How ‘Spider-Noir’s’ Artisans Created a Modern Noir Sonic Environment

Set in New York, Prime Video’s “Spider-Noir” stars Nicholas Cage and is part noir-detective and part superhero action. When it came to building the show’s sonic environment, composers Kris Bowers and Michael Dean Parsons, along with the sound team — re-recording mixer and sound designer Ryan Collins and Andy Sisul — took this into consideration. From the outset, the show immerses audiences in 1930s New York, and while set in a noir world, there’s a modern aspect to it too.

Cage plays private investigator Ben Riley, a man who has long abandoned his alter ego. But when his past resurfaces, he is forced to make a choice. Rain pours down as a shootout erupts, with Riley setting the scene in voice-over.

Parsons explains that the opening scene was the perfect entryway for conversations with showrunner Oren Uziel. Parsons says, “We walked into it very much thinking it was going to be an homage piece — 50% Spider-Man, 50% noir — and we were talking about that opening scene. We said, ‘Well, it takes place in New York. What might New York feel like to you, or what does it sound like to you?’”

This opened the door for Bowers and Parsons to bring in electric guitars, which can be heard in the very opening. Parsons says, “It’s the very first sound you hear in the show, and quickly on top of that, you have superhero-ish strings.” It’s followed by electric guitar and industrial percussion, which he describes as “very Nine Inch Nails.” Additionally, they used New York City trash cans to make big drum sounds.

Collins adds that when working with an IP as well-known as Spider-Man, there needed to be an element of familiarity for the audience to recognize the DNA of anything that had come before, but it still needed to feel different sonically. With the show set in the past, old cars and old technology worked in the sound team’s favor to make everything sound unique. Sisul says they used an old Nagra recorder to record sounds: “We would wobble it a bit.” He continues, “We also looked for old libraries of ours that were recorded 50 years ago and sounded pretty bad. But we cleaned it up a little bit.”

With the rain sequence, when the thunderclap hits, Sisul, no stranger to the Spider-Man world, had worked on “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” and worked to create the web sound, ensuring it had a grounded feel. Sisul says, “It was taking an old 2,000-foot mag reel and poking out the core and letting it just spiral out. You get that sound that comes with it. So we had a lot of fun doing that to build the opening, but that score too was driving us through.” The thunder sound was a combination of wobbling window of shades of the ’40s to achieve that old school thunder sound that was layered in with some newer thunderclap sounds.

Added Collins, “We would watch scenes, and having sound libraries that had been maintained — Andy, our other supervising sound editor Ethan Beegle, and my mix partner Nick Offer — we would watch scenes and say, ‘Okay, this sounds great and modern, but what old lo-fi sounds can we sweeten these sounds with to make them have that vintage feel?’”

For Bowers, nodding to the noir aspect meant focusing on really clear melodies and singable themes. “I remember the first meeting with Oren; after I’d seen a couple of episodes, I talked to them about how important I felt thematic development would be. Just seeing Oren, Dan, and everybody light up at this idea of being able to have themes that were overt, musical, and melodic was exciting for us. That opening, I think, was a really great litmus test for us to both try out the palette and also thematic material.”

The theme came together because, as Bowers explains, “Looking at that first version of his theme, it was actually written to the end of the episode first, because that’s the moment he decides to use his powers. Then it was going back to the opening and trying that melody out. Similarly, the story about Ruby — we went to the section where he’s talking about that love story and the tragedy of that loss and wrote a theme for that section. Then we went back to the opening, where he’s talking about being in love, and put the Ruby theme in there. It was fun to develop these melodies based on the characters and ideas outside of the context of that opening to make sure those melodies were full, strong, malleable, and able to be developed over the course of the entire season. We then built it out in this opening to explore all the palette as well.”

Bowers notes that the story is about a man who is avoiding becoming a hero again and doesn’t feel like a hero. There’s a lot of darkness in his past and his history. He says, “Writing a melody that has heroic aspects to it was important. For example, the opening couple of notes feature an octave leap gesture that is meant to feel like him swinging — this big intervallic relationship makes you feel like it’s something that’s leaping. But all of the harmony is both trying to lean into jazzy progressions and textures that are a bit different because of the noir story and also just having a bit more complication because of who Ben is as a character.”

Michael adds, “We needed to write themes so perfect for every character and Ben specifically that any one element of it could be extracted. In almost every scene, we tried to harness these themes, which hopefully, by the end of the series, the audience knows.” He goes on to say, “We spent exhaustive hours figuring out how to make Ben’s chord progression work in his darker moments. Then we asked how his chord progression could work with Flint’s melody if the two of them are talking in a scene together. Or, as Kris mentioned, when Ben is doing his day-in-the-life detective work, how could we turn that soaring octave leap into something that feels like him being an investigator?”

They pair turned to instruments such as the theremin. Parsons says, “It became the perfect bridge between classic noir plausibility and a modern sound. We used the theremin — which sounds totally ridiculous — as Ben’s signature for moments when he’s thinking about doing something spidery.” He adds, “We really strived to have that kind of connective tissue with all of the characters, all the villains.”