One early afternoon, Amber settles down at the library and opens up her email tab; the top thread reads “Reminder: Film Music Draft due tomorrow”. She immediately opens up Pro Tools (audio production software) and delved into her scoring session. As a student film composer, she has been working with audio production softwares such as Logic Pro and Pro Tools for a few years now, producing brilliant music; yet many film composers have been utilizing the audio technology without fully understanding its history and all the endeavors that have gone into creating and continuously perfecting these audio production softwares. When did musicians and engineers conceive of this idea? How did this technology come into existence? Why was this important to the development of the film scoring industry? Moreover, how did this invention influence the way film composers create music today?
Interestingly, film music (soundtrack) as we know today was primarily performed live at movie theatres up until the 1930s– the advent of music synchronization to celluloid made it possible for film music to be a part of the viewing experience without the live accompaniment of the instrument ensemble. Since then, composers such as Max Steiner and Alfred Newman have been finessing the narrative power of music by creating impressive scores. This process, though, has made the director-composer collaboration a bit cumbersome: the director would either have face-to-face discussions and live experiments with the composer in front of a piano, or fully entrust the composer with the task of creating effective music for his or her film.
Thanks to UC Berkeley graduates Evan Brooks and Peter Gotcher, Pro Tools was first launched in 1991 as an audio editing software. Pro Tools was indeed very much limited by computers’ hard drive capacity at the time. Therefore, as computers became more and more powerful, the audio editing software gained true advantage given that its multi-track system allowed more and more tracks to be edited at the same time.
However, without proper input, Pro Tools would only serve as an editing software; i.e, composers would still have to book an orchestra to play their music, and then transfer the recording into Pro Tools for the sake of editing. As a result, the advent of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) and virtual instruments allowed composers to experiment with numerous options of sound textures and effects in real time by connecting the MIDI keyboard to their computer and pressing the keys to play the selected virtual instrument . What does this all mean? Well, it means that the process of film scoring has been improved in two significant ways:
- Directors no longer need to meet up with composers on a regular basis in order to discuss the progress of the music.
- Composers now have a choice to either render their music through the audio production softwares, or continue to record live musicians as composers did before.
Moreover, companies began to create expressive virtual instruments by programming customized features such as attack, vibrato, and frequency range in order to further imitate the sound of real instruments, granting composers the freedom to create a score with just the MIDI keyboard and an audio production software (such as Pro Tools) without the complications of recording a real orchestra.
After she recorded herself playing the violin part on the MIDI keyboard through Pro Tools, Amber decided to add some expression to the MIDI output by fiddling with the vibrato settings. As she was using a MIDI knob to adjust the amount of vibrato that came out from the string section, a strange thought occurred to her, and she wondered: “What would have happened if Wagner had Pro Tools to play with?”