TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Since the 1990s digitalization has transformed Hollywood films. Today’s movies are “shot with digital film, the sound is recorded with digital recorders; both image and sound are edited on computers… and sounds are… constructed through synthesizers and samplers with layers of digital effects”^[1] added during post-production. Few soundtracks, even those featuring orchestral scores, are recorded without “electronic reinforcement”^[2]. Strange, dissonant, even threatening digitalized noises have been employed with exceptional success in science-fiction stories of monsters, dystopian futures, and dangerous aliens from outer space. Of course, film music of every kind can meaningfully be discussed only in “narrative contexts”, because “the interrelations between music and the rest of [a given] film”^[3] determine its effectiveness. Even “sound effects are generally governed by pertinence to the narrative”.^[4] Understanding Hollywood’s use of aural digitalization, therefore, involves understanding its use in particular films.

Technologically generated sounds are scarcely new to movies. Sixty years ago violent electronic dissonances filled the soundtrack of Forbidden Planet (Fred McLeod Wilcox, 1956), and some fifteen years later synthesizers contributed to a tawdry accompaniment for A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971). Today’s sampling technologies are far more flexible, often turning “music into sound and back again [and] treating previously recorded music as the functional equivalent”^[5] of industrial noise. This is true even of the “high-octane, aggressive, and striking” soundtrack for The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999), which conjoins abrasive noise with “‘avant-garde’ dissonance and tone-clusters”, and with orchestral passages of an “almost Wagnerian grandeur”^[6]. The recent American remake of The War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005) foregrounds an atypical symphonic score by John Williams, and the deafening air horns, human-alien combat explosions, and screams added digitally to Williams’s musical passages contribute to the film’s success.

In many post-1990 Hollywood soundtracks, ambient sounds and non-musical noises disrupt more familiar musical elements. In District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009), the sounds of helicopters, guns, and synthesized noises provide a quasi-musical background for a story of aliens marooned in a South African township. The Matrix, which tells of an alien takeover so carefully disguised that most people never know it happened, employs pre-existing rock/heavy metal songs, urban noises, and simulated musical elements. In the “lobby shootout” scene recorded gunfire briefly takes on rhythmic regularity over scarcely audible pop music. By 0:25, however, the music can be heard clearly, and only when the shooting stops at 1:57, does the music stop too. In these and other cases, narrative itself is momentarily replaced by sensory rather than verbal experiences, primarily aural rather than visual.