New Frontiers Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies

In 1981, a film arrived

that changed the way we thought about soundtracks.

The title sequence of Chariots Of Fire is set in 1920s England,

but the theme music was created using the latest electronic technology.

It shouldn't work, but it does

because the score by Vangelis captures the rhythm and exhilaration of the runners.

My interest in it was not to create a symphony orchestra, which I can,

but to go further and do things that a symphony orchestra can't do.

Chariots Of Fire proved once and for all

that an electronic score could be as moving and uplifting as any performed by an orchestra.

Vangelis is one of a series of pioneering composers and film-makers

who have used new technology to expand the possibilities of the soundtrack...

..giving us music that sounds like nothing we've ever heard before.

Even showing how sound effects can be used like an orchestra.

The sound of Formula One race cars is the main component.

ROARING, WHINING SOUNDS

How far can the boundaries be pushed when it comes to film music

or indeed our very idea of how a film should sound?

The moment Hollywood woke up to the fact

that it didn't always need conventional instruments

for a powerful film score came in 1945

when the Hungarian composer Miklos Rozsa was invited for a meeting with Alfred Hitchcock.

Hitchcock thought Rozsa would be ideal for his new project -

Spellbound, a psychological thriller starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck.

But Hitchcock told Rozsa he wanted something special,

a new sound to reflect the disturbed mind of Peck's character.

And Rozsa immediately knew what he needed to do the job.

It was one of these - a theremin,

an early electronic musical instrument,

developed over 90 years ago

as a by-product of research by Russia's fledgling Communist government,

and named after its creator, Leon Theremin.

You play it without touching it.

This antenna here develops an electromagnetic field

-which, when it's broken by the hand, changes pitch.

-WHINING SOUND

This one here, when it's changed, is the volume

-and it goes up and down like that.

-SOUND VOLUME VARIES

You can get a scale by moving the hand further and further away like this.

PLAYS DESCENDING SCALE

You get the vibrato just with the finger movement.

VIBRATO SOUND VARIES IN VOLUME

Rozsa had wanted to use a theremin for years.

Now, at last, he had the perfect opportunity.

This is the scene from Spellbound

that Rozsa used to demonstrate the theremin to Hitchcock.

In the film, Gregory Peck's character is afflicted by mysterious mental attacks,

triggered unpredictably by ordinary objects.

DRAMATIC VIBRATO SOUND

EERIE, HIGH-PITCHED SOUND

Rozsa uses the theremin as a recurring musical symbol,

a leitmotif for Peck's attacks.

But he carefully integrates it with a traditional orchestral score,

allowing the theremin's sound to catch us by surprise, disorientating us.

Rozsa went straight on to feature the theremin in his next score.

The Lost Weekend, directed by Billy Wilder, was a ground-breaking story about addiction,

and Rozsa again used the theremin for psychological effect

as the siren song of the alcohol

that tempts Ray Milland's character.

HIGH-PITCHED VIBRATO SOUND OVER DRAMATIC MUSIC

The result is, I'd say,

just a little too similar to Spellbound.

And although both scores were nominated for Oscars and Spellbound won,

Rozsa didn't hurry to use the theremin again.

Perhaps he realised its distinctive sound could easily become a cliche,

an inherent risk with all new technology.

What can initially sound fresh and distinctive can very quickly become over-familiar,

especially if the instrument's range is limited both by its own sound

and by the willingness of composers to find new ways of using it.

EERIE, HIGH-PITCHED SOUND

And indeed, by the 1950s, the theremin had become a staple of science-fiction films,

its eerie sound a predictable shorthand for the alien and unearthly.

Institutions like the Griffith Observatory, overlooking Hollywood,

might have been feeding the public's imagination about what other worlds might look like,

but nobody seemed too bothered about what they might actually sound like

until, in 1956, a film tried to give us a sense of just that.

And to this day, it boasts one of the most radical soundtracks ever created.

Our first glimpse of the alien world in MGM's Forbidden Planet

showcases the film's imaginative production design

and visual effects,

but what we're listening to are sounds that really had never been heard before.

WHIRRING SOUND

Forbidden Planet was a B-movie dressed up for the MGM luxury goods market.

There's no suggestion the studio wanted anything but a conventional music score for their movie,

possibly including the ubiquitous theremin.

But the sound effects were going to come from the other side of space as far as Hollywood was concerned -

the New York avant-garde arts circuit.

Employed to create the effects were Louis and Bebe Barron,

a young married couple from the Greenwich Village arts scene.

The Barrons didn't use musical instruments, but generated unique sounds using electronic circuits.

Seen up close, their improvised equipment has a science-fiction quality all of its own.

EERIE ELECTRONIC SOUNDS

The Barrons had offered their services to the head of MGM.

He gave them a print of Forbidden Planet and asked them to come up with some sound effects.

And left to their own devices, Louis and Bebe got kind of carried away.

Instead of the 20 minutes or so of quirky electronic sounds they were supposed to produce,

they handed over an entire score for the film.

And the studio loved it.

The result was the first fully electronic score for a motion picture.

What's so striking about the Barrons' achievement is that it's hard to tell where the score ends

and the sound effects begin, as in this scene.

ELECTRONIC CRACKLING SOUNDS

It gives the film a remarkably fluid soundscape.

Forbidden Planet was a hit

which meant that the Barrons' soundtrack was perhaps the most innovative so far

to reach a mass audience.

No doubt the outer space setting made it more acceptable to the public.

But within just a few years,

Alfred Hitchcock would commission an even more daring score,

set in an altogether more earthly location.

BIRDS CRY

This is Bodega Bay, just north of San Francisco.

It's lived in our nightmares for the best part of half a century,

largely because of a soundtrack that doesn't contain a single orchestral instrument.

All we hear over the opening titles of The Birds

are heightened, harsh caws and beating wings.

Not music we can recognise or use to glean any information about the film.

It puts us straight outside our comfort zone.

HIGH-PITCHED CRIES AND BEATING WINGS

None of those bird sounds are natural.

They were created on this, an electronic instrument called the trautonium.

Invented in Germany not long after the theremin,

it had later been developed to the point where it could produce a wide range of artificial sounds.

With Spellbound, Hitchcock had shown his readiness to work with unconventional instruments.

He was promised that the trautonium offered a new dimension in film production,

but what he wanted was a new dimension in terror.

The film tells a story of ordinary birds suddenly, murderously turning on the inhabitants

of an isolated community.

Hitchcock cleverly realised that the sound of the birds was crucial

to our sense of their presence and power

and that a traditional musical score could clash with or undermine this, so he dispensed with one.

Instead, Hitchcock and his regular composer Bernard Herrmann devoted their energies carefully

to selecting and placing the sounds of the birds,

created artificially on the trautonium.

My favourite scene follows the film's heroine, played by Tippi Hedren,

as she waits here outside the island's school.

It's a masterly use of sound and its absence to build suspense.

CHILDREN SINGING

We know that the bird attack is imminent and Hitchcock, as always, plays with our expectations,

indeed plays us, the audience, like an orchestra.

He drops in some sound, that relentless song that the children are singing,

their vulnerability all too exposed,

but nothing compared to what we're going to get...

..for from silence to the electronic onslaught of that attack,

what we're about to hear is astonishing.

ANGRY SQUAWKING

Those birds aren't singing with their own voices.

They've got behind them sounds from the pit of hell,

their murderous shrieks indistinguishable from the children's terrified ones.

SHRIEKING SOUNDS

Don't for a moment think that just because there isn't a musical instrument on the soundtrack

that The Birds doesn't have a score.

It does. It's as engaging as the score for Vertigo, as immediate as the score for Psycho,

because Hitchcock, genius that he was, knew that when you put these things together,

they all basically came from the same place.

As he said himself, "When you put music to a film, it's just another sound, really."

On The Birds' release, the critics seemed more bothered by the story and acting than the soundtrack,

but audiences didn't seem to mind.

And for film-makers, Hitchcock had opened up two exciting possibilities.

He'd proved that sound effects could be as powerful as music in telling a story

and he'd showcased the potential of electronic instruments

which were becoming increasingly sophisticated as the decade went on.

Within just a few years, both these possibilities would be explored in very different films.

PLAYS LOW NOTE

This is an original Moog synthesiser from the mid-'60s.

As you can see, the keyboard is pretty understandable...

ELECTRONIC NOTES

..albeit only one note at a time,

but it's this huge set of modules here that gives you the sounds.

RAPID, SUCCESSIVE NOTES

And changes them. If you think of the variety of options you have with all these here,

to understand this, you really have to have as much of a scientist's mind as a composer's.

But in the mid-1960s in New York, a young man emerged who had both.

