What each choice does
- Synchronised sound gives a scene reality, weight and grit. Where those are what the scene wants, the effect goes in, and one reply judged that to be most of the time.
- Leaving it out produces detachment and a degree of unreality, and opens space for the audience to interpret what they are seeing.
- Silence rarely stands alone. Removing effects usually means the score carries the moment instead, so the decision is a handover rather than an absence.
- One contributor put big emotional beats in that category specifically: often better served by score than by effects.
Why it is hard to do
Two obstacles were named, and neither is technical. The first is that it takes agreement — a director and a re-recording mixer have to be willing, which one reply called for bluntly. The second is closer to home: the temptation to demonstrate the work. Several people described the pull towards layered, detailed, obviously-designed sound, and the difficulty of judging the whole soundtrack objectively once your own effort is invested in it.
The argument for restraint
- The recurring diagnosis was a lack of space, and one reply extended it past sound to picture: fast cutting, dense effects and continuous score together give an audience nothing to rest on, and the response is to disengage.
- Less to attend to was described as producing more control over where attention goes, and deeper immersion as a result.
- One contributor working in game audio described the same thing as an editing job: asset lists arrive asking for everything to make a noise, and part of the work is cutting that list down to what is actually needed — even when the contract pays per sound.
- Nobody argued for restraint as a rule. The stated position was that some scenes want the dense layered treatment, and the craft is knowing which.
How the thread framed the judgement
It was treated openly as a question of taste rather than of correctness, and the useful reframing was that sound design is subjective by nature and that pretending otherwise misunderstands what the role is for. The test people described applying was not whether a sound is possible or expected, but whether there is a clear motive for it — and the same test, applied to silence, is what makes silence defensible when it comes off.