Music and sound sit at the centre of how live experiences are felt, remembered, and understood. They carry emotional momentum, reinforce narrative, and connect audiences to moments unfolding across scale, technology, and environment.
While audiences may remember visuals, spectacle, or staging, it is often the music and sound that stay with them long after the experience ends. They shape emotional recall and provide continuity across moments that might otherwise feel disconnected.
At ON THE SLY, our role isn’t simply to deliver audio. We engage directly in the creative thinking that shapes how an experience moves, lands, and resonates. When involved early, our perspective can help clarify narrative direction, strengthen audience connection, and reveal opportunities that may otherwise remain hidden. From first conversations through to delivery, we work alongside creative directors, producers, and collaborators to ensure music and sound support the wider vision while maintaining their own narrative weight.
The way we approach this work has evolved through years of involvement in complex productions across broadcast, ceremony, spectacle, and immersive environments. It isn’t a formula. It’s a perspective shaped by experience, collaboration, and an understanding of how audio is received and interpreted by large audiences in real contexts.
Large-scale experiences are collaborative systems. Music and sound rarely operate in isolation. They interact continuously with choreography, lighting, visuals, broadcast requirements, staging, and technical constraints. Decisions made early in the creative process can influence timing, clarity, and emotional pacing throughout a project.
As scale increases, so does complexity. Creative ideas need to translate across multiple partners, disciplines, and audiences, often under evolving conditions and compressed timelines. In this environment, music and audio can either reinforce cohesion or introduce friction, depending on how clearly their role is considered from the outset.
Our experience has shown that strong outcomes are supported by thoughtful interrogation of intent, open exploration of creative direction, and clear articulation of ideas across stakeholders. These principles inform the way we engage with projects and underpin the approach outlined below.
Every project is different, shaped by its audience, collaborators, environment, and creative ambition. Because of that, we don’t apply a fixed formula or rigid workflow. Instead, we approach each engagement through a consistent way of thinking that helps us navigate complexity while remaining responsive to the needs of the project.
Over time, our experience has led us to view music and audio direction through three interconnected lenses. These lenses aren’t sequential steps as much as areas of focus that inform one another throughout the process. Together, they help ensure that creative intent is understood clearly, explored openly, and communicated effectively across teams.
The model below offers a simple representation of this perspective.
We begin by listening closely to the creative vision and context surrounding a project. This includes narrative objectives, emotional goals, audience considerations, and the wider creative environment in which music and sound will operate. Establishing clarity here provides a foundation for meaningful creative exploration.
From this understanding, we explore potential musical and sonic directions. References, textures, tonal palettes, and conceptual routes are considered to shape an audio world that complements and strengthens the wider experience. This stage allows space for both familiar solutions and unexpected possibilities.
Every project begins with a vision, but that vision often exists at multiple levels. There is the immediate brief, and there is the broader narrative or emotional ambition that sits behind it. Our starting point is to listen carefully and understand both.
We explore what the audience should feel, how the experience unfolds over time, and how music and sound will interact with visual storytelling, physical space, and technical execution. Cultural context, pacing, duration, and reference points all contribute to building a clear picture of intent.
This stage is not about proposing solutions. It is about establishing shared clarity. When creative intent is understood thoroughly, later decisions become more focused, and collaboration across disciplines becomes easier and more productive.
Once intent is clear, attention shifts toward exploration. Music and sound rarely emerge fully formed. They are developed through testing ideas, drawing on references, and considering how tone, texture, rhythm, and style might influence audience perception.
Describing music in words can be imprecise. Terms like warm, cinematic, or energetic often carry different meanings for different collaborators. To create shared understanding, we build audio mood boards and discuss specific examples together, exploring why certain references resonate or fall short. These conversations help isolate the elements that matter most, whether that is instrumentation, structure, pacing, melody, or emotional character.
We gather inspiration from diverse sources, including film, performance, broadcast, and our own project experience, allowing different perspectives to inform creative direction. Multiple routes are explored, sometimes familiar and dependable, sometimes unexpected and exploratory, each offering a distinct way of supporting the wider experience.
The aim is not simply to present possibilities, but to define an audio identity that feels coherent, intentional, and aligned with the broader creative environment. Exploration helps us arrive at direction with clarity, ensuring that music and sound contribute meaningfully to the experience rather than existing as interchangeable choices.
Creative ideas gain momentum when they are understood and shared across collaborators. Presenting musical and sonic direction involves more than documentation. It requires communication that conveys intent, emotion, and rationale in ways that resonate with both creative and technical stakeholders.
We focus on discussing routes openly, illustrating possibilities through audio references or prototype material, and building shared confidence in the chosen direction. These conversations help ensure alignment across teams and allow music and sound to integrate smoothly within the overall production.
By approaching communication as a collaborative exchange rather than a handover, we support collective ownership of the creative outcome and reinforce clarity as projects move toward delivery.
Our approach is shaped by the environments we work within and the collaborators we work alongside. Large-scale live experiences rarely sit within a single discipline, and our perspective reflects exposure to multiple creative and technical contexts, from composition and sound design to broadcast, spatial audio, and live show delivery.
This breadth informs how we interpret briefs, frame discussions, and anticipate the practical realities of production. It allows us to balance creative ambition with situational awareness, understanding how musical decisions interact with choreography, technology, staging, and audience perception.
Rather than viewing music and audio as isolated contributions, we see them as elements within a wider creative ecosystem. Maintaining this perspective helps ensure that decisions are made with consideration for the overall experience and the collaborators shaping it.
Every project presents its own context, ambitions, and challenges. Our approach is simply a way of engaging with that variety thoughtfully, collaboratively, and with an understanding of how music and sound contribute to the emotional life of an experience.
For those interested in looking further into how we approach music and audio direction, we have documented a more detailed exploration of this perspective. The document expands on the themes outlined here and offers additional context around how they are applied in practice.
It’s not intended as a prescriptive methodology or guide, but as a reflection of how our experience has informed the way we think about projects and collaboration.