# Do we think actually 'scoring to picture' JW style is going to continue being a thing in future



## Fab (Jun 30, 2018)

Curious to hear what working film and TV composers have found, and what they think is easier, where are the pitfalls / benefits? 

So, if you have the time...thanks, share your knowledge!

IMO; I think I'd be fine delivering the stems and not so protective letting the overlords mess around with it, because they've paid for it right?

^But you may disagree, either way tell me why please, from your experiences.


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## JohnG (Jun 30, 2018)

do you mean "scoring to picture" by contrast with providing a sort of music library, stemmed out, that the music editor (or whoever) slices and edits into the picture?

The latter of course has been happening for many years with a lot of TV, especially reality but even others as well. 

Someone told me that the second "Transformers" movie had less than 30 minutes of score actually composed and recorded, and they music-edited it together for the movie.


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## lux (Jun 30, 2018)

I think it's like with CGI's. You can basically reuse models and parts like crazy or you can try being creative with it. There will be always movies when the composed score its like a bunch of minutes of music. I think it happened a lot before as well. I remember what recently happened with Harry Gregson Williams and Michael Mann, when the composer felt his work was used in a wrong manner and without respect in the movie. There will always be directors though who strongly believe in the relevance of a "scoring" approach to movie opposed to a single tracks or "replace my temps with something sounding alike" approach.

Where directors arent basically just plain executive assigned managers of a given (costy) project there will always be a creative interaction with the composer, I believe.


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## Bill the Lesser (Jun 30, 2018)

The most lucrative work I've done has been a sort of hybrid of what's discussed above. I'm doing music to picture mainly by manipulating Sonokinetic libraries, which are essentially pre-recorded stems, but set up for very extensive (and very, very rapid!) manipulation by the composer. I couldn't quite bring myself to put "composer" in quotes, even though maybe I should have.

Music production can thereby be literally calibrated in measures/minute for those with medium level of keyboard skills, and some familiarity with the VSTs, and some modest knowledge of music theory, and some general concept of how to support images with music. My mostly documentary and industrial clients often express surprise at the perceived high production values thereby attained, and I don't contradict them. But John Williams does not fear me.


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## Saxer (Jun 30, 2018)

Sooner or later things like that will be automated by artificial intelligence. Parts from a big library put together by analyzing emotional reactions of test persons and machines learn how to be effective that way. That's it with our jobs in music industry.


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## C.R. Rivera (Jun 30, 2018)

Saxer said:


> Sooner or later things like that will be automated by artificial intelligence. Parts from a big library put together by analyzing emotional reactions of test persons and machines learn how to be effective that way. That's it with our jobs in music industry.



In a similar vein (sorta of tongue in cheek) my wife, an artist, and I are working on technologies that "replace" existing ones, but with a twist.
We start with the stone ax, move on to the spear, followed by bow and arrow, mounted knight, fire-arms, et al, until the nuclear age. The planned finale is that all gets destroyed, and we return to, voila, the stone ax. Perhaps, there is hope for the far future and music making


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## Saxer (Jun 30, 2018)

C.R. Rivera said:


> In a similar vein (sorta of tongue in cheek) my wife, an artist, and I are working on technologies that "replace" existing ones, but with a twist.
> We start with the stone ax, move on to the spear, followed by bow and arrow, mounted knight, fire-arms, et al, until the nuclear age. The planned finale is that all gets destroyed, and we return to, voila, the stone ax. Perhaps, there is hope for the far future and music making


I think something will happen when most work is automated. If we don't work for money we do it for fun. People want to work and play. At least musicians know how to work even if nobody pays for. Artists will be the model of future mankind.


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## Kyle Preston (Jun 30, 2018)

Saxer said:


> Sooner or later things like that will be automated by artificial intelligence. Parts from a big library put together by analyzing emotional reactions of test persons and machines learn how to be effective that way. That's it with our jobs in music industry.



On my down days, I agree with this. But the more I think about it, I don’t see these scenarios putting _all_ film composers out of work. I think it’ll be the difference between McDonalds and a highly skilled chef, where AI = McDonalds. They have not and will never put chefs out of business. It also reminds me of the invention of the television laugh track. Worked at first, but once audiences figured out the trick, it wasn’t appealing anymore and it became unfashionable. Until AI and automation mimic intuition, I’m not gonna lose sleep over it.


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## Saxer (Jun 30, 2018)

There will always be people that _want_ to create. If cheep TV programs get automated probably the medium itself will change. It alredy did a lot of times from live music to published piano scores to concerts to live radio to records to movie to TV to games to streaming... and it will go on. And it has always been driven by creative people. If the industry claimed one medium and milked it the creatives moved on...


