesn't encounter the monster all at once. Information arrives in fragments. A shadow. A sound. A glimpse. A rumor. A partially understood event. Over time these fragments accumulate until a larger picture emerges.

I began wondering whether the score itself could follow a similar trajectory.

Around the same time, I had been experimenting with spectrograms and various forms of audio analysis software. What fascinated me was the way information could be hidden within noise. A sound might technically be present in a recording, yet remain completely imperceptible because it was masked by other material occupying the same frequencies. The information exists, but our ability to perceive it is blocked.

That observation felt surprisingly close to the narrative structure of Mora.

The audience is not necessarily missing information. Rather, they are unable to organize the information they already have into a coherent understanding of what is happening. As the story progresses, more of the picture comes into focus.

This led to a score concept based on progressive revelation. Instead of introducing a musical identity for Mora at a specific moment, I began imagining a musical identity that was present from the beginning but concealed beneath layers of sonic material. As scenes unfolded, portions of that masking layer would gradually disappear, allowing more of the underlying structure to emerge.

In practical terms, this could take many forms. Broadband noise could obscure tonal material. Dense clusters of frequencies could slowly thin out. Harmonic information could emerge from textures that initially appear abstract or chaotic. The listener might not consciously recognize the process, but ideally they would experience a growing sense of clarity as the film progresses.

While developing these ideas, I also found myself thinking about contemporary image generation systems. Many AI-generated images begin with random visual noise. Through a series of iterations, recognizable forms gradually emerge. Watching this process can feel strangely similar to memory or perception itself. Something appears to come into existence, yet it was somehow latent within the noise from the beginning.

I became interested in applying a similar principle to sound.

Rather than composing themes that arrive fully formed, I imagined sounds evolving toward recognizability. Musical gestures might begin as textures, become tones, and eventually become themes. Harmonic structures could emerge from noise fields in the same way images emerge from visual grain.

What attracted me to this approach was the sense of inevitability it creates. When a traditional theme is introduced, it can feel like a new element entering the story. When something is gradually revealed, it feels as though it has always been there waiting to be discovered.

That distinction is particularly important in horror. The most unsettling monsters are often the ones that seem embedded within the world from the very beginning. They do not arrive. They reveal themselves.

Although many of these ideas remained conceptual during the development process, they continue to influence how I think about horror scoring more broadly. Rather than asking what music should accompany a frightening event, I increasingly find myself asking what information the audience should or should not be able to perceive at any given moment.

In that sense, a horror score becomes less about creating fear and more about controlling visibility. The composer is not simply adding emotion to a scene. They are deciding what remains hidden, what becomes visible, and how quickly the audience is allowed to assemble the truth.

For Mora, that felt like a particularly appropriate way to think about the music. The story itself is built around revelation. The score became an attempt to make the audience experience that revelation not only through the narrative, but through the act of listening itself.