Inception Music Box

[Nadia Summerhill]

Accordingto Zimmer, the soundtrack for Inception is "a very electronic score".[1] Nolan asked Zimmer to compose and finish the score as he was shooting the film. The composer said, "He wanted to unleash my imagination in the best possible way".[2] At one point, while composing the score, Zimmer incorporated a guitar sound reminiscent of Ennio Morricone and was interested in having Johnny Marr, former guitarist in the influential 80s rock band The Smiths, play these parts. Zimmer's reported inspiration was finding a synthesizer track that he had written similar to Marr's guitar style. Nolan agreed with Zimmer's suggestion, and then Zimmer approached Marr, who accepted his offer. Marr spent four 12-hour days working on the score, playing notes written by Zimmer with a 12-string guitar.[3][4]

For inspiration, Zimmer read Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter because it combined "the idea of playfulness in mathematics and playfulness in music".[2] Zimmer did not assemble a temp score but "every now and then they would call and say 'we need a little something here.' But that was OK because much of the music pieces aren't that scene-specific. They fall into little categories".[2] While writing the screenplay, Nolan wrote in dith Piaf's "Non, je ne regrette rien" but almost took it out when he cast Marion Cotillard, who had just completed an Oscar-winning turn as Piaf in the 2007 film La Vie en rose. Zimmer convinced Nolan to keep it in the film and also integrated elements of the song into his score;[3] in particular, the film's iconic brass instrument fanfare resembles a slowed-down version of the song's instrumentation.

The trailers for the film feature specially composed music by Zack Hemsey, which does not appear on the official soundtrack.[5] The soundtrack was nominated for several awards, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a Grammy and a BAFTA.

Bob and I have an ongoing disagreement over film scores. Basically it's that he hates pretty much all music written for popular films in the past 30 or 40 years, while I really love quite a lot of it. (John Williams scored my childhood).

My current favorite score is the music Has Zimmer wrote for Inception. It's powerful, immediately recognizable, and conjures thrilling imagery. It's so cool! I played a snippet of it for Bob, and he immediately hated it. I'll leave it to him to explain why some day.

Now a viral video is making its way around the web that reveals how Zimmer got the idea for the score. It turns out he intentionally cribbed the two defining "da-da" notes from a slowed-down version of the Edith Piaf song "Non, je ne Regrette Rien." This is the song that the characters in Inception play to warn each other it's time to wake up. Check out the video:

If you haven't seen Inception, one of its many ideas is that time slows dramatically when we sleep. Five minutes in the "real" world can feel more like an hour with our eyes shut. Zimmer and director Christopher Nolan get bonus points for playing off the idea by simply slowing down the film's most important musical cue. (Bob would likely say that listening to five minutes of this score is like hearing an hour of it).

"I was surprised how long it took (someone) to figure it out," Zimmer says in an interview with The New York Times. "Just for the game of it, all the music in the score is subdivisions and multiplications of the tempo of the Edith Piaf track. So I could slip into half-time; I could slip into a third of a time. Anything could go anywhere. At any moment I could drop into a different level of time."

I generally agree with every rating on this site, but i feel like you gave inception slightly lower than it deserves. Yes, their previous music has been phenomenal but this still is great. Idk, maybe im just really biased towards this song for some reason. Hopefully it grows on you.

I came across this video on stumbleupon recently. Makes me wonder, with all the combinations of musical elements that have been written by people of varying degrees of fame over the centuries, who the heck even knows what's "original" any more?

Pitch shifting is about changing the pitch of a sound. With pitch shifting we basically detune the sound up or down in semitones (=musical half-steps) or even cents (extremely small finite intervals) (1).

Tempo is a musical term that dictates the pace/speed of any musical composition (2). In other words, it dictates how fast or slow should we play the musical composition. The tempo is usually given by BPM (beats per minute) or using words (Largo, Adagio, Allegro, etc.).

Sound bridge can lead us in or out of a scene (3). It connects seamlessly two scenes together by overlapping the sound from one scene to another. Either by overlapping the sound from previous scene to the following scene or by playing the sound from following scene into the previous scene. It is the same as J or L cut technique in editing.

