Unsettling & dissonant.
For me, horror music is about tension, mood and the unsettling, and unsettling isn't the same as tense. Psychological horror lives in the unsettling: two things that don't get on well together. Two notes, two instruments, two keys, two vibes.
Play something sweet and childlike over a dark drone and it's instantly wrong. Push two notes slightly out of tune with each other and you get unease straight away. Take away the tonal home altogether, like the atonal composers did, and the listener has nothing to hold on to.
The tools here are the ones that do subtle wrongness well: broken pianos, unstable strings, voices and textures.
By Richard Pryn · Go deeper: Horror music theory made simple with X, Y and Z cells, 12-tone rows and polytonality
A library of dark sounds from The Newton Brothers, built from solo instruments recorded in their studio, orchestral sessions, field recordings and their synth collection (ARP 2600, Moog Matriarch, DFAM, Eurorack), arranged into over 130 presets.
A Kontakt Player instrument for thriller and horror scoring with 720 sources (including 324 jumpscares and stings, 144 tempo-synced atonal rhythms, 120 sustains and textures) and 332 presets across two engines, Psychosis Designer and Psychosis Menu.
A granular effect plugin that cuts incoming audio into grains and rebuilds it, so any source can be turned into new textures.
A multi-effect plugin that chains up to ten effects from 54 modules (filters, distortion, spectral, modulation, delay and reverb), with envelopes, a 32-step sequencer that switches modules on and off, and eight macros.
A polyphonic pitch-shifting plugin with granular, formant and vocoder engines, real-time MIDI control of pitch, unison and chord memories.
A movement-based effect plugin with five modules (Filter, Noise, Drive, Volume, Pan), a 16-step Beat Repeat, a motion envelope editor, an envelope follower, two FX slots, macros and three modulation generators.
A tape machine effect plugin, subtitled 'The Tape Abomination', that the developer describes as 'the little tape machine that couldn't'.
A five-knob effect plugin that the developer calls a 'Nightmare Shifter' ('The Shifting Nightmare').
A free buffer effect for robotic artefacts and glitches, combining a buffer stage, a multimode filter, a delay and three LFOs, with a menu to reorder the effect chain.
A whisper and spoken-voice library of about 980 sounds in 196 files (24-bit/96 kHz, 5.72 GB), split into raw, stylised and designed sets.
A collection of more than 375 dark drones, textures, ambiences, pulses and stingers (24-bit/96 kHz WAV, 7.6 GB) by Charles Maynes and Jason Payne.
A boxed electroacoustic workstation for building sound from motors, sensors, contact microphones and radio signals.
A pocket-sized, battery-powered wide-band receiver (SOMA calls it an 'anti-radio') that makes the electromagnetic fields around electrical devices audible.
A touch-controlled analogue instrument whose audio signals pass through the player's body via touch-sensitive metal pots.
A spectral-warping wavetable synthesiser.
A handmade acoustic instrument built to order in Ontario, Canada.
A collection of acoustic horror sounds made with composer Mark Korven, recorded at Revolution Recording, Toronto: 622 playable instruments and patches, including 49 layered instruments, 83 processed patches and sounds from the Apprehension Engine, hurdy-gurdy, oktav harpa and symphonae.
A string-based horror sound library performed on home-made "nightmare instruments": ghostly bowing, harmonics, scrapes and warped resonances, plus breaths, metallic textures, whooshes and impacts.
A cosmic-horror sound library of synthetic, textural sounds that feel almost recognisable: atmospheres, textures, braaams, horns, transitions, warped vocal beds and pings, as designed sounds and construction-kit layers.
A solo violin library of extended techniques recorded dry: pizzicato swarms, ponticello sustains, ricochets and tremolos, plus 40 pads and drones and 20 FX presets.
A sampled old, untuned upright piano with sticky keys and broken strings, in tuned and untuned versions, with separate string and key release samples, pedal noise, sound effects and 20 ambient pads.
A collection with the electronic duo Darkstar of processed analogue synth textures, sub-basses, icy processed vocals, London found sound and lo-fi drum loops.
Horror sound design made from live woodwind recordings (growls, chuffs, airy screeches, clicks), in three Kontakt instruments: a 16-step rhythm sequencer with over 700 samples, a four-layer hit and whoosh designer, and a three-layer riser designer.
A Kontakt Player performance instrument for atmospheres and tone clusters, built from 1,038 orchestral and hybrid sound sources (ambiences, voices, pitched metal, synthesised drones).
A tension and horror string library recorded at Budapest Scoring with 10 violins, 4 violas, 4 cellos and 3 basses, recorded as separate sections.
A phrase-based aleatoric orchestral library for Kontakt Player, with recorded atonal and dissonant performances by strings (60 players), woodwinds (19), brass (22) and percussion (3).
Contemporary string textures and effects for SINE, recorded at Teldex with a 14/12/10/10/6 string orchestra: long aleatoric and extended-technique performances plus a second set of processed sound-design patches (79 patches in 11 groups).
A low-cost Originals library of the titanium euphone, a glass-rod instrument played with wet fingertips, offered as the raw recording (close, room and ribbon mics) and as processed 'Warps' that range from shimmering to horror-like (20 presets, 3.5 GB).
Experimental vocal techniques from Lea Bertucci, Audrey Chen, Cansu Tanrikulu and Phil Minton (throat singing, whispers, shrieks, clicks, multiphonics), processed with tape, outboard and digital effects into 49 presets in Spitfire's own plugin (about 2.5 GB).
A prepared and extended-technique piano library for full Kontakt, sampled from a 1926 Steinway Model L: mallet strikes, finger mutes, plucks, steel-slide bends, string scrapes, harmonics, metal-hammer hits and glisses (4,127 samples, 9.53 GB), plus 77 ambience patches and 20 processed presets.
A small free instrument of bowed psaltery effects, played in Cinesamples' Musio plugin.
A granular-synthesis instrument for Kontakt Player 6.2.2 or later, built partly from violin, electric violin, tenor violin and ciola recordings by Michael Levine.
Three pianos recorded at the MGM Scoring Stage and Hollywood Scoring, played with extended and prepared techniques by session pianist Randy Kerber.
A bundle of three user-guided aleatoric brass libraries designed by Casey Edwards: Low Brass (two tenor trombones, two bass trombones, tuba), French Horns (six horns) and Trumpets (three).
A voice effect with pitch, formant, Ghost, Snarl, Ring, Drag, Echo and Warble controls and a Ouija-board pad that blends four settings, plus a companion instrument that plays 100 spoken horror phrases from five characters.
No tools match those filters.