I'll patch this up here into one of my output modules

and try and show you how, with these primitive sounds,

we start to get very musical-sounding things.

Walter Carlos had been a musical prodigy who went on to study Physics and Music

and was an early user of the Moog synthesiser, helping to advise on its development.

By hitting a note on the keyboard now, I'm connected up, so I'll hear that one sound.

It's a very low sound.

And in 1968, Carlos used the Moog to create something rather extraordinary -

Switched-On Bach, an electronic rendition of the composer's music,

which went on to be a best-selling album.

The second LP was one of the first records I ever bought.

For me as a young musician interested in electronics, it was a game-changer.

ELECTRONIC CLASSICAL MUSIC

And Carlos' cutting-edge take on the classics was about to cross over into film.

EERIE SOUNDTRACK

Carlos heard that the director Stanley Kubrick was making a new picture,

a grim, uncompromising, futuristic one,

much of it shot here at Thamesmead in London,

a picture that might be the ideal platform for Carlos' synthesised classical sound.

Kubrick had never shied away from difficult material

and this was to be his toughest film yet.

And music had to be central to the story.

After all, as it said on the poster,

A Clockwork Orange deals with "the adventures of a young man

"whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven."

ELECTRONIC CLASSICAL MUSIC

Unsolicited, Carlos sent Kubrick an electronic interpretation of Beethoven,

as well as an original composition.

Kubrick saw their potential and alongside conventional orchestral recordings,

the finished film would also feature Carlos' renditions of Purcell, Rossini and Beethoven.

Here, Beethoven's Ode To Joy

is given an almost comical swagger,

matching the cockiness of the film's protagonist Alex.

It's bright and cartoony, echoing the clothes and the set design.

ELECTRONIC MUSIC: "Ode To Joy" - Beethoven

The brilliance of Carlos' music

is that it complements the orchestral sounds, but adds another layer.

The electronics make it sound not only futuristic, but heightened and energised,

as if we're listening to Beethoven on mescaline.

In fact, it's hard to imagine what Kubrick would have done

without the enhanced musical palette that Carlos' score provides.

To cure Alex of his psychopathic violence,

his beloved Beethoven music is co-opted into a form of aversion therapy,

ultimately turning him suicidal whenever he hears it.

At the climax of the film,

a conventional recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony subtly morphs

into a distorted rendition by Carlos, taking us inside Alex's head,

giving us music we know in a new and terrifying way.

Turn it off!

DISTORTED MUSIC PLAYS

HE COUGHS AND GASPS

Like Forbidden Planet, A Clockwork Orange benefited hugely from an outsider,

by their own initiative and unsolicited,

sending what they understood in the way of electronic music to the film-maker

and thereby, for all of us, greatly enhancing the possibilities of the soundtrack.

But the early '70s would see the soundtrack being enhanced in another way,

one that would draw on the same technology as A Clockwork Orange, but to different ends.

It was the other sonic possibility opened up by The Birds -

the use of sound effects as a story-telling device.

Sound had become something of an American preoccupation.

This was the era of Watergate, of eavesdropping, paranoia even.

When you weren't afraid of being seen, you were afraid of being heard.

In the early 1970s, a new generation of surveillance equipment was developed

which meant that you could home in on a single conversation, even in a place like this.

If you were listening on the other end, who knows what you might overhear?

Like The Birds, the opening title sequence

of Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation has no music.

Instead, we're made to listen to the faint sounds of the environment,

only gradually becoming louder

as the shot slowly zooms in on San Francisco's Union Square.

DISTANT VOICES, HORN TOOTS

So far, so innocuous,

then image and sound unexpectedly diverge.

DISTORTED SOUNDS

"What was that? Is that a mistake in projection? No, here it is again."

DISTORTED SOUNDS

So it must be intentional, but what is it?

Then gradually, the audience can piece together the mystery of what this stuff is.

A surprising shot change reveals a menacing figure on a rooftop.

Only then do we realise that the sounds are really distortion

on the rifle-like surveillance equipment being used to eavesdrop on one particular couple.

Exactly what the couple are saying becomes an obsession for The Conversation's central character,

surveillance expert Harry Caul, played by Gene Hackman.

This isn't just a film that uses sound. It's about sound.

And it was the ideal vehicle for Walter Murch

who had made his name working on the sound and editing for Coppola's The Godfather

and George Lucas' science-fiction film, THX 1138.