The characters travel into various levels of a dream (=dream within a dream within a dream), so especially the first time, it was quite difficult to keep the track where we are. However, sound works as a guide for us, the audience, to help us orient whether we are in a dream and whether we are transitioning from level to level. Here is how the sound cues work:

When we transition into another level of a dream, pitch shifting occurs (4). Not all the time, because that would be totally annoying. But in some scenes, when the characters fall asleep and start dreaming (or travel into another level of a dream), there is a change in pitch of surrounding sounds.

In the case of Inception, pitch shifting changes also the speed of the surrounding sounds (4). When we transition into deeper level of a dream, the surrounding sounds slow down (and vice versa, when we transition into upper level of a dream, surrounding sounds speed up). This directly correlates with the time-flow in various levels of the dream. The deeper the level of a dream the slower the time-flow (and vice versa).

Lastly, pitch shifting may work as a sound bridge at the same time in some scenes. For instance, interior jet roar becomes traffic when we transition to the first dream level (4). Or tire screeching becomes metal screeching when we transition to the second dream level. Very, very cinematic use of sound!

Dreams feel usually very real. But there is always something that is just not quite right. It could be weird behavior of people you know or messed up physics, like different time-flow or unnatural reverb.

For months, it was all I could think about; Nolan had planted an idea in my head and its roots were growing stronger every day. It prompted a desire to create and when Hanukkah rolled out later that year, I recreated the ending with a little orange dreidel.

AG: First of all, its relationship with time is always hard to follow. But the whole concept was very exciting, like a dream within a dream. It was exciting from the very beginning. The scripts are [always] great.

AG: That was a Hans call and I think it stayed in because of the guitars they brought in to do it. I think Chris really liked [it], so it was kind of an honor to have the guitarist play on it.

AG: Chris latched onto it; it was just a little thing on all the stuff we recorded early. They started playing it really loud and it was just very effective and dramatic and we just slowly peppered throughout where we thought it would [work nicely]. But it is iconic now, everyone uses it.

AG: I think it was the size, the scale of what we were bringing music-wise. The amount of tracks we had to manage. I mean, it was hard to keep track. That was the first time because The Dark Knight had a normal amount of tracks.

AG: I find the music is often very seductive and moody in [terms of the] relationship with Mal. Those cues are just really really good. They're on the beach; her in the apartment in those dreams; and her jumping. That was the second-best moment for me, musically. At the jump, just the heartbreak. It was just very emotional when it needed to be; deeply emotional, I think, and sad. It was great.

Like Kenny Loggins and Top Gun, composer John Williams helped make Star Wars sound so unique that you can tell what movie it is with just a split second of the opening theme. So last week, when the second trailer for the new film came out, there was a very obvious question: "What if, in classic movie trailer fashion, this had music from someone else?"

Alternatively (and if you want way less work), you can just see this on YouTube Doubler, which syncs both videos, or just watch "StarCeption," which was mashed up by Adam Doud, and includes snippets of audio from the actual trailer:

In the movie Inception, a song was played to synchronize the kicks in the different dream levels. Now, in every level the time runs much faster than the previous level of the dream. When the music is played in the first dream level, it is heard by the man in the second dream level, and so on.

The song isn't running any slower, and is operating outside the dreamer's sphere of influence. The fact that the song should be played at the same speed is the very metronome like constant the dreamers are depending upon to synchronize their kicks.

During the third 'Layer' of dreaming, the cue that the dreamers hear isn't a song, it's just a very loud, very low note followed by what appears to be a fractured echo. This could be a particular note from "Non, Je ne regrette rien", the Edith Piaf song that is used as their kick.

Whilst it's old news now, I was incredibly impressed to discover that this slowing down or 'condensing' of music was reflected not only diegetically (hence the almost foghorn sounding note in the third layer), but also in the soundtrack.

The Inception theme music, famous (and often parodied) for its swelling section, is mixed brilliantly into a slowed down version of Piaf's song itself; in order to replicate the expansion of the music, the very thing you are discussing.

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