Welcome to Sync Music Matters, a podcast that explores the beautiful relationship between music and the moving image. 

My name is Jim Hustwit and I’m your host on this journey as each week I chew the fat with industry professionals who, on a daily basis, work with music and visuals.

Now you might immediately assume I’m talking about composers but I’m also talking about the editors, the music supervisors, the directors and anyone else who’s involved with the synchronous process of pairing of audio and visuals. 

My mission is to get under the skin of their recent projects, understand their relationship to these magical media and glean insights into what makes them tick and what makes them great at what they do. 

I’m all about understanding the people and understanding the process.

This podcast is for anyone who would like to pull back the curtain and take a look behind the scenes of what it takes to compose music for an BAFTA winning game, place music in an Emmy winning series or edit an Oscar winning movie. 

I’ll have my guests regale us with tales from the front line, provide practical tips and give us hot tips on new movies, series and soundtracks to look out for.

As a composer and music producer I have a very close relationship with music. And given that 99% of the music I create is for use in TV or film I have a close relationship with the moving image. 

That and the fact that from a young age I was seduced by the magic of the movies. As an 8 year old I pretty much wore out an old VHS recording of Star Wars that I recorded off the television one Christmas.

But what I perhaps didn’t realise at the time, is that the music of John Williams played a critical role in my love for this film.

There is powerful emotional synergy when the right music is paired with the right visual.

And whilst most people will tell you that they intellectually ‘get’ the importance of music in TV & Film, I still feel it’s underestimated.

As human beings, sight is our dominant sense, so it stands to reason that the focus is on the aesthetic. But music is easily 50% of the experience.

In the first episode of Sync Music Matters I interview Oscar winning composer Stephen Warbeck