'Silence Is a Rhythm Too': Elif Duran on Scoring Empty Spaces

The mill closed in 1998 and the roof has been open to the weather since about 2011, which is why there is frost on the inside of the north wall. Two hundred metres of empty floor, a row of concrete columns, and a light that comes down in slabs through the holes where the skylights used to be. It is minus one. Elif Duran is wearing two coats and has a clipboard.

On the clipboard is a numbered list, and in a carrier bag at her feet are forty balloons. She walks to a chalk cross on the floor, holds a balloon above her head, checks that the recorder thirty metres away is running, and bursts it with a pin. The bang goes out across the floor and comes back in pieces, and keeps coming back for what a stopwatch says is 4.6 seconds. She writes the number down. Then she moves four metres and does it again.

Duran, 44, has scored eleven documentaries, all of them about architecture that no longer has anybody in it: a series on decommissioned prisons, a film about the last inhabited floor of a tower block, and 'Nine Empty Pools', which won things in 2024 and is the reason most people know her name. She is here for 'Concrete Sleep', a film about unfinished sanatoria on the Black Sea coast, which she has not started writing. She will not start writing until the balloons are done.

On measuring a room before writing a note

Why the balloons? You could composite the reverb afterwards from a library.

I could, and it would be quicker, and it would be wrong in a way that is difficult to argue about with a producer. A library reverb is an average of a room. This room is not an average. It is 4.6 seconds in the middle, about 2.9 at the north end where the machinery beds are still in the floor, and there is a flutter between those two columns that sounds like somebody laughing at you.

If I write first and put the room on afterwards, I write a melody that fits my headphones. If I measure first, I write something that this floor can actually hold. In here, that means nothing faster than about 52 beats a minute, and no chord change closer than five seconds together, because the previous chord is still in the air arguing with the new one. The room has told me the tempo before I have written a bar. That is not mysticism, it is arithmetic, and you can hear it in the way a city changes what music is written in it, which your field guide was good on, the one about why Berlin's reverb is longer.

So the building writes the score.

The building sets the constraints. I write the score. I have colleagues who talk about a place speaking to them and I find it a bit embarrassing, honestly. Buildings do not have intentions. They have dimensions and materials and a decay time, which is much more interesting, because you can measure it and then disagree with it.

On scoring to picture

What does a director actually ask you for?

The good ones ask for a length and a feeling and then go away. Hana, who I have made four films with, sends me a cut with a note that says something like: eleven minutes, they do not find anything, do not make it sad. That is a brief I can work with.

The worst brief I have ever been given, and I want to be careful because I am fond of the person, was silence, but emotional. I asked what that meant. He said, you know, empty, but with strings. I did the film. There are strings in it. I have not entirely forgiven him.

Do you write to the cut or before it?

Before, when I can, and this is a fight I lose about half the time. Editors cut to music if it is there, and if my music is there first the film starts to breathe at my rate rather than the other way round. When I come in late, all I can do is fill holes somebody else has already shaped, and you can hear that in a score. It sounds like grouting.

On silence as a rhythm

Your last two films are more than half silent. Is that a position?

It is a rhythm, which is a different thing. People say silence as if it is one object, but a two-second gap and an eleven-second gap do different work, and an audience counts them whether they know it or not. I time my silences the way I time notes. In 'Nine Empty Pools' there is a passage of ninety-four seconds with nothing in it but the room tone of a changing cubicle, and it is the most composed part of the film. I moved it four times.

Also silence is never silence. There is always ventilation, or traffic through a wall, or the recorder's own floor. That material is music, and the people who record shopping centres and car parks have understood this for years. Your review of that record made in closing malls got at it: the escalator is the bassline, so you do not write a bassline.

Is there a project you regret?

There is a film that was pulled two weeks before release and I am not going to discuss it. I signed something. And in fairness, I would not tell you even if I had not.

On the score nobody notices

What is success, in your job?

Somebody comes out of the cinema and says the building was frightening. Not the music was frightening. If they mention me at all I have probably done too much. That is a difficult thing to explain to a funder, and it is why I am cheaper than I should be.

Do you ever want to make something that is just yours?

Constantly, and then I have three days free and I go and measure a car park. I like the constraint. It is the same reason I keep going back to that pair who turn weather data into techno: they have handed the decisions to something outside themselves, and it makes them braver than they would be alone. I have a building. They have the sky. Neither of us has to have the taste.