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## Tice (Jun 30, 2018)

It takes just one JW-like score to be a hit and suddenly every director and producer will want you to make those again. They're fads, they come and go with the wind.


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## AlexRuger (Jun 30, 2018)

It's not going away, but it's becoming a smaller and smaller part of the process.

My experience in blockbusters has all been the same: suites, and music editors fitting those suites to picture, is a massively important part of the getting the thing done. Most cues that aren't directly created out of suites at least use them as a starting point and are further crafted by assistants (hence why there are so many "music programming" and "arranger" credits, when "additional music" is probably more apt, since they're often only using the suites as the starting point due to time constraints, i.e. the suites are thoroughly mixed and highly produced, so starting there makes the overall sound of the score much more cohesive and the assistants don't have to do nearly as much producing/sound design/MIDI programming/mixing in order to get the cue to demo quality -- which of course nowadays means "100% finished product except we're still using MIDI orchestra"). 

After a round or two of reviews, we start getting more cues written originally to picture. But they're still grabbing tons of material from the suites for the reasons listed above. And of course the picture turnover is so fast, the music editors are very often crafting cues as placeholders for the original ones -- the truly written-from-scratch cues typically miss a round or two of picture revisions. 

One thing a lot of people forget about is that the final deadline isn't the only one -- there's tons of internal deadlines and they can be brutal. So, just in the name of having *something* there, lots of cues end up as Frankensteins of suites/music editing/original music, and are often done by at least 2-3 people. Hence why Hans, for example, has sometimes stated how hard it can be to accurately credit people. He's right -- authorship can just get lost when you're struggling to get an hour and a half of music rewritten because the cut changed so much, and they want it in a week. There's just no time for original cues or for worrying about who's going to get what cue sheet percentage.

It's a messy process, but of course it's just based out of necessity and logistics. We could get by writing music straight to picture when picture lock existed, but digital filmmaking and CGI made that impossible. And while I long for the older way of doing things, I can't fault anyone for simply adapting (rather cleverly, I might add) to reality. 

Writing to picture will never go away, but it will never be what it once was except in special cases. Any "standard blockbuster," if there is such a thing, will almost certainly be constructed using roughly this process. Some are smaller and lean more towards relying on suites in a purely compositional sense, some are larger and the suites are handed out to all of the assistants as starting points, but no matter what, you can bet that every cue won't be written to picture from its inception.


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## AlexRuger (Jun 30, 2018)

Tice said:


> It takes just one JW-like score to be a hit and suddenly every director and producer will want you to make those again. They're fads, they come and go with the wind.



We've had four Star Wars films lately and that way of working has stayed squarely in that arena, mostly because JW can't and won't work any other way. It's not like once he keels over, suddenly filmmakers everywhere will say, "let's honor him by giving our composers more time!"

It is the way it is due to logistics, not any creative or quality-driven reason, and unless the dominant process of filmmaking changes to be slower and more limiting (hint: it won't), composers will just have to keep up.


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## Dewdman42 (Jun 30, 2018)

The simple truth is that its quite expensive to do a "proper" film score and it requires certain pros with top shelf musical knowledge and experience.. JW is being used as the example here, but there are others too.. In the old pre midi days that was only way it could be done, so it was, and it cost a lot of money. These days who wants to spend $100k or more on the music when there are much cheaper solutions involving a lot less people and more easily done using some of the things mentioned above? Midi and samples brought in this possibility and as producers have gotten away with saving money there, they will continue to do so and I suspect that is unlikely to change. The wonderful scores of JW, Horner, Goldsmith and others will be memories from a golden age when music was given more money for the task and extremely competent composers were available to make a career out of it.

In order to make it possible to use the less-expensive-technology-route, composers have resorted to using much simpler forms of musical expression that are often not as nuanced as the old days. rhythm beds and things that sound hip and do add something to the film obviously, but in my view lack some of the nuance that JW and the other great film score composers used to write into every cue, every phrase. But... very big, epic and hip sounding scores can now be done for a fraction of the cost, so long as they are musically kept rather simple. There is simply not enough time, to use the current technology and produce something with as much nuance as an old school score, and also sound convincing to the audience.

This has been accepted by producers everywhere as good enough and saves them a lot of money. Will it ever become in style to do it the old way again? I don't know, but it will cost a lot for whomever does it and frankly, the talent pool of people capable of doing it is drying up. Its an art form that is dying on the vine.

Personally I think the cinematic experience has been lessened by this change to cinema, but that's just me.


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## NoamL (Jun 30, 2018)

My experience (NOT on blockbusters, except one time  ) mirrors yours Alex.