SYNTHESISED SOUNDS

Murch was also fascinated with the electronic technology of the time,

including the instrument that was rapidly becoming ubiquitous, the Moog synthesiser.

I had studied the Moog synthesiser.

I used it on The Conversation.

In my mind, I was thinking that Harry Caul in that film had invented digital recording,

so the question was, "What does digital recording sound like when it's not going very well?"

And so I came up with a use of the synthesiser

to, um...crush the sound and abuse it.

By the climax of The Conversation, the sound effects have become increasingly detached from reality.

They and the music score seem to have become one,

accentuating our sense of Harry Caul's paranoia.

FAINT SYNTHESISED SOUNDTRACK

DRAMATIC BOOMING SOUNDS

HIGH-PITCHED ELECTRONIC SOUNDS

SOUNDS GET LOUDER

About halfway through the film,

there's almost no dialogue.

When dialogue stops, your mind which is looking for meaning... "Where's the meaning in this?

"I'm not getting it from dialogue, so I have to get it from somewhere else."

If we, the film-makers, have put meaning into the sound effects, you can pull meaning out of it.

Do you think that The Conversation is a film where the sound ultimately is the main driver of the narrative?

Because the main character is a sound recordist,

it's told all from his point of view.

He listens to the world, so we begin to listen to the world.

LOW, THROBBING SOUNDS

In their different ways, Walter Murch and Walter Carlos had exploited the novelty

and unfamiliarity of synthesised sound.

But as the '70s went on, the synthesiser really took off

and not just in the movies.

Its pulsating rhythms became synonymous with the disco boom,

especially in the wake of Donna Summer's seminal 1977 hit, I Feel Love.

# I feel lo-o-o-ove

# I feel love... #

The song was co-written and produced by Italian-born Giorgio Moroder

and when the owners of Moroder's record label branched out into film production,

they thought he might be ideal to score a gritty drama set in a Turkish prison - Midnight Express.

They had a hunch audiences would be ready for a Moroder electronic soundtrack.

In this scene, you can hear how Moroder

brings key elements of the disco toolkit to his score.

It's built on a rhythm, using the most primal beat of all - the heartbeat.

RAPID, PULSATING BEAT

He adds ambient washes of synthesiser sound,

the kind that could never be created with a conventional orchestra.

INCREASING SYNTHESISED SOUND

SPEAKS IN TURKISH

Finally, Moroder introduces the melody,

a simple, repetitive cycle of notes.

MELODY PLAYS

With Midnight Express, Moroder showed

that a fully electronic score could work perfectly for a contemporary drama.

Hollywood was impressed and awarded the pop maestro an Oscar for his debut effort.

Moroder gave this hard film the hard electronic edge it needed,

but a questioned remained over electronics.

Could they be warm, could they be moving or even inspirational,

the way that an orchestral soundtrack could?

In 1981, we found out.

Chariots Of Fire was produced, like Midnight Express, by David Puttnam.

And its score was created by another European who had made his name in pop music - Vangelis.

I felt right from the start what you caught was a sense of effort.

How did you imagine that into your music?

I don't know. I can't really explain

because it's instinctive

and I felt...

I mean, this first scene, you know, the runners on the beach...

I felt that this needs some kind of enthusiasm,

oxygen...you know, youth.

THEME MUSIC: "Chariots Of Fire"

Vangelis Papathanassiou emerged from the 1960s Greek prog rock scene...

Yes, there was one.

..where he was the keyboardist in a band with Demis Roussos.

In the 1970s, he recorded a series of solo electronic albums and documentary soundtracks

which brought him to the attention of director Hugh Hudson.

I thought about it from the very beginning. Literally, as I read the script, I wanted to use Vangelis.

I didn't want anybody else.

The task was to persuade people to use such a contemporary form of music

in such a period film.

OK, so the first theme was this...

PLAYS GENTLE MELODY

The Chariots Of Fire theme was only composed at the 11th hour.

Hugh Hudson originally wanted to use a track from one of Vangelis' albums.

Hugh at the time told me, "Don't think about the opening. We have it.

"But do the rest." And I did the rest.

Then in my mind, it was not...

I was not very happy. I said, "I have to do that. I have to try." I sat down and that's it.

PLAYS MELODY

And then that became this...

PLAYS THEME: "Chariots Of Fire"

I can't play the "dee-dee-dee" bit. I nearly missed the beat to do it.

