Old bones and Tibetan chants: Game of Thrones sound designer Paula Fairfield’s amazing toolkit
Game of Thrones sound designer Paula Fairfield is always good for an interesting interview, responsible as she is for the “voices” of so many fantastical creatures. She recently sat down with SYFYWire to talk about some of the unusual and creative ways she brings dragons, undead polar bears and all kinds of beasts to life. “My driving thing has always been the suspension of disbelief, and creating a threshold of believability,” Fairfield said. “You give the creature a purpose, you create a personality, and in that performance, it allows the viewer to connect.”
The already intense experience of watching Game of Thrones is reinforced by Drogon’s thundering roar or the blood-curdling shriek of the undead polar bear from “Beyond the Wall.” We can thank Fairfield for the chill up our spinal columns when we watch those scenes.
Fairfield’s methodology is interesting; she invents her own backstories and mythologies, what she calls “sound prints,” to provide a richer base for her aural inventions. For example, she decided that wight-Viserion’s blue fire was an eruption of the agonized souls of the human beings trapped in the Night King’s army. She imagined the two giants, Mag the Mighty and Wun Wun, to be gay lovers, thus deepening Wun Wun’s need for revenge after Mag was killed at The Battle of Castle Black.
Fairfield also imagines Drogon to be the reincarnation of Daenerys’ late husband Khal Drogo, injecting a sexual element into the relationship between woman and dragon. (We’ve already explored how Fairfield used a set of sounds from dolphins, farm animals, seals and mating tortoises to generate Drogon’s roar.)
Fairfield thought about that relationship for the scene in “Eastwatch” where Drogon came face to face with Jon Snow. “Just imagine, if this is the trapped spirit of Khal Drogo in Drogon, how he must feel. For me, the story was that he met this man who is in pursuit of his queen. And he’s not happy about it, but in a weird way he’s saying, ‘Okay. I give my blessing.'” Some fans may say that Drogon is doing nothing more than responding to the scent of Targaryen blood coming from Snow, but Fairfield sees the benefit in mining deeper meanings, even if she’s only doing it for herself:
"I know it may sound kind of nutty! Of course, you know, the Targaryen story is the meaning. But then beyond that, there’s this other thing happening between them, and so I just tried to deepen the moment with another layer of sound, and it’s a layer that was natural, given what I’ve already followed in the development of the dragons. Watch the scene again, and you’ll see what I mean."
Assuming there’s something to Fairfield’s theory, Drogon can never realize his love for Daenerys. We don’t even want to think about what that would involve. But Fairfield points out that their bond is still strong, whatever its exact nature “He’s still her dragon. He’s still her protector. There’s still a great love between them. Have you ever noticed that she looks at him as though she sees him that way?”
Fairfield has also worked had to work hard to change the way Drogon as he’s grown in size, mixing in Tibetan chants and buffalo snorting to increase the bass in the dragon’s voice. “Buffalo make these low rumbling sounds, and their breathing is super cool. The trick is blending all of these animals so they seem to come from one throat.”
Fairfield used a combination of sounds to express Drogon’s movement through the air, including the beat of dragonfly wings and rustling parchment paper. And also recordings of rhinoceroses and whooping cranes. There’s a whole menagerie in Drogon’s throat. “It’s fun, because it’s a new palette to play with.”
Tackling the undead voices of Viserion and the wight polar bear in season 7 presented a challenge for Fairfield. “You want something to make your skin crawl,” she said. Also, the bear was half-rotted and frozen, so its scream had to reflect that. “There could be this weird rattling, some clacking in there — like a glottal, bony shriek.”
Fairfield collected 40 pounds of animal bones from the desert and hung them up on bungee cords to create a bizarre set of chimes in a studio space she dubbed “the boneyard.” She also placed bones in bags and crushed them. “I grabbed a lot of interesting sounds and textures that way,” she said. You can hear the bones rattling when the bear moves, as well as in its voice and the voice of Viserion.
Then there are those agonized souls we mentioned above. To capture this aspect, Fairfield turned to a group of passionate fans. “These people watch the show together in Chicago and they put their reactions up on a YouTube channel. They’re all artists and musicians, and they have recording studios, so I asked them, ‘Can you give me some tortured screams?” She also did a lot of work to amp up the sound of Viserion’s deep-freeze blue power breath, adding in high-frequency elements of infrasound and subsonic weaponry, rolling quartz crystals in bowls, and things like jackhammers, cannon discharges and blowtorches.
Working from her Desert Hot Springs studio in California, Fairfield doesn’t just create creature noises. She also made the soundscape for the collapse of the Wall, for example. Working with the idea that the Wall is reinforced by supernatural elements, she added weird effects to the cacophony of its destruction, such as Tibetan chants and a Shepard tone, described by Wikipedia as “a superimposition of sine waves separated by octaves” that creates an “auditory illusion.”
Fairfield says she has yet to learn what happens in season 8, but “If the Night King ups his game, I’ll have to up mine, too. But I love the challenge. And next season we’ll go out with a gigantic bang.”
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Fun fact: The Canadian-born Fairfield has been generating sound for TV and Film since 1995. Her credits include La Femme Nikita, All the Pretty Horses, Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines, Lost, The Mist and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan.