Poll: Danny Elfman VS Hans Zimmer

[Casual Shinji]

I think you might be confusing melody with leitmotif (an easily identifiable tune that is associated with a person or place). While it's true that you don't see the latter in films nearly as often anymore, melody is simply a sequence of satisfying notes.

I'm not very musically... inclined, so I don't know the exact terminology when discribing the structure of compositions and whatnot.

Music is, of course, inherently subjective, so I suppose you could just decide that no series of notes in modern film is satisfying, but I think you'd be in the incredibly small minority on that. A melody doesn't need to be a tune that you can whistle or associate with a character/place to be effective.

Well, any kind of music can be effective. Just having a siren go off in the middle of a movie will have an effect. I'm not saying it's not effective, I'm saying in about 95% of current movies the score is simply used to fill in space and not compliment the scenes or characters.

This video can explain it better than I can.

 

[MrBoBo]

I would say the visuals and audio in Tim Burtons Batman movies compliment each other perfectly.
But that's just my opinion, I'm not expert.

 

[MrCalavera_v1legacy]

When it comes to Batman? I'd say they made a good job on the movies they were hired for respectively.

But, i'm really, REALLY tired of Zimmer.

 

[Xprimentyl]

I'm sorry, but I don't consider that much of a melody. Apart from the volume increasing (unnecessarily loud) I'm listening to the same three or four notes over and over, resulting in just a mash of noise.

Compare that to this; Same kind of tension, but there's peaks and valleys. All the instruments compliment oneanother and don't morph into an incomprehensible wall of sound.

I understand; it is entirely subjective. Where you hear a bland, overly-loud repeating melody, I hear a moment in time, thick with intense emotion, captured and exemplified which isn?t so easily encapsulated in a more traditionally structured piece of music. One could look at a painting of a landscape and see just hills and trees while another sees a moment of beauty and serenity; neither is wrong.

I listen primarily to electronic music (and no, not ?techno,?) which focuses largely on the exploration and expression of sound, not telling a story or creating tangible, easily digestible melody; it tasks the listener to project themselves into the experience and make it their own. I can listen to the same, lyric-less, repetitious, ?story-less? song a hundred times and feel as many different ways depending on where my mind is at at the time; I hear how it begins and I hear it change and the ways it changes and it takes on a form and an identity, for lack of better words. I don't listen to music to alter my mood; I listen to music that compliments and legitimizes my current mood, be it a good one or bad. Below is an example of what I personally feel to be a very powerful piece of music from probably my favorite artists of all time, Autechre; this isn?t indicative of the their entire body of work; I intentionally picked something ?hard to get.? Their work is notorious for requiring repeated listens until one ?gets? it; you?ll hear a rhythm where there was once noise; you?ll hear melody where there was once formless ambience; you?ll find patterns in what was once chaos. It?s beautiful and moving which is how Zimmer?s scores often hit me. In the world of cinema, the story is set and the music?s place is often used to compliment the feelings which sometimes the screen, be it for poor writing, acting or just emotions or ideas too complicated to accurately portray visually, has difficulty relaying.