IMO the major driver is those internal deadlines. You can get a new edit of the picture and bam, suddenly 20 previously approved cues need new conforms, 5 cues need ground-up rewrites and 5 cues aren't even in the movie anymore. If all the music were "only" on paper until the orchestra date, then composers could be a lot more agile. But since everything has to be a final-quality mockup EVEN if it's ultimately replaced by orchestra.... that drives a lot of the writing considerations.

I think it's not enough to have a suite, but the director & composer also have to have a clear mental picture of how the music develops over the arc of the film. Otherwise the end result is not so great. There are some recent films (not going to name names) that were clearly scored from suites and while the individual cues are badass, they don't all join together to tell a story.

I really admire the composers who are able to not just use themes, but inflect those themes emotionally so that you feel the beginning, middle and end of a character's journey in the film. A wonderful example is Henry Jackman's score for "Big Hero 6." You could listen to just the score and instantly know, by Jackman's harmonic language, where the big "turn" in the story is. Another example is Michael Giacchino's amazing scores for "Up" and "Speed Racer" (yes the movie is bad, but the score is fantastic).

I think that way of scoring is not going away any time soon, but it requires more skill & craft so there are fewer composers who can really nail it. Emotional specificity requires specificity of harmonic language. If all the music sounds the same and is using the same vocabulary, there can't be emotional specificity to call out the peaks and valleys of the story.

Speaking of John Williams, I think _The Last Jedi_ is some of the best scoring we've seen in a long time. The director was reportedly pretty deferential and let JW do his thing. There even seem to be remarkably few places in that score where recorded material had to be conformed.


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## MPortmann (Jun 30, 2018)

Tice said:


> It takes just one JW-like score to be a hit and suddenly every director and producer will want you to make those again. They're fads, they come and go with the wind.



Agree. Director I’m working with now requested a more “classic/old school JW approach” (his words) to score I’m working on. That’s music to my ears. Not always the case. Versatility in different styles and uses of technology help with the gig.


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## Nmargiotta (Jun 30, 2018)

Dewdman42 said:


> and produce something with as much nuance as an old school score, and also sound convincing to the audience.



I think you absolutely nailed it here. Especially the though of the audience being convinced. I was just reading Scoring the Screen: The Secret Language of Film Music ( fantastic book by the way ) and the Author brought up that fantastic point about the audience accepting a complex score like that of the likes of JW. Obviously JW has mastered it, as have some of the other few at his level, (Giaccino) but there is something that has caused the current movie goer to feel weary or almost not trust a score with that kind of magnitude or fluff, esp in the HZ era of film music we are in now where the musical themes are very simple yet still very musically deep (think Inception).


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## Dewdman42 (Jun 30, 2018)

Hans Zimmer is actually probably to be credited more than anyone for ushering in the current trend. He opened pandora's box of using technology to create meaningful scores for a lot less money with a film score factory, essentially. I like a lot of his work, don't get me wrong, some of it is truly genius. That being said, it does lack some of the nuance that people from before used to bring, heavy on broad thematic material that doesn't necessarily hit the scene details exactly like JW and others do. There will either be some big theme that is blasted out rather broadly...or there will be subtle and rather generic background music that is just kind of blathering on meaninglessly to the scene. Because of his gift for themes and moods, its still brilliant, but this approach is what we see mostly everywhere coming from hollywood now and a lot of others don't possess his genius, so we get what we get. Its a lot cheaper this way though.

You mentioned inception, and its been a while since I saw it, but this is case in point of using a big broad theme over and over again, very repeatedly..and it hits the mood for sure and brings a certain feeling through the theme itself as well as the other elements that bring a feeling or mood.......but does not hit or support the scene details very well. IMHO, much HK material is like that...missing that nuance. And I personally think that his production company, which drastically cut the cost of film scoring down, is responsible more than any for starting the trend and where we are now.


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## Dewdman42 (Jun 30, 2018)

on the other hand, HZ has pushed the envelope, not only in lowering the cost to produce a film score, but also some very creative ventures.. Take for example, InterStellar. Genius.


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## Desire Inspires (Jun 30, 2018)

Save money for the client while getting paid fairly = golden opportunity for you guys!

STFU and make it happen!


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## AlexRuger (Jul 1, 2018)

NoamL said:


> IMO the major driver is those internal deadlines. You can get a new edit of the picture and bam, suddenly 20 previously approved cues need new conforms, 5 cues need ground-up rewrites and 5 cues aren't even in the movie anymore. If all the music were "only" on paper until the orchestra date, then composers could be a lot more agile. But since everything has to be a final-quality mockup EVEN if it's ultimately replaced by orchestra.... that drives a lot of the writing considerations.



