Guest post by Hunter Farris. This article originally appeared on Soundfly’s Flypaper

Have you ever gone back to your childhood stomping grounds and felt goosebumps from some profound sense of immediate nostalgia? Do you ever get that same feeling watching television or a film?

There’s something magical about a director or composer’s ability to create that poignant sense of looking back or the joy of feeling like a kid again, and the cascade of emotions that come with it, with image and sound. Depending on the project, it might be as simple as a well-arranged descending chord progression, or adding sound designto paint an expressive picture of a particular moment in time shared by many of us in our youth, like a swing set or a wind chime, for example. But there really is no one magical trick that works for all audiences all the time.