At THU, we treat sound less like a finishing touch and more like a pivotal part in the way stories are created. A collaborative force that shapes the very essence of a piece across all media.

Three of our guest speakers at the THU Sound & Music online event, Nicolas Becker, Pedro Conti, and Mark Mangini, offer a useful snapshot of sound as not confined to one particular medium, or locked into one workflow, but increasingly central to how contemporary creative work is made.

Nicolas Becker

Most people know Nicolas Becker for Sound of Metal, a film where sound is empathy. Its design is the story, guiding you into an intimate relationship with perception itself.

What’s easy to miss is how much Becker’s practice extends beyond cinema. His collaborations with visual artists and choreographers push sound into something closer to architecture. In his work, sound is a medium that reorganises how we inhabit space and time.

Becker often frames listening through phenomenology, treating it as a lived experience rather than symbolic decoding. Recording, in this context, isn’t neutral documentation, but a way of choosing perspective and deciding what the world feels like from the inside.

Pedro Conti

But if Becker is concerned with perception, Pedro Conti often starts with rhythm. The THU community already knows Conti’s work across music-driven animation and image-making, where the pipeline flips the usual hierarchy and sound becomes the foundation the visuals respond to. Music establishes a structure in which then movement, composition, and image assemble around it.

Conti’s process sits closer to composition than actual production, or post-production. He treats sound as a kind of collective memory that carries cultural residue and texture, even before a single piece of frame appears on the screen. When you approach him for advice, more ofen than not he'll insist on one word: iteration. Experimenting without fear of failure, learning through doing, letting the work reveal its own logic over time.

Mark Mangini

Mark Mangini brings the long view with more than four decades in film sound, with credits that include Dune, Mad Max: Fury Road, Blade Runner 2049, The Fifth Element, and Gremlins. But his perspective is anything but nostalgic.

Trained as a musician, Mangini has consistently described sound design as organised sound, shaped intentionally in service of feeling. Essentially approaching sound design as a composer, he’s argued that if you take “music”  as a structured experience rather than a set of rules, then sound design often is the music, even when it doesn’t conform to melody or traditional form.

Beyond the studio, he’s also an active lecturer and public speaker, advocating for sound to be recognised not as a functional necessity, but as authored storytelling. Much aligned with what we are trying to do with this event.

 

Placed side by side, Becker, Conti, and Mangini represent three distinct approaches to sound: immersive perception, music-first construction, and compositional storytelling. What connects them is a shared belief that listening is an active act that changes how stories land, and how creative decisions get made.

At THU Sound & Music, we’re less interested in defining a single “correct” way to work with sound than in creating space for experimentation, and for new forms of collaboration across disciplines.

If you want to learn more about attending this carefully programmed digital event (February 10–12), follow the link.