Yeah, this is the aspect that can make film scoring truly a feat of endurance. By the time the inevitable craziness at the end rolls around, you've already gone through something similar 4 or 5 times.


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## dgburns (Jul 1, 2018)

IMHO, Not sure you can blame any one person for the state of the process.

On a positive note, writing music upfront has certain benefits as I’m discovering-

-Harvesting all the sound sources takes time and it pays off to work on that over time. Actually can be a fun part of the journey.
-The video editors seem to appreciate having original source music to cut with, avoids temp love issues and you chasing a temp.
-The team gets used to the music, so final mix and later stage approvals go more smoothly because your music is in the stream from an earlier point. (edits not withstanding)
-On the point about ‘frankencuts’, those crazy edits done to resolve changes, I wonder if I haven’t put some thought into how to write music to withstand the edits better. I concept I haven’t heard talk about much around here.

And sometimes despite all your best efforts to the contrary, you’re just pooched and behind the eightball, so it’s best to just accept it.


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## JeffvR (Jul 1, 2018)

Oh yeah I hate the "new approach". There's no development in themes as the same tune can be used in the beginning or at the end. Also the editors have to be informed which themes are supposed to be used for what. I prefer less time with a locked picture instead of more time while pre-composing stuff.


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## lux (Jul 2, 2018)

Tice said:


> It takes just one JW-like score to be a hit and suddenly every director and producer will want you to make those again. They're fads, they come and go with the wind.



I had this thought as well, but honestly there have been lots of great sophisticated scores those years (I can think of Desplat's supeb work with the final chapters of HP) attached to uber-selling flicks, still it doesn't seem to change a lot.

Watching recent Netflix productions I kinda recognize a non-scoring approach as most used. Have to admit that I kinda left a couple series along the way 'cause I was really annoyed by their soundtracks, attached to very long sequences. I'm not really sure why they didn't use the music to add dynamics to long drone landscape shots or stuff like that. Just one single Absynth note for 3-4 minutes, that's a bit too much for my own taste, really.

At the same time I'm loving the music on Luke Cage 2, not a John Williams approach for sure, but lots of really tasty music inserts reminiscent of late 60's, 70's and 80's. Very cool.

At the end of the day it's not really related to style, but more to a how you imagine scoring to picture. While definitely overmentioned, sure Stranger Things is probably one of the most brilliant recent examples of a "scored" approach using synths or non orchestral instruments. They used character and situational themes (the kids friendship tasty sequences, the upside down theme...) and not a single orchestral flute was armed during the releasing.


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## Ned Bouhalassa (Jul 2, 2018)

Loved the music for Westworld 2 - the theme is still fantastic, and I loved how thematic variations are used throughout. There’s a good writing study to be had just in analyzing the many iterations of the opening theme.


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## TimCox (Jul 10, 2018)

While I may not be doing any major motion pictures or a Hollywood mogul of any kind I will say I've only worked with directors that wanted me to score to picture. So maybe it's not as 'old-fashioned' as it seems?


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## AlexRuger (Jul 10, 2018)

TimCox said:


> While I may not be doing any major motion pictures or a Hollywood mogul of any kind I will say I've only worked with directors that wanted me to score to picture. So maybe it's not as 'old-fashioned' as it seems?



It's a Hollywood thing, so that's not surprising.


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## TimCox (Jul 10, 2018)

AlexRuger said:


> It's a Hollywood thing, so that's not surprising.



True, but perhaps the next generation of filmmakers will desire that personal touch you get when it's scored to picture. I personally think there is room for both and don't see one phasing out the other.


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## AlexRuger (Jul 10, 2018)

TimCox said:


> True, but perhaps the next generation of filmmakers will desire that personal touch you get when it's scored to picture. I personally think there is room for both and don't see one phasing out the other.



In my experience, filmmakers don't know and/or don't care. Composers choose to work this way -- no one's making them. Though, the filmmakers that know and/or care tend to think it's smart. YMMV, though.

And...again, it's not like scoring to picture doesn't happen. It's just joined by other things (more/longer suites, more reliance on music editing to finagle the skeleton of a cue into place, etc). It's neither more or less personal, just different. And loads of Hollywood composers don't explicitly copy this model (or at the very least, they do to varying degrees). It's just that the Remote Control composers tend to work this way, and there's a lot of them 

And it depends on whose personal touch we're talking about. I'll take, say, Bob Badami's "touch" via music editing over most assistant composers' any day!


