Super Bowl LIV

As with the annual San Diego and New York Comic Cons, the Super Bowl is another enduring mass audience congregation both in the United States and around the world, and prime media real estate for all kinds of audiovisual advertising, not the least of which is the Super Bowl teaser trailer. In anticipation of an extraordinarily large audience, studios exploit the opportunity to roll out first or major previews of important upcoming releases, unveiling cinematic trailers on television which for sports pubs and home theaters means big screen airings. Here are just a few of said trailers we found especially interesting in one way or another in their use of music and sound.

Mulan

The first nineteen seconds of the final trailer for Mulan begin as a sort of epic prelude, with cello careening between the root and minor third and ringing piano in the upper register like tolling bells. Low, wordless choir (in the vein of a chant or a drone) and pounding drum accompany the expository dialogue following; we see for just a split second (at 0:25) the drum synching to an on-screen counterpart. The sword unsheathing a beat later also synchs; at 0:40 we hear the beginnings of Chinese traditional instrumentation incorporated into the arrangement. It’s very subtle and ambient, with winds echoed at the 0:57 mark; still, the Western harmonic arrangement and instrumentation take the fore. Notice also the liberal use of sound effects to incur additional tension at 0:57 and elsewhere, sounding somewhat like an analogue camera gearing up to shoot. From 1:01-1:03 we see some more obvious synch between action and the epic percussion. At 1:50 we hear more modern epic trailer sound effects; only at 1:55 do we finally hear, with the main title card, what a Western film audience would recognize as Chinese instrumentation. One could argue whether this instrumentation should have been more foregrounded generally, or whether its unveiling makes it more evocative and effective, but there’s no denying the decisions the trailer editors made here.

Black Widow


The colour of the timbre of the sound design in this teaser trailer for Black Widow is both evocatively dark and industrial while also remaining elusive and unidentifiable—much in the same vein as the film’s conceit itself, as we’re told we don’t truly know much about protagonist Natasha Romanoff’s past. As an exercise in intrigue, sonified, this trailer hits the mark—and without the signature Avengers theme, telling us that this is a new story. Little snippets of melody, as in at 0:24, leave the audioviewer wanting more—which serves the purpose of this teaser perfectly.

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run

The SpongeBob Movie’s spot takes a decidedly meta turn as we see Krusty Krab commenting on the supposed need for SpongeBob to neatly summarize all of the film’s main beats (as audiences have popularly complained trailers are wont to do). While he tries his best—with the clock ticking and generic orchestral trailer music filling in—the series of non-sequiturs that SpongeBob is known for usurp any semblance of coherence, which, again, works to the benefit of the teaser’s thirty-second form. 

Top Gun: Maverick

While Top Gun: Maverick’s Super Bowl teaser reaches for a grab bag of tried and tested trailer music tropes, such as the single piano note and the ticking sound, it layers on some new ideas too—namely, Tom Cruise’s belaboured breathing rhythmically intertwined with the more traditional musical elements, giving it a literal breath of fresh air. It even reinforces this point as the last thing we hear, at the end of the spot.

— Curtis Perry