Temptracks: ¿nightmare or opportunity for composers?

Dec 15, 2024

Temptracks are reference music tracks commonly used by film directors and editors to support the editing process until the final music is composed. They are also one of composers’ biggest challenges. Why? Because once you have associated an audiovisual fragment with specific music in your brain, a connection is established that is very difficult to change: each piece of music contributes something to the image, highlighting certain elements (a shot change, a glance, a camera movement…). And when you watch a film sequence with a particular musical piece a certain number of times (and during the editing of a film that “number” of times is really very very high), that association becomes indissoluble.

Film history is full of cases where this has happened. Perhaps the most “notorious” case is 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed in 1968 by Stanley Kubrick. The studio had commissioned the original music to the composer Alex North. However, Stanley Kubrick used classical music pieces by composers like Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss, and György Ligeti as temptracks during editing. Eventually, Kubrick rejected North’s composed music and used these classical music fragments as the film’s final soundtrack. Was North’s composition inadequate or of low quality? Given the composer’s trajectory, this is highly unlikely. Unfortunately, Kubrick had internalized the editing with these classical music pieces so deeply – their rhythm, accents, how they highlighted certain visual or narrative elements – that any other music no longer served his purpose.

Fortunately, composer Jerry Goldsmith rescued Alex North’s score from obscurity and in 1993 recorded the more than 40 minutes of music composed for the film. Curious to hear it? At the end of the post, I’ll leave you the link to the album published on Spotify.

On the other hand, I know that this “temporary support” of temp tracks is something directors and editors need to make sense of an edit, a scene, to perceive the rhythm of moving images, emotionally support the interpretation and actions, and further enrich the cinematic narrative: after all, it’s a way of demonstrating the important role music plays in film. Therefore, I try to see this phenomenon as an opportunity to better understand what the director wants, to learn how a particular scene works in their head, which will ultimately help me, as a composer, better contribute to the final result. In many cases, musical language is not the director’s native language, and often talking in musical terms may not help understand what the director is looking for in the music. However, the sensations they perceive when music “works” with a sequence are a very valuable source of information for me, because it helps me understand what effect they want the music to have on the film, how they want the music to accompany, complement, and enrich it.

My way of facing this reality is anticipation. I try to get involved in projects as early as possible, even when all that’s on the table is a simple literary script. This allows me to compose small sketches and demos that the director can start listening to, evaluate, and give opinions about, thus arriving at the editing phase with more or less developed themes they can use as references. When this isn’t possible, and the editing phase approaches, I provide the director with a folder containing many of my music pieces from previous works to use as temptracks. This already allows for a first approach to the musical language we’ll use, and there will likely be something in that folder they can use as musical support. After all, when they call me to compose music for a film, it’s because they’ve heard my previous work and something has “clicked.” There’s already been an initial connection.

As promised above, here’s the link to the album “2001: World Premiere Recording,” featuring the music composed by Alex North for 2001: A Space Odyssey, in a recording performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Jerry Goldsmith. What do you think of the soundtrack? Feel free to leave your opinion in the comments if you’d like.

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Music Composer & Sound Designer

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