Sounding Glocal: Synthesizer Scores in Hong Kong Action Cinema

Abstract

At a symposium entitled “Film Music and Digital Media,” held in 2009 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Marks, Chihara, and Carlin), music historian Martin Marks observed that if the history of fi lm sound underwent its fi rst revolution with the diffusion of synchronized soundrecording technology in the 1920s, and its second revolution with the rise of fi lm sound design as a distinctive aesthetic practice in the 1970s, it is now in the midst of a third revolution owing to the integration of digital audio technology. Indeed, the irrevocable infl uence of digital technology on fi lm music composition was initiated in the early 1980s with the development of the Yamaha DX-7 digital keyboard and MIDI, an interface for the transmission of data between musical instruments and computers. 1 The “digital turn” empowered composers with the means of writing, playing, and recording entire scores with a MIDI-capable keyboard and a computer equipped with inexpensive software. Although acoustic orchestral scores have retained a strong presence in Hollywood cinema, scores produced by digital synthesizers are standard resources in many fi lm industries around the world, not only for their budget-friendly effi ciency, but also for their ability to create innovative sounds that are impossible to obtain from acoustic instruments.