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## JohnG (Jul 10, 2018)

part of what @AlexRuger is writing about relates particularly to blockbusters / major budget action movies. Let's face it -- a lot of movies can be followed even by someone who's completely drunk, so elevating it too much may be inappropriate?

Please don't take my comment as a knock -- it's not. Some of the comments about the creative nexus get a little purple at times. I am not sure that it's fair to talk about working from a suite as a "lesser" process or otherwise cast it in a pejorative light creatively. 

Michael Nyman, one of my favourite composers, writes ahead of time. the score for "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" is one of my all time most enjoyed scores, and I think that was written ahead of time. Certainly still an art film in my opinion.

Personally, most of what I have done originally was "to picture," but I've also written a lot of TV and trailer music, some to picture and some not, that then gets reused and reused -- thankfully -- and of course that's just a library function. But it would be hard to call what I've worked on "high art," whether it was done as a library or not.


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## AlexRuger (Jul 10, 2018)

To be fair, I'm only talking about that because that's really the only part of film scoring where the default of just scoring straight to picture like a normal person doesn't necessarily apply. 

Asking "do we think actually scoring to picture JW-style is going to continue being a thing in future" about indie movies doesn't make any sense, because the answer will pretty much always be "yes, of course, what else would we do?" There are some obvious exceptions, thoughu, such as Mica Levi or Jonny Greenwood (though, one may not consider them indie, just "Indie Darlings.")

Asking the same of TV would yield, "we never really did that anyway -- TV composers wouldn't survive without constructing at least a little bit of music for each episode from edits."

Etc. So, pretty much by definition, the question of this thread applies to big budget movies. I mean, JW is even named in the title (and let's face it, this is VI-Control -- blockbusters are what the majority care about, unfortunately).


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## JohnG (Dec 19, 2018)

NoamL said:


> But since everything has to be a final-quality mockup EVEN if it's ultimately replaced by orchestra.... that drives a lot of the writing considerations.



Very true.


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## dgburns (Dec 19, 2018)

For those that actually score to picture, or have done it alot-

Don’t you find you write differently when you have locked picture in front of you?

I do. It forces a few decisions about how you go about it, imho. The biggest one being how literal you create to the image. Big consideration. One with a few ramifications on the final result.

One of the biggest outcomes for me was an evolution of style. I’d say that due to the projects I came across (non blockbuster), the narrative was way more important, so much so that the dialog became the ‘singer’ and the music I wrote would usually be form fit to support not only actions, but the dialog. Even with thematic based music, like say musicals, there’s a whole world of possibility that can enhance the story, even with small pushes and pulls. One might consider all this music editing, but I think it goes far further to include deeper aspects of the music, like tempo, key signature and key changes.

So while I can’t force a client to accept me scoring to picture, I do what I can to make that situation happen. One big reason is that you become part of the dialog on story. Without that discussion with the director, I feel that I become wallpaper. No question about it, nothing stays in the final if no one else is buying the score, and sure, lots of times there are edits done after I’ve gotten ‘approvals’ and sent to mix. Yes, it bugs me if I’m beng honest, but what is one to do? It’s not my place in the end.

I also think this is a symptom of ‘video editor will do everything’ syndrome. Yes, the video editor can do it all, but the real question is, should they?

-edit-

And one thing to remember is that Music Composer is an Above the Line line item. Until such time as it is not, I’ll act accordingly as best as I can.


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## Olfirf (Dec 19, 2018)

I honestly believe that writing music is already a thing of a past for the most part. Soon, computer programs will "compose" music. That will be made from existing library tracks for cheap. Any real compositions by AI so far have failed (have you heard the score, that got played by an orchestra? - it sounded like a very bad JW rip off!)! So, there will be a few jobs left for a few people like a John Williams. But the majority of film musicians as they work today can be replaced, if you ask me. Not because they are all bad composers ... some might be really talented! But the way they already work in this business is totally without any real artistic attitude. It is all quick and cheap and on very well known, secure paths. Nothing, that an AI could not replace up to at least 95% ... and that will do it for the whole commercial endeavor of media music.


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## jbuhler (Dec 19, 2018)

I can't find the original image, but here is my transcription of a memo by David Selznick from 1939 where he complains about the usual method of scoring to locked cut. (The reference to Waxman is about the score Waxman had been hired to do for _Rebecca_.) The moment I came across this in the archive it struck me as very anticipatory.


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## YaniDee (Dec 19, 2018)

Olfirf said:


> I honestly believe that writing music is already a thing of a past for the most part


Kind of makes us, real instruments, sample instruments, and this whole forum redundant!
Guess we'll be seeing a lot of 98% off liquidation sales around the corner.
And don't forget to say goodbye to artists, poets, writers, photographers, film makers and all other creative people..pretty bleak view of things.


