| abstract
| - Ah, music. The universal language. And it's a good bet we'll still be listening to it thousands of years from now, although it may take a form which may not be recognizable to us present-day humans as music. That's because The Future is where everything is supposed to be all cool, shiny and... well... future-y, so of course it'll be different! Well... maybe not so much... Oftentimes, "futuristic" music in a movie or series will be based on contemporary popular music, with a few fancy bells and whistles added. You can expect fashion and hairstyles to also be based on contemporary examples, but it seems a bit more jarringly retro and unrealistic when music that seems rooted to a certain decade and place is inserted into a futuristic setting, either in the soundtrack or as music that people listen to for recreation. Future-themed movies (especially those made in the 50s) will often feature lots of creepy Theremin music, à la Bernard Herrmann's score from The Day the Earth Stood Still. The soundtrack may also feature lots of weird alien-y or spaceship-y noises, which are hard to describe accurately, but if you pop in a DVD of Forbidden Planet you'll hear them going off in the background all the time. Anytime a character sings a song or turns on a radio (or the futuristic movie equivalent of a radio) you can expect to hear music which sounds not unlike a top 40 hit dating from the decade the movie was made, with a few "futuristic-sounding" instruments (like synthesizers or the aforementioned Theremin) thrown in. The Jetsons episode featuring Jet Screamer, a 60s-ish pop idol, singing "Epp Opp Ork Means I Love You" is a prime example of this. (Although more people today may be familiar with the Violent Femmes' particularly faithful cover version of this song...) If a futuristic movie is made in the '70s or '80s, you can expect at least one scene to take place in a "futuristic disco" which features lots of heavily synthesized music and people in neon costumes writhing around. (The Buck Rogers TV series featured a lot of scenes like these, as did the movie Logan's Run and the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode Space Mutiny.) And Cyberpunk Is Techno, naturally. In futuristic movies that prominently feature aliens, you can expect their music to either be:
* A random and non-musical collection of notes and rhythms that no one -- aside from a malfunctioning robot with Parkinson's -- could hope to dance to.
* This has a basis in reality, though, as humans and monkeys have very different musical tastes (original article available only to subscribers, at $39.95 per year), and they're not even from different planets.
* Some form of "opera." (Klingon opera perhaps being the most prominent example.)
* Music which sounds suspiciously like a popular and "rebellious" contemporary form of music if the aliens are teenagers (or the alien-aged equivalent of teenagers.)
* Contemporary pop music, only with more synthesizers, timbre distortions, and random electronic noises. In some instances, you may even hear aliens chanting in an alien language, but that's usually reserved for scenes where something is about to go horribly, horribly wrong. An abundant source of Zeerust. Examples of Future Music include:
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)