by Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier
He is also a composer himself, perhaps best known as the musical mind behind indie darling Untitled Goose Game. Playfully remixing a selection of Debussy piano préludes which react to the actions of the player, Golding recently explored the themes further in his mischievous “Untitled Concerto for Orchestra and Honk”.
This places him in a strong position to observe the rapidly changing state of the creative industries – and all from numerous standpoints across gaming, radio and film.
The swift advent of AI as a cheaper, and assuredly more soulless, alternative to human beings in every artistic field has rightly left many creatives fearful of losing their livelihoods.
Golding admits there is plenty of discussion around the issue, sharing some on-the-ground insight of a large film studio stipulating contract clauses that allow large language models to be trained on the music of a composer working within that studio.
“So, if you write a soundtrack for ‘insert studio name here’,” Golding explains, “and they keep the right to be able to train their future AI on your music, this is a little bit concerning. Especially if that composer is not being compensated fairly for that potential future loss of work.”
The approach to the industry’s increasing new reliance on AI-generated music is two-fold, Golding suggests. The first relates to streamlining the production of relatively simplistic music, and the second emphasises the need for skilled musical storytellers which heighten whatever project they’re working on.
The soundtrack work that is most at risk of AI replacement, Golding highlights, is “what people used to call, or still do call, production music. That’s royalty-free tracks for a YouTube video or a podcast, those sorts of things.”
It’s when you start to elevate the level of complexity required of music, this is where AI is not yet at the level of replacing human emotional intelligence and artistic intuition.
Citing some of his favourite examples of film scoring – Bernard Herrmann’s music in Vertigo and Psycho, as well as more contemporary work such as Ludwig Göransson’s Black Panther soundtrack – Golding underlines the multi-faceted skillset required to make great movie music.
“Every composer has to be a storyteller and has to understand what they’re doing with the music,” he elaborates. “I mean, those great examples that I pointed to before, they’re amazing soundtracks by people who aren’t just able to technically write good music but who know what they’re doing with an orchestra.”
Golding admits the precise direction of the film industry is a mystery to him, so he can’t say to what scale – and at what rate of speed – visual media will begin employing AI-generated scores in lieu of human-made music.
“You can probably get a system to write good music, if you sort of push it in the direction you want to,” Golding says. “But I think the combination of all of those things are still a pretty tall order and is best done by an actual thinking and, more importantly, feeling human.”
All this to say, Golding is a buoyant opponent to the tired adage that the best film music is the kind that you don’t hear. The conventional view of film scoring is, save for the standout hero moments, you aren’t meant to really hear it, so as not to distract from the characters talking and not to bring attention to itself.
“What good music can do,” Golding proposes, “is that it doesn’t just give you an emotional sense of the scene, but it can often tell you about the plot; about what’s going on. It can often comment on what’s happening, in a way that the images alone don’t.”
Golding returns to Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score and the immense amount of work it performs, providing deeper insight into the characters’ various states of unease and paranoia than dialogue or imagery alone. The film’s director Alfred Hitchcock, who Golding explains was notoriously reluctant to credit anyone other than himself for a film’s success, admits that 33% of the film’s overall shock value is the result of the music.
“It’s funny how often directors come back to percentages when they’re talking about film and music, but actually it often multiplies,” Golding ponders. “It’s not segmented so easily.”
Art, like life, is not something that falls easily within percentages, either. It often goes beyond precise metrics and can’t be condensed into prompts for a large learning model. Art, emphatically, is not artificially generated and here’s hoping it stays that way for as long as it can.
Dan Golding can be heard on his Screen Sounds programme every Saturday at 6pm, on ABC Classic. You can also hear his deep dives on iconic film scores at Art of the Score
