A
soundtrack can be recorded music accompanying and synchronized to
the images of a
motion picture,
book,
television program or
video game; a commercially released
soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack of a film or
TV show; or the physical area of a
film that
contains the
synchronized recorded sound.
Origin of the term
In movie industry terminology usage, a
sound track is an audio recording created or used in
film production or
post-production. Initially the dialogue, sound effects, and music in
a film each has its own separate track (dialogue track, sound
effects track, and music track), and these are mixed together
to make what is called the composite track, which is heard in the
film. A
dubbing track is often later created when films are dubbed into
another language. This is also known as a M & E track (music and
effects) containing all sound elements minus dialogue which is then
supplied by the foreign distributor in the native language of its
territory.
The contraction soundtrack came into public consciousness with
the advent of so-called "soundtrack albums" in the late 1940s. First
conceived by movie companies as a promotional gimmick for new films,
these commercially available recordings were labeled and advertised as
"music from the original motion picture soundtrack", or "music
from and inspired by the motion picture." These phrases was soon
shortened to just "original motion picture soundtrack." More
accurately, such recordings are made from a film's music track,
because they usually consist of the isolated music from a film, not the
composite (sound) track with dialogue and sound effects.
The abbreviation OST is often used to describe the musical
soundtrack on a recorded medium, such as
CD, and it stands for Original Soundtrack;
however, it is sometimes also used to differentiate the original music
heard and recorded versus a rerecording or
cover of the music.
Types of
recordings
There are five types of soundtrack recordings:
- Musical film soundtracks which concentrate primarily on the
songs
(Examples:
Grease,
Singin' in the Rain)
- Film scores which showcase the background music from
non-musicals
(Examples:
Star Wars,
The Lord of the Rings)
- Albums of pop songs heard in whole or part in the background of
non-musicals
(Examples:
Sleepless in Seattle,
When Harry Met Sally...)
- Video game soundtracks are often released after a game's
release, usually consisting of the background music from the game's
levels, menus, title screens, promo material (such as entire songs
that only segments of which were used in the game), cut-screens and
occasionally sound-effects used in the game
(Examples:
Sonic Heroes,
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time)
- Albums which contain both music and dialogue from the film, such
as the 1968
Romeo and Juliet, or the first authentic soundtrack album of
The Wizard of Oz.
The soundtrack to the 1937 Walt Disney film
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first commercially issued
film soundtrack.[1]
It was released in January 1938 as Songs from Walt Disney's Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs (with the Same Characters and Sound Effects
as in the Film of That Title) and has since seen numerous expansions
and reissues.
The first live-action musical film to have a commercially issued
soundtrack album was
MGM’s 1946 film biography of
Show
Boat composer
Jerome Kern,
Till the Clouds Roll By. (Snow White was also a musical
film, but an animated one.) The album was originally issued as a set of
four 10-inch 78-rpm records. Only eight selections from the film were
included in this first edition of the album. In order to fit the songs
onto the record sides the musical material needed editing and
manipulation. This was before tape existed, so the record producer
needed to copy segments from the playback discs used on set, then copy
and re-copy them from one disc to another adding transitions and
cross-fades until the final master was created. Needless to say, it was
several generations removed from the original and the sound quality
suffered for it. The playback recordings were purposely recorded very
"dry" (without reverberation); otherwise it would come across as too
hollow sounding in large movie theatres. This made these albums sound
flat and boxy.
MGM Records called these "original cast albums" in the style of
Decca's Broadway show cast albums. They also coined the phrase "recorded
directly from the soundtrack." Over the years the term "soundtrack"
began to be commonly applied to any recording from a film, whether taken
from the actual film soundtrack or re-recorded in studio. The phrase is
also sometimes incorrectly used for Broadway cast recordings. While it
is correct to call a "soundtrack" a "cast recording" (since it
represents the film cast) it is never correct to call a "cast recording"
a "soundtrack." Among MGM's most notable soundtrack albums were those of
the films
Good News,
Easter Parade,
Annie Get Your Gun,
Singin' in the Rain,
Show Boat,
The Band Wagon,
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and
Gigi.
Film score albums did not really become popular until the
LP era, although a few were issued in 78-rpm albums. Alex North’s
score for the 1951 film version of
A Streetcar Named Desire was released on a 10-inch LP by
Capitol Records and sold so well that the label later re-released it
on one side of a 12-inch LP with some of Max Steiner's film music on the
reverse.
Steiner’s score for
Gone with the Wind has been recorded many times, but when the
film was reissued in 1967, MGM Records finally released an album of the
famous score recorded directly from the soundtrack. Like the 1967
re-release of the film, this version of the score was artificially
"enhanced for stereo". In recent years,
Rhino Records has released a 2-CD set of the complete Gone With
the Wind score, restored to its original mono sound.
One of the biggest-selling film scores of all time was
John Williams's music from the movie
Star
Wars. Many film score albums go out-of-print after the films
finish their theatrical runs and some have become extremely rare
collectors’ items.
