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.
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