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## Olfirf (Dec 19, 2018)

I am not pessimistic, I am just realistic. I watch at mankind, how it acted in history, how it acts today and with the capitalistic system that rules the world today, I don’t see a big crowd of creatives being around for so much longer (sure! Other creatives as well!).
There will stay only those that offer something that the machines cannot offer (like a Williams or the classical composers). There might also stay some, who will adopt to operating composing algorithms and releasing something like 50 tracks per day. But we won‘t have the same number of composers writing for small TV stuff and company events or image films. Those jobs will pretty much be gone ... hell, they already are kind of! Where you could live from scoring one documentary 20 years ago for at least 2 months very well, nowadays, you have to score one per week to barely make a living. Are you seriously believing this trend is gonna change for the better as soon as algorithmic compositions are there?


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## wickedw (Dec 20, 2018)

The whole "AI" composition thing is a bit funny. Of all the applications for an "AI" ( and the term is being used extremely loosely these days), creative work like composition is about the least interesting one. Maybe the odd group in a university will dabble with it for a bit because it makes for a fun demo and "oh look how far we got with """"AI"""". But in reality there's just no money in it really. 

Why pay for expensive software to write music for you when people are practically doing it for free anyway? Just to get some extremely generic score that will likely ( especially in the early days ) have to be edited by a human anyway, just to make it playable and sound half decent. I think it's a bit arrogant even to think that media composition is the primary target of these applications, such a small industry and there is much more money to be made for companies to focus on other industries.

Technology has definitely changed the way we live and the way we work, and it will continue to do so. In both good and bad ways but worrying about algorithmic compositions is just a bit silly.


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## blougui (Dec 20, 2018)

Saxer said:


> Sooner or later things like that will be automated by artificial intelligence. Parts from a big library put together by analyzing emotional reactions of test persons and machines learn how to be effective that way. That's it with our jobs in music industry.


I'm pretty convinced we're heading to that (same with a lot of "creative" jobs).


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## Saxer (Dec 20, 2018)

wickedw said:


> Why pay for expensive software to write music for you when people are practically doing it for free anyway?


The expensive thing is to develop learning software. When this is done you can feed whatever you like into this process. I agree that composition isn't much on the priority list. But manipulation is. There are already bots out there manipulating the way we communicate online. Having an emotional impact by music is just another step beside voice and video manipulation.


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## MatFluor (Dec 20, 2018)

That AI discussion always reminds of translators.

I studied (and current dayjob, work) in the field of Computational linguistics. One part I did a ton of was train (via machine learning) automatic translation systems. Those systems are in use e.g. at Autodesk, Banking software companies and much more.
On the advent or early days of those systems, the same discussions happened. Human translators all fearing for their jobs, damning computers and whatnot. What happened?
Human translators are still needed, translation studies are well attended, and a lot of students graduate each year. But their job shifted a bit.
The current translation systems work very well for manuals etc, domain-specific, clearly regulated things. Also work fairly well for business letters. You don't need a human translators for that anymore. Instead, human translators now have a couple of fields to work:
- Terminology: establishing the language and terms
- Using the machine translation systems: they get trained to take these tools as aid and to supervise them
- Correcting: read through the auto-translated texts and correct for more fluidity, fine-tuning semantics etc
- Advice and special jobs: Recommending systems, training them, or fill databases, and unique translations like e.g. "that big client in Japan wants flawless Japanese"

Yes, you need overall less translators nowadays, but not as much as everybody panicked. There are still areas machines cannot touch (simultaneous translation in the UN for instance). So - the composers job will shift, maybe the "low hanging fruits" will disappear. Maybe it won't go anywhere apart from experimental stuff, since there is so much music produced and on shelves already.
But I can see it as opportunity for us as well. Somebody needs to supervise with a musical ear, somebody needs to mix it. Somebody needs to train the systems, or feed it your patterns to use it as aid in your process. But creative collaboration between a director and a composer will not be touched by that, the bouncing off of ideas, the teamwork of creating a worthy final product.
The landscape changes - with the usage of theme suites and less writing to picture - but not everywhere. Nobody in the translator discussion thought about the translators sitting in the EU PA translating all the speeches, because they need the nuances of terms and semantics since politicians tend to speak in that manner.
They are still there, as many as before the machine translation rise. They use the tools they have available now, to provide the best value, faster for the client. Without having a huge pay-cut.

