Tonight I saw an episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer called “The Body” in which Buffy’s mum, Joyce, dies from complications from having a brain tumour removed. I’d seen this episode before and noticed that it stood out as a significant example of interesting sound design.

In a radical stroke of genius in this age of Music Must Saturate Every Emotion, this episode has no music. This notable absence served to underline in the most compelling way, the human experience of isolation in grief. It conveyed the numbness and lack of overt emotion from Buffy as she comes to terms with the situation, and the of nervous awkwardness of her friends. There was no sickly swelling of sentimentality, or requiemesque musical lamenting, just the silence and the emptiness that is the immediate impact of the loss of someone close.

The state of nonexistence that Buffy later expresses, of suspension in the moment, is amplified by the silence. At the beginning of the episode, Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) enters the house calling for her mother and chattering normally and animatedly, presuming her mother to be in the house as usual and not suspecting that she lies dead on the couch in the loungeroom. There is an eerie silence, like the calm before the storm, the lighting of the set adding to the feeling of strangeness. The silence alerts the audience to feel that all is not right, and as Buffy closes in on the moment of finding her mother, starts herself to feel that there is something different about the day. The silence just before she finds her mother is almost howling with suspension.

A notable sound moment is when the paramedics leave Buffy in the house alone with her mothers body, waiting on the coroner. Buffy in a moment of dreamlike suspension and confusion, and accompanied by a soft tinkle of windchimes, opens the back door as the ordinary sounds of backyard suburbia, once ignorable in their trivial everydayness, tumble in the door as a clamorous racket , startling Buffy as if the sounds were assaulting her senses like some unexpected and unfamiliar enemy.

The absense of sound altogether as we jump cut to Buffy’s companions converging to meet each other before heading to the morgue, seems to leave them in their thoughts and us with ours, uncluttered by musical direction. It’s that moment in which you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, or whether to walk or run. Or who to ring and what to say. Later in the scene, silence is used to underline the awkwardness of a group of friends in grief who simply don’t know what to say to each other. Each time Anya talks, her voice grates out of the silence making her clumsy and embarrassing attempts to find some sort of explanation for the unease she feels (being not used to human form) more rejectable by her companions.

It’s all to easy to jump to music to explain emotion, and to direct our feelings. Most directors feel as if they ought to saturate the high emotional stakes in music, because not to do so is a language they’re either unfamiliar with, or perhaps a risk they’re not willing to take.

This is the time of the music video, and it’s often reflected in film and tv soundtracks. Full marks to Joss Whedon, Director and Screenwriter for this episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for taking the risk to let the sound work through it’s absence and through the use of sound effects.