Welcome back to Scoring for Films and to the third and (perhaps) final part of Star Trek. We initially planned to do just one episode... Today, we’ll focus on something rather particular. When we looked at Basic Instinct, we saw that synthesizers - we're in the ’92/’93 period - rarely play a theme or a solo. Here, what happens? Something similar, in some ways, right?

Something pioneering happens, if you will. We’re in 1979, and Goldsmith uses these sounds organically with the orchestra. A futuristic use, if you will – a new world, a new type of sound that, at times, led some composers to get a bit carried away, let’s admit it... Since the 1950s, these sounds had become very used in cinema. Think about the old sci-fi films – the use of the Theremin, which wasn’t a synthesizer... But beyond the Theremin, synthesizers were also used as early as the late 1950s.

Of course, synthesizers have been an incredible innovation for cinema. Imagine being someone in the ’70s or ’60s... pressing a key and an entire sound world emerges. Always on our legendary score, we have precise indications of which synths were used and where. Let’s dive straight into the first scene we’ve selected. So, Kirk arrives at the space station.

Cut to the station moving, and you can hear this lightness—how is this lightness achieved? Let’s look at the score. This lightness is achieved in two ways. Firstly, through a repetition of two identical chords, and also by using the high register of all instruments. So no basses, no cellos, of course. Flutes playing an arpeggio that gives this sense of flight, of lightness.

And our ARP 2006 synth. Look at how wonderful this emulation is. Having lost the almost physical pleasure of plugging the jack into the plug, what did they come up with? A fake cable, of course, that is so beautiful just to look at! And we recreated - - using a preset - the sound we heard together with the orchestra. Here we have a classic use of a sonic blend: flutes, electric piano, vibraphone, bright strings— meaning violins in a fairly high register—and then this sound, which—even if we don’t notice it— is there...

The viewer, when watching the scene, might not realize it, but this synth helps create this sense of lightness. Let’s listen to it again now in light of what we know. We have the idea of something in the future... Space also takes us to the future, ideally. This sound, which is blended so elegantly with the orchestra, feels like a natural idea of the future; later, we'll have something less "natural"... You could tell me these sounds are old...

But these sounds today have a new use, even in pop, not just in films. They allow us to play with other types of sequences like this... It’s a bit like Alan Parson's Project... Then we apply the filters, it becomes tremendously interesting, modern, and in action scenes in many films it is used by removing the high frequencies to make the sound darker. So, we said earlier that Goldsmith's use of synthesizers in this score is almost always for blending and almost never just alone; but here, just to contradict myself, we see the exact opposite. Spock – for those who don’t know – is rationality, the absence of passions, it’s clarity taken to the extreme consequence.

Spock does a kind of test on Vulcan, and the test is not passed. During this test, Goldsmith has the orchestra play writing “non espressivo,” “non vibrato,” because vibrato usually gives that sense of humanity and human passions. Obviously, Spock is cold, aloof, and seeks to detach from his passions, so the sound of the orchestra is non expressive and non-vibrato. Spock's arrival must be associated with surprise in the minds of those who see him in front of them. Spock enters, and we hear underneath... Here, this interlude is beautiful.

The synthesizers interrupt the flow of the orchestra, so the orchestra represents the humanity of the Enterprise. Spock breaks this pattern with a synthesizer sound. Pure and raw, to then reach this look from Kirk where the warmth of the orchestra returns and the fact that he is happy to see Spock again. And we also notice that the synthesizer appears... ...on Kirk's face as he turns. We are in Kirk's mind, and we are seeing Spock through the synthesizer's sound.

Yes, because often we tend to match a character's sound with his face which isn’t wrong from the technical standpoint of scoring a film, but it's a bit basic. Here, we go beyond that. Spock is present in the room even if he's not in the shot. Thanks to which synth? CS80? Yes, this is the CS80!

I peeked, I didn't know! And of course, the CS80 is also part of the emulations we have available. Here it is. And we have the sound of Spock. It's also interesting how this sound is used: in a way different from how other sounds are treated in the same sonic environment, which is the future. Here Spock is not the future, here it's logic.

So, the cold sound of this synth, the Yamaha, doesn't help us imagine the future but Spock's logic. And so here we have an electronic sound - new, in 1979 - which adds to the palette available to composers to express something. Okay, but if today, in 2024, you watch this movie with your daughter one evening and listen to this sound, does it sound dated to you? It definitely sounds dated but what I think is interesting to point out is the introduction of a new linguistic element. If you had to score logic, which instrument would you have used if you didn't have this synth? If I didn't have this synth I would have used something like a harp or something like that, a zither...

because it would have brought me back to something from the ancient Greeks... But definitely something cold anyway, not something too expressive. And here the synth bursts onto the scene and the use of this gray area is brought by the synthetic sound. A middle ground between human light and cosmic darkness. This CS80 sound however, is not the only one available. Here too we tried to bring something out of maybe something different with the same synthesizer...

Let's listen to the result. This reminds me a bit of John Carpenter and 1997, Escape from New York. The expressive possibilities are potentially endless. You can use a lot of them fused with other sounds. So, what happens in this scene? The looming, imminent, and unknown danger brings the death of some distant people.

