The Emmy-Winning Composer Who Says All Sound Is Music | Amanda Jones

A speech and a film score are built the same way. You hook early, you earn the emotional moment before you spend it, you let the silent parts stay silent, and you get one crescendo. Composer Amanda Jones spends her career making those decisions in sound, and this conversation is about what writers, speakers and communicators can take from the way she does it.There's also the problem she solves before writing a single note: figuring out what a director hears in their head. She gets one creative call, sometimes with months of silence after it, so she's built a method for getting inside someone's imagination fast.Jones is an Emmy-winning composer and the first African American woman nominated in the Primetime Emmy score category. Her recent work includes Apple TV+'s Murderbot, National Geographic's Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time, and Tyler Perry's The Gospel of Christmas. She sits down with Pia and Kelly to break down how she reads a story, builds a sound from scratch, and knows when to get out of the way. In this episode:• The question she asks every director to find their "cultural focal point"• Why she chose a temperamental 1970s synthesizer to play a sentient robot• How she scored Hurricane Katrina survivor interviews without crowding them• The easiest emotion to write music for, and the one that's actually hardest What temp music does to a composer's work, and why it's a trap• The organizational system she learned working under Hans Zimmer and John Powell• Her advice for composers coming up, including why perceived proximity decides who gets hired Subscribe to Well Said for conversations with the people shaping how stories get told. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube. Find Amanda at amandajonescomposer.com and on Instagram @amandajonescomposer. Episode Timestamps1:09 Scoring a script before anything has been filmed2:40 The questions she asks a director to find their taste4:14 "All sound is music," and why she doesn't get writer's block5:09 How much of a movie is actually score6:30 Temp music and the placeholder trap8:28 Murderbot: building a sound for a sentient robot10:11 Why a temperamental 1970s synth plays the machine15:14 The movie that made her fall in love with score18:40 The easiest emotion to write, and the hardest20:03 Hurricane Katrina and the discipline of restraint33:22 The organization system she learned in Hans Zimmer's world35:05 Rapid fire41:29 Advice for composers coming up44:10 Where to find Amanda