My 2 cents


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## Olfirf (Dec 20, 2018)

MatFluor said:


> That AI discussion always reminds of translators.
> 
> I studied (and current dayjob, work) in the field of Computational linguistics. One part I did a ton of was train (via machine learning) automatic translation systems. Those systems are in use e.g. at Autodesk, Banking software companies and much more.
> On the advent or early days of those systems, the same discussions happened. Human translators all fearing for their jobs, damning computers and whatnot. What happened?
> ...


Funny, but I just recently spoke to a translator and asked her why she is working in a different sector now. She told me that she still got offers, but those were only the most demanding tasks, very technical stuff where you needed to look up many things in order to be able to translate it. Those were the jobs, the machines (or the cheaper translators from poor countries) couldn't do. The thing is, they paid the same rate for those difficult translations as for the easy ones. In the past, the easier jobs made up for those difficult jobs and you could make a living by the sum. It is not a few less translators today! Only a fraction of those people who learned that job can make a living of it today! I think you are fooling yourself a little bit by trying to diminish the impact those things have.


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## I like music (Dec 20, 2018)

C.R. Rivera said:


> The planned finale is that all gets destroyed, and we return to, voila, the stone ax.



I misread the "voila" as a "viola" which made me chuckle.


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## MatFluor (Dec 20, 2018)

Olfirf said:


> Funny, but I just recently spoke to a translator and asked her why she is working in a different sector now. She told me that she still got offers, but those were only the most demanding tasks, very technical stuff where you needed to look up many things in order to be able to translate it. Those were the jobs, the machines (or the cheaper translators from poor countries) couldn't do. The thing is, they paid the same rate for those difficult translations as for the easy ones. In the past, the easier jobs made up for those difficult jobs and you could make a living by the sum. It is not a few less translators today! Only a fraction of those people who learned that job can make a living of it today! I think you are fooling yourself a little bit by trying to diminish the impact those things have.



Let me prepend with: Yes, you are right, depends where you look at it (but it doesn't make your point less valid).

Sure, one has to take into account where and what (which I didn't do in my long text). Yes, the rates are the same - comparable to scoring by a minute of music. A Minute is a minute - be it a drone or a Williams action cue. And absolutely - you don't see many "exclusive pair" translators anymore, I know extremely few that translate only in one pair (and mostly I see them in big companies and the language specialists of our military).
Other than that, there still are many translators - but the demand is different, since basically everybody here speaks at least 3 languages, in some cases 4, in rarer occasions 5+. We are pickier considering machine translations, due to our multilingualism. Other jobs studied translators can do are in journalism, tourist guides, book translations, phone lines and whatnot (every middle-sized company needs at least a couple persons fluent in 2-3 languages), European languages though, but still. I see very few Arabic or other language speaking students here. But I have in my lectures always two or so Arabian or Chinese speaking ones (among the roughly 50 per year).

You are right, there are other countries and sectors who were devasted by machine translation. As said, I studied and work for "the other side", trying to get even better systems, pushing the accuracies above the 96% mark. Isn't that somehow what sample libraries do with musicians and orchestras? Or affordable pro-quality libraries with pen-and-paper composers, conductors etc?
(No need to answer that, it's just a quick thought based on the last paragraph - but that would spark another huge discussion that has been made a couple times on here already, derailing even more )


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## Tice (Dec 20, 2018)

I wonder, is the move away from JW-style music also happening because during the editing process, it's much easier to edit to the style of music we see more of nowadays because it's much less specific, and also because the themes used in JW-style music are too jarring for the director and editor because they associate those themes with the movies they were originally written for, where-as that association is less strong in the less specific music being used a lot today?


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## YaniDee (Dec 20, 2018)

In thinking about this further, it's not just composers that will be gone, but performers also. What kid is going to learn to play the clarinet, or flute, or any instrument when the "app" can do it better. When the instrumentalists are gone, say goodbye to live music..sorry Beethoven, your time is up!


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## MartinH. (Dec 20, 2018)

wickedw said:


> The whole "AI" composition thing is a bit funny. Of all the applications for an "AI" ( and the term is being used extremely loosely these days), creative work like composition is about the least interesting one. Maybe the odd group in a university will dabble with it for a bit because it makes for a fun demo and "oh look how far we got with """"AI"""". But in reality there's just no money in it really.
> 
> Why pay for expensive software to write music for you when people are practically doing it for free anyway? Just to get some extremely generic score that will likely ( especially in the early days ) have to be edited by a human anyway, just to make it playable and sound half decent. I think it's a bit arrogant even to think that media composition is the primary target of these applications, such a small industry and there is much more money to be made for companies to focus on other industries.
> 
> Technology has definitely changed the way we live and the way we work, and it will continue to do so. In both good and bad ways but worrying about algorithmic compositions is just a bit silly.