In this cloud there is something, something acting Here we heard two things. The first thing is what might seem at first glance like a synth, But it's not a synth. Even though it seems like it. It's a very particular instrument called the Blaster Beam. The Blaster Beam is, I must say, a strange discovery, because when I first heard it, I thought it was a synth. Nope!

Here we have an image of what a Blaster Beam is. It's a percussion instrument, basically, that has a whole series of expressive possibilities. You can do glissando, and a whole series of very interesting things. And Goldsmith uses it very often in this score exactly as it is alone. Of course, also because it's the sound of the threat we don't know. It's the cloud, it has something inside...

We'll discover that that something is V'ger and the sound of V'ger. Every time something happens that must remind us of V'ger we hear the sound of the Blaster Beam. And it's curious that this so relevant sound, is a sound that seems synthetic to us, but isn't synthetic. Maybe because what we believe to be a synthetic thing - and therefore fake - is actually a real thing, it's a real entity. And we can hazard that in Goldsmith's mind there was a desire to evoke that in the dark cloud there is V'ger: the probe created by man and thus V'ger has a humanity in that it's a machine created by man. Yes, I see this connection, perhaps forced, maybe Goldsmith didn’t think about it at all, but I like to think that even if it's a bit twisted, there could have been some reasoning behind it of that kind.

And here too... of that kind. And here we can also take our Yamaha CS80. Let’s hear it. I’d say it’s it. It’s definitely it.

We’ve used a preset from the emulation called Aquarock. This experiment is also able to make us isolate and perceive the sound of the synth relative to the rest. Let’s hear the scene again, here’s the Blaster Beam and then our CS80. What do we have now? Spock’s CS80 gives us the logic. The CS80 on dematerialization gives us the mechanics, we begin to perceive a synthetic sound as it is synthetic, as it is artificial, it’s the nature of the machine from which it seems to come.

And I’ll point out that this is a scene where people die. So it could have been scored in a thousand other ways, perhaps even more dramatic, maybe more emotional... but Goldsmith’s choice was to - in quotes - take away importance from these deaths. Not because they aren’t important, but because for the Entity that caused them they’re irrelevant. We won’t know until the end what causes these events. It suggests that this cause might not come from something human, but maybe something artificial...

Later scene: "Spock walk" Spock wants to go see, of course provoking Kirk’s wrath. Spock is outside walking in space, walking toward the entity. And we hear a falling synth sound. We have a use of the synth in bending. I’ll point out something that is purely musical notation: These three parallel lines give the idea of "glissando", but they actually have no influence on the execution: the execution is: the three notes as a chord, then the synth does all the bending part. So this is not an execution indication, but it’s a helpful indication for the conductor to visually see right away what kind of effect this synth should generate.

But which synth did Goldsmith use for this movement? The CS80? No. The ARP2006? No. He used an Oberheim OBX.

Fantastic, here it is. And we have the GForce emulation, I recommend it. Could we not go to search for the Spock walk... It would have been offensive. We found a preset that closely reminds us of the sound used. And here it is.

With the bending that gives us that sense of fall, as you said earlier, right? We are discovering more and more the artificial nature of what’s inside the cloud. Let’s remember, we don't know what’s inside. This cloud is approaching Earth. It causes casualties, but we are starting to sense more and more that this thing is alien, and it's probably artificial. And of course – as we did before – we can listen to other sound possibilities from the OBX, right?

Exactly, let’s listen to another preset that I find very interesting. I don't know why, but the preset is called "Brush your Teeth"... A somewhat fanciful name, but the sound possibilities were many, today even more and even in today’s presets sometimes there are some strange sounds, and finding the name... is difficult. Obviously, all these sounds take us back to space, and once you’ve called it "Spaceship", "Space", "Asteroid", "Satellite"... after a while you call it "Brush your teeth".

We wanted to try a theme you might recognize. Ah, I recognize not only the theme, but... I recognize a whole sonic world... It wasn’t played on the OBX, it was played on another synth, but the sonic texture was this one; you probably recognized the theme from Blade Runner. This little excursus in four interesting scenes made us revisit the pioneering approach to the synth in a truly pioneering way; but it also highlighted the relevance of these sounds today, which we find in different forms as a result of a different trend because time also shapes taste. Some things we know well are the children of that moment and they might die with that moment, but other things will remain.

One day we’ll have to face from a sonic point of view something like Zimmer’s "Dune". Or "Interstellar" and see what use was made of synths there. I believe the difference is not so much in the sound – which can go out of style or refer to a specific period – but in the way it’s used from a psychological perspective on the character; if the use is the same, if the ratio is the same, then the sound can be more or less modern... but I believe the use of sound is something we should delve into... For now, the interesting thing we’ve wanted to show is the language behind the use of these synths; it's always a carefully considered choice, always with consequences on the audience’s and listener’s perception and it can also be an excellent tool to form our own language and our own use of synths. Leave a like, comment, and subscribe to the channel!

See you in the next episode, bye!