"Everything in this film is driven by music" - Edgar Wright's Relationship to Sound

Edgar Wright is a British filmmaker who many consider an autor, for his distinctive storytelling through editing, visual style and unique use of sound and is personally one of my favorite directors.​​ 

Baby Driver is one of Wright’s most famous films, and definitely the most popular for its use of music. He had an idea for an action movie set to music and was inspired by certain songs, coming up with sequences to fit the song, rather than writing the scene and picking the music afterwards. As such, the entire film is choreographed to music. He synchronizes the characters’ actions and visuals on the screen to match with the soundtrack. 

An immersive technique in the film is the use of diegetic sound. Throughout the movie, the audience hears the world from lead character Baby's perspective. Baby suffers from Tinnitus and hears a constant buzzing. Wright uses sound design to play with this and subject the audience to varying degrees of it depending on the situation. It also functions as a rhythmic and tonal anchor, adding complexity to the sound design and blends with the soundtrack, contributing to the film's atmosphere, establishing tension and heightening suspense where it becomes more prominent. 

In Scott Pilgrim vs the World, Wright utilizes sound and the incorporation of technological audio in innovative ways to mimic the experience of a video game, complimenting the narrative. He said with the sound design he wanted “to create almost a pavlov’s dog response for people in the audience who have grown up with those sounds.” They created original video game sound effects for the games characters played in the movie and “worldized them through an old arcade machine” for the diegetic sound in the movie. They wanted video game sounds that had a similar nostalgic feel, but that were unique to the movie so it could match the action on screen and not be associated with specific real life video game actions in audiences’ minds. Sound Designer Julian Slater Interview

He very clearly has a passion for music and uses his love for it as inspiration for soundtracks, characterizations and plot. His sound design heavily uses layering, diegetic sounds as narrative cues (emotional, comedic, physical, symbolic, tonal, etc.), synchronization of sound with actions and exaggerated and stylized sound effects for action sequences.