Independant games development is a huge market full of people that need music, but have little to no budget for it. There are tons of people who can't wait for AI-composed music. Not sure it will cut deep into the low-budget _custom _music gigs, but I think it's not unrealistic that it will have a non-negligable impact on library music sales. Why would somone pick generic library music when they can have just as generic but technically more unique AI generated music, for cheaper? 
And people are likely going to spam libraries and asset marketplaces with AI generated music as well... everything to make a quick buck is gonna be tried.

The next few decades certainly are going to be "interesting" for everyone...


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## Fab (Dec 20, 2018)

YaniDee said:


> In thinking about this further, it's not just composers that will be gone, but performers also. What kid is going to learn to play the clarinet, or flute, or any instrument when the "app" can do it better. When the instrumentalists are gone, say goodbye to live music..sorry Beethoven, your time is up!




hmm, yeah but I also think we will always need good clarinet players to record and put into sample libraries in the first place!

Then we will hire them again because we are familiar with the sound and know it will sound better to capture their live performance of our composition. The clarinet player probably will not even need a great recording setup, compared to the one sampled for. Then there will always be paid work for playing the clarinet in a live orchestra setting.

----


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## Daryl (Dec 20, 2018)

YaniDee said:


> In thinking about this further, it's not just composers that will be gone, but performers also. What kid is going to learn to play the clarinet, or flute, or any instrument when the "app" can do it better. When the instrumentalists are gone, say goodbye to live music..sorry Beethoven, your time is up!


Live music is a different kettle of fish. People will always want to see live music. What they might not want to do is pay for a live recording. However, at the top end of the industry this is unlikely to go away, and the same will apply to composers. It's those in the middle and bottom who will probably lose their incomes, particularly if they are writing formulaic genre music, like loop based underscores, Reality TV pizzicato and trailers.


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## Fab (Dec 20, 2018)

MartinH. said:


> And people are likely going to spam libraries and asset marketplaces with AI generated music as well



This does sound like it's definitely going to happen, if it isn't already.


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## YaniDee (Dec 20, 2018)

On even further thought..yes AI might take over, for a while, but people will revolt against it..I was just on Youtube, enjoying some 80s videos (after a couple of beers)..Don't You Forget about me by Simple Minds has 117 million views Don't you want me by Human League, 99 million views, I Ran by Flock of Seagulls has 54 million..etc. Just about every comment is from 17 year olds admitting that current pop SUCKS, and they wish they had lived at that time. The New Wavers embraced the new technology of the time (kind of laughable now) but they put memorable melodies to it which still reaches people 38 years later! (A bit off topic..but I had to say it.)


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## AlexRuger (Dec 20, 2018)

AI doesn't worry me too much. "AI" at this point is really just market-speak for "programming enough choices into a system such that if you squint your eyes really hard, the illusion of intelligence can be seen," combined with the still hilariously young field of machine learning. Don't think that I'm underestimating it -- I'm not, and I'm very well aware that the potential for this field is astounding -- but we are in very early days here. And unlike many fields of technological advancement, there's little low-hanging fruit to pick. Progress is and will continue to be painfully slow (until it's not -- yes, I foresee the incoming CGP Grey "Humans Need Not Apply" link -- but that's a ways off).

The impact, if any, on live performances and people learning instruments will be negligible at most. In fact, I can see it bolstering interest in live music more -- see the conversation that keeps getting louder about the need to get away from social media and to have more and better interactions, or the trends of people getting away from screens (recording music using screenless technology, or finding a hobby like woodworking, etc). Humans like the real shit and only accept better convenience at the expense of (for lack of a much better word) their souls until they can actively feel them shriveling up -- then they rebel, because _really living _feels good.

However, AI is definitely going to eventually eat into highly idiomatic gigs. If the gig calls for a variation of some shit we've already heard a hundred times, and it doesn't require really nimble and well-considered timing to picture, then that gig is running on borrowed time. And given that our culture seems to be in nostalgia overload mode right now, that describes a hell of a lot of gigs. Also, low-budget gigs that already rely on cheap music (see, as mentioned already in this thread, super low-budget indie games that often license royalty-free music) will be gone; I can definitely see the smartest music libraries expanding their services to include generative client portals to avoid losing out completely to tech companies.

Basically: the already-small and ever-shrinking middle class of composing work is what I'm worried about. That said, when considered along with the fact that by the time AI is good enough to really start eating into composers' incomes, it will most likely be eating into _way more _peoples' incomes, the loss of those gigs will likely be the least of our worries. Hopefully by then we humans will have done the smart thing and found a way to feed our population (but let's please not let this thread devolve into UBI speak).


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