As film-watchers, most audiences do not take into consideration the time and thought put behind the creation of a film score. According to two composers, Fred Karlin and Rayburn Wright, this process can be approached systematically. As an audience, we can use this book, On the Track, as a guide to help us analyze the film scores that are composed for the audience to listen to. Alan Silvestri, the composer of Contact, has a very conventional method of composing his film scores, in that he uses a main recurring theme. This theme is then further developed to similar motives that can be heard in new sound cues. In Contact, Silvestri uses his tried and true method to create exemplary film scores that director Robert Zemeckis had become infatuated with and the pairing of Zemeckis and Silvestri continued for many movies after Contact. …show more content…
From The Spice Girls to the broadcast of Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon, Silvestri places the audience in a familiar setting. As the music changes from one sound byte to the next, the camera is panning away from Earth, and these sound bytes become older. This allows the audience to discover that the farther they are from the earth, the longer it took those sound bytes to reach those destinations in space. Silvestri did not necessarily compose music for the opening, but had to find audio clips that the audience could recognize, and even watching this movie 19 years after it’s release, the audience is still able to understand the purpose of the music chosen. The director, Robert Zemeckis, and composer, Alan Silvestri, use this as a means to explain just how vast our universe is and allude to the purpose of the