Why am I a Composer?: Film Scoring Secrets #1


AFX Industrial (film scores)

More than anything else I get asked "how's it done?" I've been promising a blog outlining some of the secrets behind scoring music for film and here is the first one.

Where do you start?

I think film scoring is still one of the most misunderstood areas of the film making process, but how can I quantify where it is that you start? Well, you probably don't want to hear this but the real secret behind music is the fact that it is based on an array of mathematical expressions ... You can see now, the real explanation of how music works is so terribly dull that people often wish they hadn't asked!

I know it is seems paradoxical that music, something so magical can be broken down into a series of uniform numbers, such as oscillations (cycles per second), beats per minute and beats per bar. But that is the truth of it.

Tell me it's magic!

It's magic! Mathematics is magic, well I think it is! But honestly, film scoring isn't a haphazard process that relies on fairy dust and a cauldron of frog bones smouldering in the corner of a studio. No it's a quantifiable, logical process that is usually constrained by time and access to resources. Even more reason to remove the random aspect of it!

Why does some music sound 'better' than others?

Music that sounds 'better' than other music usually has a more coherent mathematical structure as it's backbone. For instance if I play to you two different versions of the same synth drone (held notes - a classic film scoring technique) you may 'feel' one more than the other. But could you pinpoint why? I can almost guarantee the preferred drone will have a more coherent mathematical structure as it's backbone. This structure won't necessarily be limited to note order and timing, it could also include oscillator movement and pitch modulation.

"film scoring isn't a haphazard process, it's a quantifiable, logical process that is usually constrained by time and access to resources"

The way mathematics affects the performance of music can be glaringly obvious or practically invisible to the untrained ear. Pretty much like what goes on under the bonnet of your car, the better your car runs the less you notice the engine and that kind of sums up how film music should work. You'll probably notice it more if there is a problem with it. More next time!

I hope you enjoyed #1 of Film Scoring Secrets we still have a long way to go before we get to the point of laying music behind the images in your film. But that's OK there is plenty of time to go into that, I want this to be an in depth look at what it takes to score a movie.

See you next time - David.