LAUGHTER

Chariots Of Fire focuses on two rival British sprinters competing in the 1924 Olympics -

the Scottish missionary Eric Liddell and the intensely driven Harold Abrahams.

Vangelis' music captures their very different personalities.

In this scene, Abrahams is recalling a race he has just lost to Liddell.

The banging of the seats seems to be hammering in Abrahams' sense of defeat.

But even that sound fades under Vangelis' sparse score

as we share Abrahams' self-absorption.

GENTLE, MEDITATIVE MUSIC

He was a tormented character.

He had his own reasons to run

and he had to win and he did win.

And I think he was much more concerned to win.

Liddell was maybe, you know, more natural to win.

The best line of the film to me is when he says,

"God made me for a purpose and when I run, I feel his pleasure."

That's a great line.

I love the moment when you hear that again as he's running.

And as his head goes back your music explodes.

'Jenny...

'I believe God made me for a purpose.

'But He also made me fast.

'And when I run I feel His pleasure.'

MUSIC COMES IN

To create his Chariots of Fire score, Vangelis used a costly bespoke set of equipment.

But technical advances were already rendering banks of expensive kit obsolete.

Soon a single instrument could do much of the heavy musical lifting.

This is the Korg M1, one of the iconic keyboards of the 1980s.

You'll understand when I do this.

ELECTRONIC NOTES

It's kicking off a whole series of other musical textures just by holding down one note,

so if you do this...

MORE SOUNDS OVERLAY

..you get an enormous texture, enough for a film score.

There is actually a program on here called Film Score.

DRAMATIC CHORDS

And that's my problem with it.

Instead of being a tool towards creativity, it can become a replacement for it.

Electronics works at its best when a composer takes it

and creates something completely new that we haven't heard before.

And that's just what Vangelis did with his next score.

It was for a film set nearly 100 years after Chariots of Fire

and in a very different world.

Los Angeles, 2019.

In Blade Runner, his soundtrack reflects and enhances our awe

at a future realised in extraordinary, spectacular detail

by director Ridley Scott and special effects wizard Doug Trumbull and his team.

GENTLE ELECTRONIC NOTES

Vangelis creates not just a music score, but an entire soundscape that heightens the visuals.

Here the very twinkling of the city's lights seems captured in the music.

With Blade Runner, you had to create a world in our ears

that matched a world we'd never seen before on the screen.

I was knocked out as well when I saw this big construction

by Doug Trumbull and, of course, it's been done with no computers at the time.

It impressed me and immediately I did this theme, like I did with Chariots.

THEME FROM "Blade Runner"

This is the one. OK.

Absolutely.

MUSIC SWEEPS

You've always used electronics as orchestral instruments, or like orchestral instruments.

Like you've created your own orchestra using these.

My interest in it was not to create a symphony orchestra, which I can, it's very easy,

but to go further than that and do things that the symphony orchestra can't do.

And to open...

to open other paths.

And I think that I succeeded to create some things like this.

But are there some things that can't be done by music of any kind?

After The Conversation, Walter Murch had spent several of the following years exploring the potential

of sound effects in another collaboration with director Francis Ford Coppola.

It would set the benchmark for modern cinema sound.

One of the most iconic pieces of soundtrack in cinema history isn't a sequence of notes,

but it is a sound that, once you've heard it, it's very hard to forget.

And it's so powerful, it's our first experience in the film,

played out in darkness even before the first image has hit the screen.

ECHOING WHOOSH OF ROTOR BLADES

It's the sound of the helicopters that opens Apocalypse Now,

echoing round the cinema before the music by The Doors fades in.

For me, coming away from the cinema,

all of my friends had been to see it at the same time and we all sat in the pub going...

MAKES HELICOPTER NOISE

Now how did that come about to go from a helicopter to something that had that potency to it?

Francis,

early on when we were talking about what were we going to do for this film,

he said this is the first helicopter war,

the first war where helicopters are really used like cavalry used to be used in the 19th century.

And so he wanted to emphasise the helicopters

and he wanted the helicopters to be able to fly all the way around the theatre,

to envelop the audience in this world.

The opening sequence builds into a strange montage of images,

the noise of the helicopters merging with that of a ceiling fan.

It's all utterly immersive, but it's not clear what's going on.

The beginning of the film, it takes a while to discover that you are in a hotel room and this is a dream,

but we wanted, right from the beginning, the sound to start pushing you in that direction.

