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-Pop Demon Hunters is an animat- ed feature that combines tradi- tional Korean culture and heritage with highly-produced music that's a signature of the genre. The film from Sony Pictures Animation was released theatrically in June and is currently streaming on Netflix. Maggie Kang and Chris Applehans directed K-Pop Demon Hunters, which is centered around K-pop superstars Rumi, Mira and Zoey. When they aren't on tour, performing for their global fanbase as Huntr/x, the trio are using their secret skills as demon hunters to protect the population from an ever-present super- natural threat. Gwi-Ma, the leader of the underworld, inhabited by demons, rec- ognizes the girls' power over the people and agrees to support a rival boy band — the Saja Boys — in an effort to win over their fanbase and steal their souls. Right out of the gate, the soundtrack for K-Pop Demon Hunters is filled with music, in addition to dialog and ef- fects. Michael Babcock served as sound designer, supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer on the project, work- ing out of Sony Pictures Post Production in Culver City, CA, where he has a dub- bing stage that serves as his home base. For Babcock, K-Pop Demon Hunters marked one of his first animated proj- ects, and he credits initial conversations with the filmmakers as the reason he was selected to collaborate on the project. "It seems I really connected with the filmmakers because of my music background," says Babcock, who is a graduate of the University Miami School of Music, having studied music engi- neering, Jazz saxophone and electrical engineering. "Some of the questions they asked me, and some of questions I asked them…After the interview, I'm like, 'Boy, I really hope I get this, because this, to me, is the ultimate right brain/left brain kind of combining my music side with the film side.' So it was that connection that got me hired." Babcock had initial conversations about the film's creative needs in April of 2024, a year before the feature would be released. "It was the most cross-pollinating… between the departments that I've ever been a part of," he says of the film's music, dialog and effects. "One really informed the other. One of the first con- versations I had with the directors, cre- atively, was about treatments. I needed a jumping off point as the creative sound person. K-pop has a very definitive sound to it, has a definitive sheen to it. It's very highly produced, very artfully produced, and I thought everything you hear — sound effects, dialog — everything that you hear needs to go through that lens. You're building a vocabulary." One of the first sound design ele- ments he focused on was the demon treatments, which extend beyond the un- derworld and the Saja Boys to Huntr/x's Rumi, who is always in the spotlight, while also hiding a painful secret. "She has her secrets that she's grap- pling with the entire time, and there had to be a vocabulary that you recognize for all the different characters having that same kind of treatment and thought." The filmmakers provided Babcock with a musical playlist designed to inspire him. Some of it was of K-pop bands and other popular American artists, such as Billie Eilish, and others were lesser-known singers whose vocal treatments were representative of their ideas. "(They) had these really interesting effects that added to the emotion of their actual singing performance," he re- calls. The music, he notes, was filled with reverb, delays and layered harmonies, techniques he'd employ on his original sound design elements. "Harmony was a big one," he shares. "Trying to actually accomplish harmony in the demon treatment voices — or I should say lack of harmony, until (Rumi) comes to terms with herself, and then things are in harmony…It was a process K-POP DEMON HUNTERS BY MARC LOFTUS HIGHLY- POLISHED SOUND EFFECTS SUPPORT THE MUSIC OF THIS ANIMATED FEATURE K SOUNDTRACK www.postmagazine.com 30 POST NOV/DEC 2025 Michael Babcock Babcock worked out of Sony Pictures Post Production.