A music professor I had at South Alabama once lectured on soundtracks and their roles in movies. He believed they were indispensable for setting a scene's tone and mood. At that time, one of the big movie releases in recent years was 1985's Out of Africa. In class, the guys just looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders. "Never seen it, Doctor Wermuth," one guy ventured. The professor laughed and conceded the point but stated that he had and thoroughly enjoyed it. He continued on by saying he was at a screening with the soundtrack stripped away and it was almost unwatchable.
If the good doctor wanted resonance with a bunch of guys in their late teens and early twenties, he should have referenced Top Gun, the Naval Aviation recruitment video from 1986. It had enough of an impact on me that "Highway to the Danger Zone" was previously featured on these pages. The other hot ticket off that album was "Top Gun Anthem". A buddy in college loved blasting these two tunes from his tapedeck as he cruised around, and in a rare case of cassette serendipity, as one song finished, you could just flip the tape and the other song was automatically queued up.
Great soundtracks are more than mood lighting; they have a symbiotic relationship with its movie. Whatever emotions are evoked on-screen are transferred to the musical score. Take the Rocky franchise. Survivor's contributions to Rocky III and Rocky IV have made this blog because the images of Rocky Balboa training for his next big fight on screen made a visceral connection with teenage me. These songs continue to be in rotation in this old school gym rat's training montage for when I absolutely need to crank out that last rep or cycle to the top of that next hill.
If you're OG enough you'll remember seeing Jaws in the theater and the iconic, manacing ba-dub from its soundtrack. This guy saw it as a 5-year-old and memories of those two ominous cords repeating, getting louder and faster wigged me out for weeks. Evidently, there's a scientific reason why horror soundtracks can evoke such an emotional response. The non-linear dissonant chords popular in the genre trigger a deep ingrained threat response in us. The cited study compares the resonance to the panic squeals of yellow-bellied marmots. The next time you find yourself in a pitch-black room with the hairs on your neck standing straight up, just quote the results of this study to the darkness. You'll be fine. Maybe.
The 2006 film, The Da Vinci Code, earned blockbuster status as it raked in $224 million. It was an entertaining movie, but I loved its soundtrack. In particular, I found "Chevaliers de Sangreal", Knights of Royal Blood very compelling. While its use in the movie was profoundly effective for Tom Hanks's character's moment of discovery, I found it to be a beautifully orchestrated piece that's always queued up when I find myself in a pensive mood.
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