And so we couldn't really use a real helicopter because that would be too real.

We just used the abstract sound of the blade, which was generated in a synthesiser,

and we called it the ghost helicopter and flew it around the room,

just to kind of demonstrate, "Here's the rules. This film is going to do these things.

"It's capable of doing it and it's going to do it."

The reason audiences of Apocalypse Now could enjoy such three-dimensional sound effects

was that the film would be shown in a pioneering new sound format.

Francis Ford Coppola had a singular ambition for how his movies should be seen and heard,

a grandiose scheme worthy of the film's insane character Colonel Kurtz.

For a number of months,

Francis's goal was that the film would not play in normal theatres,

but it would play in one theatre in the geographic centre of the United States

and we would have this special sound system installed at this theatre

and families would come from all over the country. It'd be a destination to go see Apocalypse Now

and it would run there for 20 years, a cinematic Mount Rushmore.

And...that did not happen,

but this sound format, which was designed to work in that imagined space, did happen.

That surround sound format with its multiple channels

has now become the modern standard for what we hear in the cinema.

And more channels mean more opportunities for sonic creativity.

Murch became the godfather of a new cinematic discipline - sound design.

I was being presented with a new landscape to work with

and just as production designers take a space and then decorate it

with things that look good and are revealing of the character of the film,

that's what I was doing with the sound. I was figuring out,

"How do we decorate? How do we furnish this space with sound?"

And so production design became sound design.

Murch's work on Apocalypse Now changed the way Hollywood thought about sound.

Alongside music and dialogue, sound effects became a key element in the audio palette in their own right.

I'm in a place in California where soundtracks of some of the biggest films have been put together.

It may look like an upmarket winery, but this is Skywalker Sound,

a state-of-the-art post-production facility built and owned by Star Wars creator George Lucas.

SCREECHING SOUNDS

A former protege of Walter Murch, Randy Thom recorded sound effects for Apocalypse Now.

He's Skywalker's director of sound design.

In 2005, he won an Oscar for his work on the Pixar movie The Incredibles.

My first job, of course, is trying to work with the director

to figure out what individual sounds should be,

what works and doesn't work. In the case of these flying saucers,

after listening to a wide variety of sounds, we decided that the sound of Formula 1 race cars might be there.

SCREECHING LIKE A RACE CAR

And there was this idea that the saucers were not only very fast,

but they're spinning, almost like blades.

And so it occurred to us that we might record saw blades rubbing and scraping against each other.

METALLIC SCRAPES

The audience get the feeling that this thing is spinning and could splice Dash right in half.

-Can we now see finally the whole sequence with the music, sound effects, dialogue in place?

-Sure.

SAUCERS SCREECH AND SWIRL

-It's wonderful and it is so playful.

-Yeah.

-I think that's part of it.

This may be an impossible question, but how many hours of work is that, just what we've heard there?

For me, it's about...

..five months.

And three months for four or five people. So it's a lot of work.

'But with sound designers and composers individually giving their all to a film,

'can this lead to sonic overload when effects, music and dialogue are finally mixed together?'

Very often the first day of the final mix

is an extremely frustrating day.

You see lots of heads in hands

and people leaving the room and disgruntled people

because you're confronted with this incoherent wash of sound.

It's an arduous task, working your way through this jungle of sound with your machete,

slashing away at this bit of sound and that bit of sound to find the pieces that actually

are doing the storytelling job.

This is the Kurosawa mixing stage.

Wow!

'And here's where Randy wields his machete - the mixing theatre,

'where music, effects and dialogue are put together under the watchful eye of the director.'

Oh, look at the size of that desk!

-And up here is the final arbiter, of course.

-The director's likely to sit in one of these chairs.

So do you find when you're dealing with composers, are they in the room here in these seats?

For my money, composers are not in the final mix as often as I would like them to be.

Very often the composer just isn't available and the music editor is the representative of the composer

who's in the mix.

The poor music editor is deathly afraid that he or she is going to offend the boss by saying,

"Oh, sure, it's OK to drop that cue."

I think you're more likely to make the change effectively and quickly if the composer is in the room.

'Randy obviously has to tread a fine line,

'but it would be wrong to imply that music and sound effects are always in competition.

'One leading composer has long had a very close relationship with sound design.

'I've travelled to New York to meet Carter Burwell.

'His work includes scores for the hugely popular Twilight series. This is the love theme.'

