Going into a show like House of the Dragon, you expect two things: houses and dragons. The houses so far haven't made too much of an impression, but the dragons have been spectacular. Whether it's "old lady" Vhagar, "white boy who thinks he can rap" Caraxes" or "fidgety" 13-year-old Taylor Swift fan Syrax, all of them stick with you.
That's not me naming the dragons, by the way; that's Paula Fairfield, the show's sound designer. She has the honor of imagining what dragons sound like and then making it happen, combining all kinds of sounds from our own world into something wholly unique. “Occasionally, I will use a human voice, but I really love using animals from our Earth because their expressions are pure emotion,” Fairfield told Variety. “There’s no acting, no agenda, no trying to be something they aren’t — and babies are like that too.”
Fairfield mixed in some baby voices to create the roar for Vhagar, the oldest and largest of the dragons on the show. Ironically, Fairfield describes Vhagar with words like "tired, cranky and IBS,” but I guess that describes at both the start and end of their lives.
The second season of House of the Dragon posed an extra challenge for Fairfield, since it featured more dragons than at any other point before in the Game of Thrones universe. She got to help kill one in "The Red Dragon and the Gold," which climaxed with the death of Meraxes, the great red dragon ridden by Rhaenys Targaryen. “A lot of it was seals, pigs and some bird sounds,” Fairfield said. “Stuff that’s in the higher range that can be twisted and manipulated and has enough articulations that I can use.”
Then there was the spectacular sequence in "The Red Sowing" where a gaggle of Targaryen bastards competed to claim a dragon of their own under the watchful eye of Rhaenyra Targaryen, who basically locked the lot of them in a big cave with the huge dragon Vermithor and said "good luck." Right before that happened, Rhaenyra and Vermithor commune for a second, and he gives her a soft hum. He gives it again later when he chooses a new rider: Hugh Hammer. So that's the voice the dragon makes when he likes you. “That’s his tell,” Fairfield said. Everyone else gets the "fire sphincter," which is the chirp Vermithor makes right before starting the barbecue.
In that same episode, the hopeful dragonrider Ulf White runs off and finds himself alone in a room with Silverwing, a gentler dragon than Vermithor...but she's still a dragon, which means she's very scary:
Originally, these scene was going to be scored with music by composer Ramin Djawadi, but they ended up taking the music out so Fairfield's sound design for Silverwing could take center stage. “I was very proud because this has only happened a couple of times in my career,” she said. “They took it out because the story of her discovering him and sniffing him out and realizing this is my guy was told through her voice.”
The third season of House of the Dragon is in production right now, with a loose release date of sometime in 2026. Fairfield will be busy over the next two seasons until the show ends. If you've read George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood, you know that the dragons play a big role going forward, and that things get very intense. They get so intense that I'll preface this final quote from Fairfield with a SPOILER WARNING: “We know this is the war where they all end, so it’s honoring the legacy of these dragons to find their best, most beautiful voices even in death,” she said.
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