Adding the Soundtrack and Editing the Sound

Choosing the Music

 Now that the footage was ready I searched online for some music that I could use for the opening. I had already decided on using a song that I had heard from an episode of Castle which I felt would really fit the murder scene. 

Thus I added the song 'No Envy, No Fear' by Joshua Radlin for the murder scene and kept looking for audio for the scenes of the detective. Typically in moves when a protagonist is getting dressed in the morning, cheerful and upbeat music plays in the background. Here, however, the sequence is quite dark; we've just witnessed a murder. I wanted a more serious type of non-diegetic sound which would not sound too cheerful.

Ultimately I settled for a song that I found whilst searching on YouTube for serious music called 'It's All Downhill From Here' by Amy Kuney ft. Tim Myers. I felt that it struck the right balance between upbeat and sober. The music itself has a slightly cheerful tone but the lyrics and vocals stop it from being too happy. The turn that the movie is about to take is indicated by the song title itself, things are indeed, going to go downhill for the detective as she starts investigating the crime.

Editing the Sound

I kept most of the non-diegetic background music at a constant volume of -16db, using the audio gain feature to do so. However, the non-diegetic music in the murder scene is somewhat loud since there was no dialogue or important ambient noise that was used as well in this scene.

The diegetic ambient noises were usually kept at a volume of around -18db and the dialogue sounds were not changed but kept as they were so they would be clearly audible. I also used an Exponential Fade audio transition to transition from the soundtrack music to the phone ringing and a Constant Gain transition to return to the soundtrack music once the phone call was done so that there would be no other noise during the important dialogue bit.