A
soundtrack can be recorded music accompanying
and synchronized to the images of a
motion picture,
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,
soundtrack is
a contraction of "
sound track" and 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 early 1950s. First conceived by movie companies as a
promotional gimmick for new films, these commercially available
recordings were labelled and advertised as "music from the original
motion picture
soundtrack." This phrase 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
Sound
track; however, it is
sometimes also used to differentiate the original music heard and
recorded versus a rerecording or
cover
of the music.
Soundtracks are not the same as "
cast
albums". Original cast recordings are studio made recordings of
the songs from a stage musical. The performers sing the score live
every night. They do not lip-synch to pre-recorded tracks.
Incorrect use of the terminologies creates confusion in the
marketplace. For example as of July 2008 there are two albums of
the "
Mamma Mia" score. The first is the
original London cast recording from 1999, while the latest is the
film soundtrack. While it is correct to call the soundtrack a cast
recording (since it is the cast of the film version) it is
incorrect to call the original London cast recording a
soundtrack.
Types of recordings
In the soundtrack genre there are three types of 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”, “Exodus”)
- Albums of pop songs heard in whole or part in the background of
non-musicals
(Examples: “Sleepless in
Seattle”, “When Harry Met
Sally”)
The first musical film to have a commercially issued soundtrack
album was
MGM’s film biography
of
Show Boat composer
Jerome Kern,
Till the Clouds Roll By. The
album was originally issued as a set of four 10-inch 78-rpm
records. Only eight selections from the film are included in this
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, the 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
their 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).
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.
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" 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.
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, and the
Absolute
Edition of
The League
of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier is planned to
include an original
vinyl record.
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,
Runaways,
Achewood,
Dinosaur Comics and
Killroy and Tina are examples of
this.
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
- Savage, Mark. " Where Are the New Movie Themes?" BBC, 28 July
2008.
- Sine Fiction (New) — No Type — electronic &
experimental music
- http://www.fantagraphics.com/artist/woodring/woodring.html
- Marvel Comics News: Next Wave: "And to prove
it, we've created the band Thunder Thighs and commissioned a Theme
Song worthy of these champions!"
-
http://marvel.com/news/comicstories.8505.Download_The_All-New_Runaways_Theme_Song
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