Anyone who works on film soundtracks knows what source music is, but for people who don’t I’ll let George Burt, author of The Art of Film Music, explain it: “Source music is introduced into a scene either visually or by reference. We see a dance band playing in a dance hall, or we see (and hear) a radio or television. If a person is playing an instrument, singing, or whistling, we see and hear the performer. These sounds are visually initiated. In other instances, the source of the sound is not shown on screen. A disco system may not be seen, but we can expect to hear one.”
How one goes about making that music feel a part of the world in which the film lives is often the job of the music re-recording mixer in the final mix, although nowadays options are also often provided by the music editors where the source music has been ‘treated’ using tools like the plugin Speakerphone. Of course the clean music is always available too, as you just never know what shifts in perspective & treatment may be necessary in final context. Such processes can be very handy as a reference, and a huge timesaver on temp mixes where time is short & marathons must be sprinted… And pursuing that approach in its truest form involves worldizing, a subject much has been written on already
Years ago when I was working on a film called Toy Love (2002) I decided to have a play around with augmenting the inner city ambiences by worldising some beats from passing car stereos. I was more than a little influenced by having recently had a trip to San Francisco to attend AES, and while recording ambiences in Union Square I accidentally recorded this:
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I love how it feels like the sub is making the car vibrate, which it probably was!
Anyway I dug through my library & found some appropriate beats, looped them & made a CD & got my assistant to drive past at various speeds with the window down, blasting the car stereo… It was a bit hit & miss but I got some not bad results & found a few good places to use them in the film, heres a few examples (note they are only mono as I only had one 416 mic back then, but they still worked in the film okay as we panned them past & verb’d them into the environment anyway)- my crappy old Toyota, car stereo with no sub…
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It is equally interesting to see & hear examples of music videos that use the idea of source music as their creative basis, take this example:
And the original song:
Of course sometimes pre-existing music is used not as source music but as score and it can make for ‘interesting’ use of budgets since if a song is popular and/or dates strongly to a period, then chances are its licensing will be tied up with one of the big record labels who aren’t known for their generosity… Quentin Tarantino must be the grand master of the technique, in both his choice of tracks & their relationship to the film. But it can sometimes be surprising to hear music you know & love used in a film – sometimes good surprise and sometimes not. I recently watched Vertical Ray of Light and instantly warmed to the film when they used the Velvet Undergrounds Pale Blue Eyes whereas Lovely Bones use of Song for the Siren had the opposite effect on me. It’s a lottery, as each member of the audience will potentially have their own pre-existing relationship to a piece of music & if it is a well known song then that relationship may be steeped in memory & context entirely inappropriate for its new use. Do film makers worry about such things? Possibly, but mostly probably not for they are making their decisions based on their own experience. In the case of This Mortal Coils version of Song for the Siren, I felt the song had already been overused but I couldn’t remember where, turns out it was used in David Lynchs Lost Highway… Its a beautiful song but it sure doesn’t need to appear in any more movies….
