February 3 was the first class meeting for the new semester of the course I’ve been teaching for several years now about the role of sound in the media landscape. Taking off last semester turned out to be unfortunate timing, due to the release of *Star Wars: The Force Awakens*. See, my opening lecture each semester has focused in some detail on the role of music in the films and television of J.J. Abrams, from the various tweaks on *Fringe*’s theme, to the virtual non-theme of Lost’s opening credits, to his decision to employ a new theme for Star Trek, to his teasing extenuation of the Mission: Impossible theme in the film in that franchise he directed.
Abrams is so prolific in his directing and his producing that there has, each semester, been a new project to tag onto the sequence, sometimes to even include as homework viewing. After Abrams was announced as the head of the new, Disney-era Star Wars films, my lectures began to speculate what Abrams’ take on John Williams’ score would be. We now know, of course, that like the film itself, he has opted for an originalist scenario, going back to the first trilogy (that is, the “Luke trilogy” not the “Anakin trilogy”) and building on that framework.
There’s some notable sound design in the new film. The intense daymare experienced by Rey in the forest on Takodana has gotten a lot of attention for how, among other things, it manages to include [the late Alec Guinness saying the character’s name](http://www.ew.com/article/2015/12/20/jj-abrams-reveals-obi-wan-and-yoda-are-star-wars-force-awakens) by snipping a syllable from another word — all the more potently, the word “Rey” was culled from is “afraid,” very much Rey’s state of mind in that sequence. More impressive, or at least less fleeting, was the audible breath of Darth Vader heard when the camera shows that his grandson, Kylo Ren, maintains a shrine of Vader’s melted mask.
The class will proceed weekly through May 18, aside from spring break on March 23. I won’t be summing up all the early lectures each week, because I’ve already documented them fairly well, but I’ll link to the previous summaries here ([week one](https://disquiet.com/2015/02/03/sound-class-week-1-of-15-an-introduction-to-listening/)), and make note of any new developments. I have been lining up some great guests, including a technology lead from a major streaming service and a curator at a major art institution.
*This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the February 9, 2016, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound”email newsletter: [tinyletter.com/disquiet](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet).*
