Soundtrack, The - Volume 1, Issue 3, 2008

Incidental music, once largely confined to drama, is now a characteristic of documentaries as well as other factual programmes including even current affairs and sport. The young, at least, now seem to live in a culture where music is expected to be readily available, at any time and in almost any circumstances, and many programme makers seem persuaded that only if their programmes are sexed-up with music will they appeal to the widest audience. However, not everyone appreciates this trend and complaints to the broadcasters are at record levels. For many it is an irritation, but for the hearing-impaired incidental music can easily render accompanying speech unintelligible.

This article seeks to explore the historical and industrial determinants which have informed the use of, often inappropriate, incidental music and to offer suggestions for remedy. The focus of this paper is on programmes, which are generally of a factual nature, often called actuality programmes.

This paper explores connections between sounds and music, whether sounds can indeed be musical, and whether they can inhabit the same intellectual landscape as music. Drawing upon the work of composers as well as film-makers and film sound designers, it considers the way in which we listen, and the way in which our listening has changed over the past century of film and recorded sound. It also considers the ways in which many of the ideas first proposed as a reaction to Late Romanticism have developed into later musical idioms, and the way that some of these have found their way into film sound.

Cinema's Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and the U.S., Charles O'Brien, (2005) Bloomington and Indianapolis, USA, Indiana University Press. 216 pages, ISBN 0-253-34463-8 Hardback, $45.00 ISBN 0-253-21720-2 Paperback, $19.95

In August 2008, the School of Sound and Screen Academy Scotland held a threeweek workshop on soundtrack production. Eighteen professional sound designers, composers, editors and directors explored the creative connections between sound, music, image and script in the production of a narrative film soundtrack. Su Nicholls-Gaertner, Head of Department for Postproduction at the Internationale Filmschule Kln, observed the experiment.

Tragic enough at the best of times, this waste of talent is doubly so now at a moment when, for the first time in the history of cinema, we are beginning to experience the rare pleasure of seeing films made by men who have grown up with the cinema, who have spent their lives making films, who are so immersed technique that they transcend it.

Tom Milne Mamoulian

I was one of those stage specialists they were hiring in those days to help the silent directors make sound movies.

Rouben Mamoulian