Notes On A Score: ‘Resynator’ Director Alison Tavel and Composer Chris Ruggiero Talk Scoring Their New Documentary With Its Eponymous Instrument [SXSW 2024]

(Welcome to “Notes on a Score,” GVN’s interview series highlighting the composers and musicians behind some of the year’s most acclaimed films and television shows.)

In 1974, musician and inventor Don Tavel began developing a revolutionary synthesizer. Dubbed the “Resynator,” it was set to be the world’s first combination of analog and digital processes for instrument-controlled pitch detection. However, the world never got to see Tavel’s creation. as Tavel was killed in a car crash in 1988. He was survived by his wife, Tamara, and their recently-born daughter, Alison. Cut to over three decades later: Alison is now a tour manager for renowned musician Grace Potter with only passing knowledge that her father was a pioneer in synth technology. In 2014, she finally unearths the last remaining Resynator in an attempt to learn more about her father, thus beginning the unpredictable journey of her feature debut documentary, Resynator.

To no surprise, the film––which won an Audience Award following its World Premiere at the 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival––is scored using its eponymous instrument. Composer Chris Ruggiero (Minding the Gap, Emily the Criminal), was first introduced to the synthesizer through his own music blog, “Preservation Sound.” He was given access to the Resynator to compose the score and, due to the instrument’s unique construction and sensitivity to performance, had to redefine his typical process in order to compose with it. The result is a score that, though driven by a synthetic instrument, feels organic; certain cues, including some that feature a leitmotif designated to Don Tavel, combine both piano and Resynator to heartstring-tugging effect. 

It’s an element of depth that speaks to how much larger Tavel’s project has grown since its inception. Resynator merely began as documentation of Tavel’s work reconstructing her father’s original creation. However, as the connection between her and her father began to deepen, Tavel realized the documentary was actually a family story. The Resynator’s inclusion in the film’s score can be seen as a practical choice informed by the film’s surface level subject matter. However, by flooding the soundscape with Don Tavel’s creation, his voice is able to shine through after his passing. Better yet, the score is further informing Alison Tavel’s emotional journey, further cementing the film’s father-daughter story in a metaphysical way. It’s a quietly powerful artistic choice that has both reaffirmed Chris Riggiero’s talents and cemented Alison Tavel as a filmmaker to watch.

Alison and Chris spoke about their collaboration on Resynator and more in this exclusive conversation with Geek Vibes Nation, edited for length and clarity.

I want to start our conversation by discussing how you two decided to work together on Resynator. What were the initial conversations, and how early or late in the filmmaking process did those conversations start?

Alison Tavel: I learned about Chris ten years ago when he wrote an article about the Resynator on his blog, “Preservation Sound.” He had never used one, but he found an old ad and wrote about it. We became friends back then. Cut to a year or two ago. I want to score my film with the Resynator and I wanted to find a composer who could do that. The Resynator is very complicated and it takes a lot of patience, understanding, and enthusiasm to want to pull all of these sounds out of it. I knew that Chris was a talented, award-winning composer and I was a fan of his work and a fan of him personally, so it just made sense to see if he would want to use the Resynator. Who better to use the Resynator than the guy who wrote about it ten years ago and kind of launched the inspiration for me to go get it out of the attic anyway?

Chris, talk to me about your introduction to the Resynator. To get an opportunity to score with it now must be like a dream.

Chris Ruggiero: Yeah, it really is. “Preservation Sound” was a blog that I started because I’m really interested in antiques and technology. I have dreams of being in estate sales. [all laugh] People tend to think that you live in the present, there’s every future possible, and the past is the past. I don’t really see it that way. There’s an infinite number of pasts waiting to be discovered. I tend to spend a lot of my time and energy trying to uncover those pasts. “Preservation Sound” was about that but really focused on music technology and the tools that I use to do my job. I’m totally obsessed with weird, old things and especially weird, old things that are dead ends. The Resynator was one of these really remarkable dead ends because the promises it made were so unusual. It was obviously this incredibly sophisticated thing. It seemed so incredible that someone would have created something this complex, marketed it to this extent, and then none exist. I wrote about a lot of things like this and I ended up meeting a lot of people this way. Alison, I think you have an incredible amount of energy and drive. There’s all these things from the past that stay in the past and you manage to bring them forward. You sent me [the Resynator] and it was really fun to play with. 

Tavel: Did it stand up to the review that you did all those years ago? I’m curious.

Ruggiero: Yeah! It’s really different from most other [synthesizers]. The product category you would put it in is as a guitar synth, right? There’s been a lot of these things since the mid-70s. However, it’s really quite different. It feels different to use it. It captures a lot more of the nuance in performance, whereas a lot of guitar synths sound really cool and work effectively but my feeling playing them isn’t any different than if I played it on the keyboard. They’re kind of agnostic to the input. The Resynator, for whatever reason––the way it’s implemented––it’s a lot more dynamic and expressive.

As the person who performed the score, it must have felt really special to use a piece of technology that is so enhanced for performance.

Ruggiero: Yeah. Alison was adamant about it from Day 1 [that the score should be made using the Resynator]. It was a challenge because part of being an effective film composer is being creative and coming up with new ideas, but you also need a process to do that. I had to figure out a new process for this because the music had to sound contemporary. It couldn’t sound like 70s synthesizer music. Although there are things that obviously pay homage to that, the movie’s about now. It’s not about the 70s. It’s not supposed to sound like period music.

Is the entire film scored with the Resynator? Are there any organic elements involved?

Tavel: The Resynator’s featured heavily on every single track. There are a couple of tracks that are piano-based where there’s an ambient drone from the Resynator that’s happening underneath. I definitely got attached to some of the temp score that was in there.

Happens to the best of us.

