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Soundtrack

Many of the sound effects were created on the Mixtur-Trautonium, an electronic musical instrument developed by Oskar Sala.

Hitchcock decided to do without any conventional incidental score. Instead, he made use of sound effects and sparse source music in counterpoint to calculated silences. He wanted to use the electroacoustic Mixtur-Trautonium to create the bird calls and noises. He had first encountered this predecessor to the synthesizer on Berlin radio in the late 1920s. It was invented by Friedrich Trautwein and further developed by Oskar Sala into the Trautonium, which would create some of the bird sounds for this film.

The director commissioned Sala and Remi Gassmann to design an electronic soundtrack. They are credited with "electronic sound production and composition", and Hitchcock's previous musical collaborator Bernard Herrmann is credited as "sound consultant".

Source music includes the first of Claude Debussy's Deux arabesques, which Tippi Hedren's character plays on piano, and "Risseldy Rosseldy", an Americanized version of the Scottish folk song "Wee Cooper O'Fife", which is sung by the schoolchildren.

Special effects

Once the crow attack and attic scenes were assembled by the film's editor, George Tomasini, they were sent to special effects department for enhancement. The film required myriad of special effects and Hitchcock commissioned the help of various studios. The special effects shots of the attacking birds were done at Walt Disney Studios by animator/technician Ub Iwerks, who used the sodium vapor process ("yellow screen") which he had helped to develop. The SV process films the subject against a screen lit with narrow-spectrum sodium vapor lights. Unlike most compositing processes, SVP shoots two separate elements of the footage simultaneously using a beam-splitter. One reel is regular film stock and the other a film stock with emulsion sensitive only to the sodium vapor wavelength. This results in very precise matte shots compared to blue screen special effects, necessary due to "fringing" of the image from the birds' rapid wing flapping. At Disney, Iwerks worked on the children's party, Melanie driving to Bodega Bay and the first two cuts of the crow attack sequence. One of the biggest challenges facing Iwerks was the scene where a number of sparrows fly in through the chimney of the family home. Utilising an optical printer, superposition of a group of small birds flying inside an enclosed glass booth made it possible to multiply the birds in the living room. Most of the optical special effects work done at Disney was done in the Disney Process Lab, on printer 10. This printer was made from Iwerk's own design.

At MGM, Bob Hoag, was put in charge of the optical effects for the sequence in which Melanie hides inside a telephone booth as it is attacked by the birds. Hitchcock had requested that he remove any shot where Melanie looked placid and urged that she be in constant movement instead. Bob, along with a team of 30, worked together on the blue backing and sodium matte shots. Linwood Dunn, a founder of Film Effects of Hollywood, was commissioned to work on the attic scene. He was asked to produce a rough cut of the sequence before Hitchcock before he left for Berlin in December of 1962. Bill Abbott, at Fox, was in charge of the optical effects for the crow attack sequence which would take six weeks to finish. Bill organised two teams, both working 11 hours a day, to work on the sequence simultaneously. Bill's biggest challenge was size ratio. He had to make sure that the birds looked like they were attacking the children by placing them in frame, while also zooming into the birds to make them in proportion to the size of the kids. Finally, at Universal, Ross Hoffman and Al Whitlock worked on the background shots of the town and of the birds in the trees as well as the backdrop for the river shots of Melanie's car arriving in Bodega Bay.