LILTING ROMANTIC SCORE

But Burwell's biggest collaborators by far have been the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan.

He's scored more than a dozen films for them across a wide range of styles and genres.

In this scene from True Grit,

you can hear how he marries a melody inspired by 19th-century hymn tunes

to a classic Hollywood Western orchestration that matches the widescreen action and setting.

Burwell began working with the Coens on their debut picture Blood Simple.

With a background as a computer scientist and New Wave musician,

Burwell had never written a film score before.

He took inspiration from an unconventional source.

When Joel and Ethan first said, "Yes, you know, you should score our movie,"

I thought, "Boy, I should learn something about film scoring!"

And I came home and I looked at the TV scheduler for great movies. "Oh, The Birds!"

So I set my VCR to record The Birds and I watched it, always listening for the music.

And when it would come to the end of a dramatic scene, I'd say, "Oh! I forgot to listen to the music!"

I got to the end of the entire film and thought, "I've got to rewind and study these scenes.

"I don't remember the music at all."

Of course, I found that there isn't any music in the traditional sense.

It's tapes of bird sounds, synthesised bird sounds.

That was just the best lesson I could have as my first film scoring lesson. Anything can be a film score.

Working on this principle, Burwell has collaborated closely

with sound designer Skip Lievsay, particularly on the Coens' Barton Fink,

the story of a first-time screenwriter in 1940s Hollywood

who finds himself trapped in a psychological nightmare.

Director Joel Coen wanted much of that fear and claustrophobia to be carried by the sound effects.

Joel originally felt that Barton Fink would have no score.

When I saw the film, I felt there was something to be contributed still.

The result is an often subtle interplay between effects and music,

such as the recurring motif of the mosquito, which represents Barton's growing sense of torment.

MOSQUITO BUZZ

And I say, "I'm going to do something with a solo violin that will echo the idea of a mosquito.

"It'll be this held violin note."

FAN WHIRRS AND CLANKS

So we literally, scene by scene, would divide the frequency spectrum. Skip would say, "I've got the highs."

And then there would be scenes like this wonderful sound montage

that begins with Barton making love on the bed.

So it begins with music playing, Barton's theme.

Camera pans into the bathroom and goes down into the sink

and the piano mutates and becomes a prepared piano.

I had all these metallic samples of my own that I've tuned to the pitch of the music.

In the end, the final result, I can't tell where my stuff leaves off and Skip begins.

In 2007, Burwell worked on a film with the Coens that forced him

to distil his music down even more.

The abiding sense of No Country For Old Men is one of menace,

a violence which seems to emanate from the empty Texas landscape itself.

One of the things that was really compelling about the edit of the film without music

was that the dryness gave it just this tension that left you uncomfortable all the time.

And that seemed to be the pleasure of that film, the discomfort.

That's where the pleasure is.

In the end, the ultimate withdrawal from scoring the movie

was to hide whatever I did behind, again, Skip Lievsay's sound effects.

Burwell's score may hide behind the effects, but he also enhances them,

lending them a more musical quality.

Here the villain is closing in on the protagonist

and he increases the tension with a subtle, but disconcerting drone

that could almost be the sound of the car itself.

CONSTANT HUM

And listen out for the bell-like sound that ends the scene.

It could be an echo of the action, but it adds a richly ominous note.

GUNSHOT AND METALLIC CLANG

I can't imagine there's a more minimal way to score a film.

I prefer films with less music. I prefer not being told how to feel or what's going on.

I prefer to be a little bit more mystified or discomfited.

Carter Burwell's approach seems remarkably self-effacing,

though it's clearly appropriate in many instances,

but I don't think a prominent score, one that declares itself, is anything to be ashamed of,

given the right director, composer and subject.

These are the opening titles of Pi,

a psychological thriller that marked the debut of British composer Clint Mansell.

URGENT TECHNO BEAT

The music sets the tone perfectly -

driving, utterly modern, yet unpredictable.

Pi was also the first film by director Darren Aronofsky.

Mansell's subsequent collaborations with him include Requiem For A Dream, The Fountain,

and the Oscar-nominated Black Swan.

We first bonded over the fact that we didn't like film music any more. It was very much wallpaper.

Scores like Pi, had we done those within the studio system...

I've had producers say to me, you know, "Can you make it more neutral?"

You mean you want the music to do nothing?! And I'd always rather be bold and go, "OK.