Tavel: You can make the Resynator sound like anything, but piano’s hard. It just didn’t have the same feeling that I was attached to. We decided to keep those tracks as piano, but the Resynator does such a good job of creating an undertone, so it worked really nicely, I think. But, yeah, there are a couple of scenes that are 100% Resynator.

Ruggiero: There’s a lot.

You can hear it, but it makes the organic parts really stand out. There’s one scene that takes place in Colombia and there’s piano that plays over it, which is, I think, a perfect moment to bring in a different sound.

Ruggiero: Oh, you need to talk about that.

Uh oh. [laughs] Looks like I unlocked something.

Tavel: My dad had a record that he made in 1969 when he was 18. It’s him on piano. I wanted to incorporate one of those tracks at the end of the film so you could hear his voice, but then Chris had this idea to use my dad’s colorful arpeggios on the piano in the actual score. He created this theme and it made me so happy because [my time] in Columbia was really the first time, in real-life and in the film, that I felt a connection to my dad. The audience wouldn’t know that if they weren’t reading this interview, but that’s my dad playing piano. As soon as I heard it for the first time I said, “Well, that has to be Don’s theme!” What you’re hearing when I’m in the attic and I see the Resynator for the first time and we’re hearing my dad for the first time is a Resynated version of his arpeggios. It’s kind of like it’s filtered, but then in Colombia, it’s just him. It’s supposed to represent how I finally broke through and got to connect with him, the real him. It gives me goosebumps thinking about it. That was Chris’ genius idea.

Amazing element of depth in that choice.

Tavel: Thanks for noticing it, that’s so cool.

It’s hard to deep listen on a film because there’s images that you’re processing, but it immediately stood out to me because the score feels entirely synthetic.

Tavel: Did you hear the popping? It’s the vinyl transfer.

Ruggiero: I never noticed until last night. At movie theater volume, you hear it.

I heard it in my headphones, but I thought it was a filter.

Ruggiero: It’s totally real.

I love that.

Ruggiero: I’ve watched these scenes a lot, but I work at a pretty modest volume because I have to do this eight hours a day. I’d never heard it that loud and you can hear every little pop.

This opens up another conversation I want to have, which is the relationship between the edit and the score. Where was the film at in terms of the edit when Chris started incorporating music?

Tavel: We were at picture lock. We had been using temp score for two years, that’s why I was attached to it. We made a few changes, but Chris was working with picture lock before we ever put anything down, with the exception of one song that he started two years before that. I was cutting together a sizzle and I was like, “Chris, can you just cut something together that’s representative of what the score could sound like so people can get an idea of what the full score would be?” When he sent it to me, I couldn’t find a place for it [in the cut]. Then, when he came back two years later to actually start the score, I was like, “Oh, yeah, there’s an amazing cue that we never ended up using that’s 100% Resynator,” and it ended up in two scenes. It’s in Act 1 when I’m with Mike Beagle working on the Resynator for the first time and then the reprise comes when I’m soldering with Mike [Gordon] in Act 3. That’s 100% Resynator and it’s the first thing he ever scored. It’s still my favorite track he composed for the film.

Knowing that you were working with picture lock, talk to me about the process going back and forth. There must have been a very special and surreal feeling using the very instrument that the movie is about to score the dramatic momentum of certain scenes. 

Tavel: I think you [Chris] should answer that, but I will say, because I was so attached to the score, there were scenes that I was used to seeing … and I don’t cry, they weren’t emotional to me, they were just matter of fact because I’d seen them so often, and then Chris sent a score. It was the one where my mom was talking about her relationship with Don and how it started. He sent this cue over.

Ruggiero: It was one of the piano ones.

Tavel: It was piano, yeah, but there’s this nice little Resynator moment in it that completely made me cry. I’d never been emotional about the scene before. I was like, “Well, he’s doing a good job.”

Ruggiero: My whole process and studio is set up to feel invisible. When I’m writing music and making music, I really don’t want to be aware of the technology I’m using. I just want to focus on the image quality, what the pictures look like and what storytelling function it needs to perform. I really try to not have to think about equipment or anything. In this instance, the most profound way that this instrument affected the process was that I had to find a new process. When I started working on it, before I sent anything to Alison, I spent probably three weeks just working to develop a very natural and effortless relationship with it the same way that I have a natural and effortless relationship with the tools that I’ve been using for 25 years. Being in a situation where I had to use this one particular instrument, it forced a much different outcome than the stuff I usually work on. tend to work on films where the music has to do a lot of constant work structurally because it has a lot of heavily expository sequences where a lot of information needs to be conveyed. This film has a few bits like that, like the Brian Kehew scene, but this film is a mostly slow process of learning. It’s more about the emotional resonance than necessarily, “And then this happens, and then this, and then this,” and there’s always twists and turns. It was a much different kind of music than I usually write, and that was exciting.

Did it give you more room to explore?

Ruggiero: Yeah. If the music doesn’t have to do a particular job every 63 frames, the musical ideas unfold over time. The score is pretty thematic. Not every project is like that and sometimes you’re not able to do that. Because the music could be a little more gentle in this film, it didn’t have to be so structured.

Tavel: I will say, sometimes you have to let the Resynator do what it wants to do. I’d give the Resynator to producer friends, musician friends, and if they had this finished song and were just trying to make the Resynator do this one thing, sometimes they couldn’t figure out how to use it properly. It’s better to start with the Resynator because it will guide you into the song. Then, you’re like, “Oh, there’s the inspiration,” and then you build off of it. It has a mind of its own. You turn it on and it doesn’t do what you want it to do, and it’s better that way. Sometimes, it scores itself.

Resynator held its World Premiere as part of the Documentary Feature Competition section of the 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival. It is currently seeking distribution.