The Film Music Age of Sampling

I have written a few posts already how technology has changed media music and how changing the tools (from score sheet writing to DAW production) has changed the music.

As this is a very multi layered phenomenon several aspects arise from this development that are worth discussing and worth questioning. After all, even if one doesn't creatively follow every current trend in the media music world, I find it incredibly important to be aware of developments and staying "on top of the game".

One of these aspects is the way how media music often is conceptionalized in recent years. The focus on sound and texture has brought up an entire new sub genre that currently seems to be exploding:

In the pursuit of an original quality of a score, many composers invest a lot of time in collecting unique sounds and textures to be used in the score. Ideally, these sounds have a direct relation with the movie that is being scored.

One of the prototypes of this kind of score is Hildur Guðnadóttir's score for CHERNOBYL. Supposedly, the entire score is constructed out of sounds that she field recorded in a nuclear power plant. If you have seen that mini series, one has to admit that the score greatly contributes to the dystopian and apocalyptic atmosphere of the images. The roughness of the sound forms a great symbiosis with the images. I don't think it is fair to say that she invented this conceptual approach as similar concepts in film scoring have been seen before but admittedly this score gained a lot of publicity for this approach.

Using such a strategy has several benefits: from a compositional standpoint, it is relatively simple to create something that sounds very unique. Depending on what your source material is, it might be so special in sound that it easily creates a recognizable texture that can be easily associated with the movie/game etc. and consequentially is very accessible for the general audience. Of course, it shouldn't be underestimated how much work needs to be put into the recording, mapping, editing, sound processing etc for these textures but once you have that set, you have created an acoustic toolbox that nobody else has and that no other project uses. Additionally, it is relatively easy to sell such a concept to a client and to the audience as the accessibility of the idea behind the score is way less abstract than let's say using a specific harmonic language as a concept.

However, it seems like this entire approach is currently being used inflationary and there seems to be an increasing amount of composers who seem to feel like such a concept is the creative pinnacle.

I keep seeing composers who would even default to such a concept for a romantic comedy. "The movie depicts the life of a woman who runs a bakery and by chance meets the love of her life" - let me sample all baking utensils I can find and use these sounds throughout the score.

And this is where I feel this approach is often questionable. Of course, sampling bakery utensils and making a score out of it will create an instantly unique sounding score but at the same time it is a relatively lazy approach and it can be questioned whether this is a creative solution or just gimmicky.

The reason why I often consider it as a lazy approach is of course only partially true because it of course takes a lot of work to gather this sound catalogue but from a musical standpoint it often is lazy. Writing a score that feels unique and fresh but uses nothing more but standard instruments that have been used thousands of times before is creatively way more challenging and requires a considerably deeper control of compositional skills than going the easy route of using a handful of uniquely samples sounds and arranging them along musical standard paths.

At the same time, the continuous development of overlaps between score composers and sound designers creates a sub genre of scores that rely only very little on traditional musical vocabulary and craftmanship. We all have heard scores that seem to be consisting only of evolving textures but you hardly ever get a chord or a clearly identifiable musical fragment. But most often we find such scores in rather "dark" film genres, preferably dystopian post apocalyptic sceneries (such as Chernobyl) where it often makes a lot of sense to strip away a traditional "human" factor from the music.

Translating this conceptual approach however to "lighter" genres such as the fictional rom com mentioned above where a well executed traditional score that creates uniqueness through specifically chosen musical devices would often be a more substantial and less gimmicky solution, is definitely questionable. 

Of course, this is a matter of taste and personal work approaches and there of course is also the possibility of combining unique textures with well crafted writing but unfortunately, it can quite often be seen that one replaces the other and that the focus also of the work of composers shifts away from musical craftmanship to sound design craftmanship. Of course, everybody needs to find their own standpoint whether this is desirable and moves media music into the right direction and how much of such approaches are appropriate. I personally see it as a valuable addition to creating media music but not as a replacement of other musical factors.