"Let's sort the men from the boys here."

Some of Clint Mansell's own boldness must have come from his previous career.

Here he is in the band Pop Will Eat Itself, whose forceful sound landed them hits in the '80s and '90s.

When the band split, Mansell moved to the US. He'd never composed a film score.

In fact, he'd had no formal musical training. Electronic technology made his new career possible.

For me personally,

there is no confusion that without computers and technology, I couldn't do what I do.

Even when I was in my band, we never jammed. I didn't have the musical chops to do that,

so for me the computer just opened up a whole world

whereby a simple idea like this, that I did for Moon...

It's really not that exciting at this stage.

But when you put it to picture and you can add... DEEPER TONES

Then I play them back and I've now got this.

TRACKS PLAY TOGETHER

And suddenly it's a... a much fuller experience, and I've done it on my own.

It's just the computer has allowed me to sort of track my thoughts,

put them together and suddenly we have a piece of music where nothing existed before.

I could have... Maybe if I'd gone to a music school and learnt to write music

with, you know, pen and manuscript, I could still do that because that's the way you do that,

but I didn't do that. I played in bands, I know music by ear and whether it sounds good to me or not.

The computer allows me to express it.

To my mind, Clint Mansell's finest work is his score for Requiem For A Dream.

Made in 2000 and starring Ellen Burstyn,

the film interweaves the doomed lives of four drug addicts from Coney Island.

Mansell's powerful music not only captures the oppressiveness of their predicament,

but crucially its tragedy.

That wonderful panning shot across Ellen Burstyn going at different speeds,

as soon as you put your piece to that, in effect,

was when it became a requiem. Until then it had been a story.

Now it became a process of grieving for the audience.

It brought such an emotional... weight to it, I suppose.

Darren says it's a horror movie.

Every time the addiction wins, that's the monster winning. That's the monster's music.

I remember the first place we tried it was under the scene where Marion comes out

having slept with her psychiatrist. She's coming down the hallway.

We both were just gobsmacked.

CRASH OF THUNDER

It's a measure of the power of Mansell's score that it's gone on to have a life beyond the film.

This is the trailer for The Two Towers, the second Lord of the Rings movie, released in 2002.

Listen to the music.

"Requiem For A Dream" SCORE

That epic tune with these spectacular images

is actually the theme from Requiem For A Dream,

reworked with the kind of full orchestral treatment it would have been given by Max Steiner

and Erich Wolfgang Korngold in Hollywood's Golden Age.

When it was re-orchestrated for Lord of the Rings,

it actually kind of blew my mind because it made me see the possibility of music.

There's the way we'd done it and somebody else did this huge version that really... I don't know.

People use it on YouTube all the time. You can put this on anything and it becomes epic!

I don't know. It's just been amazing, really.

Clint Mansell strikes me as a shining example

of how technology has democratised film scoring,

opening it up to talents without conventional composing backgrounds.

But if the history of the film soundtrack tells us anything

it is that cinema has always been open to new storytellers and new kinds of storytelling.

"The Adventures of Robin Hood" THEME

Throughout this series, we've seen how great leaps forward in film scoring have been made

because studios and producers were remarkably willing to take risks and trust the judgment of composers.

Hollywood welcomed migrants from Old Europe like Korngold and Steiner

giving them the resources to build on the classical tradition

and bring a new depth of expressiveness to cinema.

It enabled a bold modern composer like Bernard Herrmann to create scores of unprecedented complexity

and psychological depth for the greatest films by the 20th century's finest directors.

Producers gambled that composers from jazz and pop backgrounds like Ennio Morricone and John Barry

could win over a new generation of moviegoers, and they did,

bringing fresh energy and excitement to the film soundtrack.

Masters of technology like Walter Carlos and Vangelis were encouraged

to touch our emotions in new ways with new sounds.

That astonishing track record continues to this day

and it leaves me more confident than ever that film composers will continue to innovate and thrive.

Film composers don't just come up with a nice tune or memorable hook.

What they do is they place their musical abilities entirely at the service of the story.

It's the one thing that interests us most as an audience - what happens next.

They understand about character, about narrative, about mood

and when they bring their music to those elements of cinema, they create something almost unimaginable

before the music was there.

And here's the big miracle -

no matter their background, their age or even the style of music,

they find exactly the right notes at the right time to speak to every single one of us.

There you go.

PLAYS "Chariots of Fire" THEME

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd