Impact of Music Technology on the Film Industry

This essay deals with the relationship of technology in developing new forms of musical expression in films. It focuses on how film music evolved from orchestras to the use of technology and how music technology has opened new horizons for film industry.

There is an important historical relationship between films and music.

Starting with the early film sound or “The Golden Age” (1933-1949) was served in special by orchestras, who did whatever was asked of them by the executives assigned to particular film for the sole purpose of making those films palatable to as large an audience as possible.

By 1935, the idea of movies had steered Hollywood not just in the direction of well-wrought screenplays adapted by camera-savvy actors but also toward a panoply of technical innovations that involved lighting, camera housing, microphones and the complete separation from a film’s image track of three different sound tracks each independently controllable in terms of both placement and volume levels. Not just in Hollywood but also in certain European centers of film production, during the second half of the 30’s mechanical innovation and aesthetic development existed in a symbiotic relationship. However things might have transpired day-to-day at individual studios, by the end of the decade the global audience for movies was being exposed on a regular basis to something that in general was vastly different from what it had experienced when the fully evolved sound film finally made its debut.

The moment Hollywood realized the fact that they didn’t always need conventional instruments for powerful films came in 1945 when Alfred Hitchcook invited Miklos Rozsa , a hungarian composer , for a meeting.

Hitchcook thought Rozsa would be ideal ...

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...flying cars. In this movie Vangelis soundtrack reflects and enhances out all future aspects realized with extraordinary detail by Doug Trumbull and his team, and this makes it not just a music score but an entirely soundscape where the city’s lights seems captured in the music.

The point from were sound design came from was an iconic piece of soundtrack that once it has been heard it was very hard to forget, so powerful that could be played out in darkness even before the first image to hit the screen. It was the sound of a helicopter, made by Walter Murch in ‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979) using electronic instruments to highlight the effect of echoing round the cinema, a surround sound format with multiple channels which will become the modern standard of hearing in cinemas.

Works Cited

Ben Kettlewell (2001). Electronic Music Pioneers. USA: Artistpro. 286