The 5th Annual SCL Awards

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.

Wish Multi-Language Video

Asha sings "This Wish" in 29 languages

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.

Wish

SoS transcribes a Wish for Disney

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.

Journey to Bethlehem

SoS takes a journey with Adam Anders

Adam Anders’ directorial debut, “Journey to Bethlehem”, is currently in theaters in the USA. The film, starring Antonio Banderas, Fiona Palomo, and Milo Manheim, imagines the biblical story of Christmas as a pop musical.

Anders and Sony Pictures realized that they needed more than standard film localization materials to translate a story told through eleven songs in varying styles. Symbols of Sound was tasked with transcribing all vocals from the film and creating foreign vocal sheet music guides for international translators and dubbing performers.

“Journey to Bethlehem” will have theatrical releases in numerous countries over the next month.

The Marvels film poster

A Marvel-ous Autumn

As summer wound down, work picked up at Symbols of Sound. The autumn months at SoS have had a breathtaking amount of activity including…

  • music preparation for a orchestral studio recording of a stage musical
  • music preparation for 4 big band charts from hand-written scores
  • vocal transcription for over 100 episodes of television
  • vocal transcription for 3 feature films, 2 of which were musicals.

The first of the feature films, The Marvels, was not a musical; however it had a surprising number of vocals that were an important part of the story. Disney needed to ensure the vocals were transcribed properly for foreign dubbing, and turned to SoS once again.

The Marvels releases in theaters on Friday, November 10, 2023.