Listen again and it's easy to hear what Britell is talking about: as one melody continues, the notes from another evaporate as if the music is breathing. It's easy to see why Malick used "Les Barricades Mysterieuses" in "The Tree of Life."

The piece appears when Jessica Chastain's character, absent her husband, experiences moments of pastoral joy with her children.The ethereal nature of the music augments the goofy, youthful fun, suggesting that these fleeting moments will take on added significance once they're the subject of reflection. The suspensions are also there in "Adagio in D Minor," except it's one melody that resolves. In fact, the suspensions in the "Adagio" last for seconds, not milliseconds, so the sound is all the more potent. "Fire in a Movie Theater" and the "Hoffa" score have the same technique, except they're cheapened by the clash of drums.

While suspensions and their subsequent resolution are beautiful, their absence can have the opposite effect. Steven Price, the composer for the film "Gravity", was deeply aware of suspensions when he composed "Debris," one of score's more harrowing tracks. While it has more in common with traditional scores like James Horner’s for "Aliens," the track builds layered sound around a powerful, elegant technique that deliberately unnerves the viewer.

Price explained how he would, "take these notes played by the orchestra and cut them off. Your brain expects a certain decay of the note, which means there's this unsettling quality to ['Debris']." The lack of resolution happens throughout the piece: around the two minute mark, the strings do not have the opportunity to finish and Price piles on another searing melody. It is intense music, and it's meant to reflect Alfonso Cuarón's style: "In this film more than anything I've done, the music was influenced by how the film was shot. There are these long, continuous shots, and weightless of the camera was a total influence on the way I wrote the score."

But for all the dense sounds that help define the score for "Gravity", the music is at its most powerful when it is spare. The track "Aurora Borealis," which occurs when Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is at her most hopeless, is a minimalist triumph. The distant, pulsating piano almost sounds like a lost beacon, and the abstracted melody is a series of suspensions that are given ample time to resolve. Price adds, "It didn't feel right to be too complex [for 'Aurora Borealis'], so the minimalist approach creates pure emotion and resonates. My job was to be there for [Dr. Stone], rather than force things upon the scene." Unsurprisingly, this track sounds the most like Arvo Pärt's "Spiegel Im Spiegel," which is in the teaser trailer for "Gravity". The resonance of the notes reflects the austere beauty of space, so we project feeling onto Bullock's character. This is manipulation in reverse: instead of telling us what to feel, the minimalism creates an opportunity for feeling and the image does the rest.