{"id":46803,"date":"2025-09-06T06:34:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-06T06:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/46803\/"},"modified":"2025-09-06T06:34:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T06:34:07","slug":"kpop-demon-hunters-uses-billie-eilish-and-imogen-heap-to-protect-the-honmoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/46803\/","title":{"rendered":"‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Uses Billie Eilish and Imogen Heap To Protect the Honmoon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like Icarus, it\u2019s always possible for movie sound design to fly too close to the sun; too many audio layers and the sound of a moment can start to melt into a mess of nothing. So the filmmakers behind \u201cKpop Demon Hunters<\/a>\u201d \u2014 in addition to working so diligently on turning the film<\/a>\u2019s musical numbers into true bops \u2014 started working with supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer Michael Babcock very early, before animation<\/a> had even begun.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Babcock and directors Chris Appelhans and Maggie Kang<\/a> wanted to start figuring out the demonic voices for the evil boy band Saja Boys and for how HUNTR\/X lead singer Rumi (Arden Cho) would express herself in moments of stress. This meant Babcock, who has a musician\u2019s background himself, went to work studying the sound of K-pop and of pop music generally, in order to find out the right sonic approaches that would be fantastic and transporting, but still live inside the film\u2019s musical language.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"'Christy'\"<\/a> \"The<\/a> <\/p>\n

\u201cK-pop music is very intricate and has a certain polished sound to it,\u201d Babcock told IndieWire. \u201cSo it really gave me the excuse to listen to a bunch of different K-pop music and pop music.\u201d Getting the demon sound led Babcock to different ways of processing vocals, from computer voices to Billie Eilish and Imogen Heap.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI took a lot of treatments, the jumping off points they use \u2014 everything from reverbs to how they layer voices, how they all do the harmony because, I mean, harmony is a big theme in the whole movie,\u201d Babcock said. \u201cThe [demon voices] have a very specific treatment on it, a combination of reverb delays and coursing type things, which are all production tricks actually used in K-pop.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"KPOP\u2018KPop Demon Hunters<\/a>\u2019\u00a9Netflix\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

The sound of K-pop also hums through the other magical elements of the film, especially HUNTR\/X\u2019s weapons and the strange familiars that Rumi and Ji-noo (Ahn Hyo-seop) use to communicate with each other across enemy lines. The key for Babcock was to make sure, in each sequence, especially the more action-packed ones, that the sound effects were pitched to the songs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re in the beat. If there are any kind of hits, anywhere in any of the songs, they\u2019re to the beat. So that\u2019s a lot of fun. But also finding an organic way to do that and not take away from those great songs \u2014 for example, the swords, I\u2019m super proud of them. I didn\u2019t want them to sound too processed, for them to have some organic genesis to them, so I went on Amazon and bought a bunch of tuning forks, and we manipulated those. They kind of sound like swords when they resonate.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the trickier elements to sound design on \u201cKPop Demon Hunters\u201d<\/a> was actually the cutest, most unassuming one. The mysterious spirit animal messengers that Ji-noo sends, a tiger and a magpie who represent the nobles and commoners of many Korean folk tales, needed to be otherworldly without being fully demonic. Especially if the tiger and the magpie have a name among the crew like Derpy and Sussie.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"KPOP\u2018Kpop Demon Hunters\u2019NETFLIX<\/p>\n

\u201cParticularly Derpy \u2014 they never say the name, but Derpy was a combination. You can\u2019t make that creature too scary. There\u2019s a cuteness to how it was animated. So it\u2019s actually harder on the sound design side to make something cute than it is [to make it] scary. A lot of Derpy is animal sounds layered with me manipulating my voice to be able to get the character to emote.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Emotion was the throughline for every sequence in \u201cKpop Demon Hunters,\u201d which is part of why Babcock found the work so satisfying. \u201cThis movie had some of the most challenging scenes, sonically, I\u2019ve ever worked on,\u201d Babcock said. \u201cBeing able to be rhythmic with certain things and be very strategic with sounds \u2014 the whole end of the movie, from the Saja Boys doing \u2018My idol\u2019 to the finale, that\u2019s one of the most fun, intensely wonderful, emotional things I\u2019ve ever mixed in my career.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

As with music, doing that work and sneaking in so much sound is all about the beats and the pitch. \u201cThere\u2019s actually more sound design than I thought we\u2019d get away with, and it doesn\u2019t sound different than how you\u2019d hear the songs on the album,\u201d Babcock said. \u201c\u200aIt\u2019s a combination of being exactly precise and, frankly, tasteful, between the music and anything else going on.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like Icarus, it\u2019s always possible for movie sound design to fly too close to the sun; too many…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46804,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[264],"tags":[746,18,117,597,19,17,4923,337,127],"class_list":{"0":"post-46803","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-animation","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-film","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-kpop-demon-hunters","15":"tag-music","16":"tag-netflix"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}