Symbols of Sound
After nearly a decade, “Inside Out” characters Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, are joined by Anxiety and others in “Inside Out 2”. Once again, SoS joined the team by transcribing audio to sheet music for localization, allowing Riley’s jumble of teen emotions to be expressed worldwide. “Inside Out 2” is in theaters June 14.
Symbols of Sound’s latest feature film project is “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”. This was another vocal transcription project for foreign dubbing. SoS transcribed the vocal musical performances from the film, and created sheet music for dubbing of the non-English versions of the film.
To avoid giving anything away, we won’t say what vocals are in the film. Nonetheless, we can say it provided some “hairy” challenges for the sharp musical ears at SoS.
The Society of Composers and Lyricists’ 5th Annual SCL Awards were held on Tuesday, February 13th in Los Angeles, California. The Awards were hosted by Grammy-winning singer and songwriter Siedah Garrett. Garrett opened the ceremony with a barn-burning arrangement of her song “Shug Avery” from the 2023 film The Color Purple. She closed with her song “Man in the Mirror”, made famous by Michael Jackson, which Garrett co-wrote with Glen Ballard.
The ceremony also honored the filmmaker-composer team of Martin Scorsese and Robbie Robertson with the Spirit of Collaboration Award, which included a performance of Robertson’s song “Between Trains” from Scorsese’s The King of Comedy by 6-time Grammy-winning recording artist, Jason Isbell.
In addition to accompanying these acts, the orchestra performed Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn”, and the song “Somewhere Out There” from the film An American Tail sung by Zola Odessa and Danny Duran III in a beautiful “In Memoriam” segment.
Symbols of Sound handled the hiring and management of the orchestra and provided music preparation services. SoS has had a role in the music of every SCL awards to date.
Disney created a multi-language video of the song “This Wish” from the film “Wish”. The video features vocal performances in 29 different languages. Each of the non-English performances, as for all songs in the film, was created with the vocal transcriptions produced by Symbols of Sound.
The video is an excellent example of how accurate transcription and sheet music creation enables dubbing that can match the quality of the original language. It also showcases the highly-skilled localization teams around the world working in conjunction with Disney Character Voices International. A dizzying array of performers, translators, engineers, cultural consultants, and many others coordinate to create Disney magic in dozens of languages.
Click the video image to watch.
Symbols of Sound’s latest film musical project is Disney’s “Wish”. The film contained eleven song tracks which needed to be transcribed from audio to sheet music for use in localization.
This was a project that spanned several months. Various countries needed to start preparing performers to create the localized versions before final edits on the film were complete. SoS had to work from versions of the songs in an early edit of the film, and review later edits for any changes that affected the sheet music. SoS would then provide Disney’s localization teams with updated sheet music and a list of any changes.
While this may sound cumbersome, and presents obvious challenges for localization; it enables films to be released to audiences worldwide simultaneously. Otherwise audiences in some countries would have to wait weeks or months to see a film until local language dubbing is completed.