In a few rare instances an entire film dialogue track was issued on
records. The 1968
Franco Zeffirelli film of
Romeo and Juliet was issued as a 4-LP set, as a single LP with
musical and dialogue excerpts, and as an album containing only the
film's musical score. The ground-breaking film
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was issued by Warner Bros
Records as a 2-LP set containing virtually all the dialogue from the
film.
RCA Victor also issued a 2-LP set what was virtually all the
dialogue from the film soundtrack of
A Man for All Seasons.
Movie and television soundtracks
The term soundtrack now most commonly refers to the
music
used in a movie (or television show), and/or to an
album
sold containing that music. Sometimes, the music has been recorded just
for the film or album (e.g.
Saturday Night Fever). Often, but not always, and depending on
the type of movie, the soundtrack album will contain portions of the
score, music composed for dramatic effect as the movie's plot
occurs. In 1908,
Camille Saint-Saëns composed the first music specifically for use in
a motion picture (L'assasinat du duc de Guise), and releasing recordings
of songs used in films became prevalent in the 1930s.
Henry Mancini, who won an
Emmy Award and two
Grammys for his soundtrack to
Peter Gunn, was the first composer to have a widespread hit with
a song from a soundtrack.
By convention, a soundtrack record can contain all kinds of
music including music "inspired by" but not actually appearing in the
movie; the score contains only music by the original film's
composer(s).[2]
Video game
soundtracks
Soundtrack may also refer to music used in video games. While
sound effects were nearly universally used for action happening in
the game, music to accompany the gameplay was a later development.
Rob Hubbard and
Martin Galway were early composers of music specifically for video
games for the 1980s
Commodore 64 computer.
Koji Kondo was an early and important composer for
Nintendo games. As the technology improved,
polyphonic and often orchestral soundtracks replaced simple
monophonic melodies starting in the late 1980s and the soundtracks
to popular games such as the
Dragon Quest and
Final Fantasy series began to be released separately. In
addition to compositions written specifically for video games, the
advent of CD technology allowed developers to incorporate licensed songs
into their soundtrack (the
Grand Theft Auto series is a good example of this).
Furthermore, when
Microsoft released the
Xbox in 2001, it featured an option allowing users to customize the
soundtrack for certain games by ripping a CD to the hard-drive.
Book soundtracks
Only a few cases exist of an entire soundtrack being written
specifically for a book.
A soundtrack for
J. R. R. Tolkien's
The
Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings was composed by
Craig Russell for the San Luis Obispo Youth Symphony. Commissioned
in 1995, it was finally put on disk in 2000 by the San Luis Obispo
Symphony.[citation
needed]
For the 1996
Star
Wars novel
Shadows of the Empire (written by author
Steve Perry),
Lucasfilm chose
Joel McNeely to write a score. This was an eccentric, experimental
project, in contrast to all other soundtracks, as the composer was
allowed to convey general moods and themes, rather than having to write
music to flow for specific scenes. A project called "Sine Fiction"[3]
has made some soundtracks to novels by
science fiction writers like
Isaac Asimov and
Arthur C. Clarke, and has thus far released 19 soundtracks to
science-fiction novels or short stories. All of them are available for
free download.
Author
L. Ron Hubbard composed and recorded a soundtrack album to his novel
Battlefield Earth entitled
Space Jazz. He marketed the concept album as "the only original
sound track ever produced for a book before it becomes a movie". There
are two other soundtracks to Hubbard novels, being
Mission Earth by
Edgar Winter and
To the Stars by
Chick Corea.
The 1985 novel
Always Coming Home by
Ursula K. Le Guin, originally came in a box set with an
audiocassette entitled Music and Poetry of the Kesh, featuring
three performances of poetry, and ten musical compositions by Todd
Barton.
In comics, Daniel Clowes' graphic novel
Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron had an official soundtrack
album. The original black-and-white Nexus #3 from Capitol comics
included the "Flexi-Nexi" which was a soundtrack
flexi-disc for the issue. Trosper by
Jim Woodring included a soundtrack album composed and performed by
Bill Frisell,[4]
and the
Absolute Edition of
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier is planned
to include an original
vinyl record.
The
Crow released a soundtrack album called
Fear and Bullets to coincide with the limited edition hardcover
copy of the graphic novel. The comic book
Hellblazer released an annual with a song called
Venus of the Hardsell, which was then recorded and a music video
to accompany with.
As
Internet access became more widespread, a similar practice developed
of accompanying a printed work with a downloadable
theme song, rather than a complete and physically published album.
The theme songs for
Nextwave,[5]
Runaways,[6]
Achewood,
Dinosaur Comics and
Killroy and Tina are examples of this.
In Japan,
such examples of music inspired by a work and not intended to soundtrack
an
radio play or motion picture adaptation of it are known as an "image
album" or "image
song," though this definition also includes such things as film
score
demos inspired by
concept art and songs inspired by a TV series which do not feature
in it. Many
audio books have some form of musical accompaniment, but these are
generally not extensive enough to be released as a separate soundtrack.
See also
References
External links