ABSTRACT
Film music has been affected by technological change since before the sound film became a stable genre. Even in the late 1920s there were several competing technologies for synchronising sound and picture, with ‘sound on disc’, the original system pioneered by Warner Brothers in Don Juan (1926) and The Jazz Singer (1927), quickly being replaced by ‘sound on film’. Advances in recording technology throughout the twentieth century saw significant progress made in the recording of film scores, with microphones able to pick up wider frequency bands and the development of multi-track recording. Additionally, the introduction of electronic instruments (notably the synthesiser) broadened the range of sounds available to the film composer. However, the particularly rapid pace of technological advance since the 1990s has far exceeded anything that came before this time, especially since the analogue to digital switchover in the mid-1990s. While the impact of technological developments on film-score production has been documented to some extent, the focus of such accounts tends to be on the work of the composer. There has been relatively little consideration of how such innovations may have affected the processes and practicalities of film-score orchestration, or the ways in which technology may have changed the relationships between composers, orchestrators and others in the music team. Furthermore, the rapid pace of technological change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries means that the information offered in several published sources is now outdated, resulting in an inaccurate picture of the industry as it exists twenty years after the widespread implementation of digital music technologies.
