Other sounds

There will be a Tron 3, so now is a good time to revisit the Daft Punk soundtrack for Tron: Legacy. In the beginning the band received a helping hand from Thomas Bangalter's father, the much-sampled French disco musician Daniel Vangarde:

"When the band started they were in their 20s, so I helped and advised them so that they got total artistic and financial freedom and stayed owners of everything they do. And I'm glad because I think there's too much interference between the time an artist thinks of a project and when it's distributed: it arrives distorted. One of the reasons for Daft Punk's success is that they did exactly what they wanted and it came to the public exactly, unfiltered, from their minds."

The score for the original Tron was by Wendy Carlos, something which seems even more remarkable now. In a 1983 interview with Randall D. Larson, Carlos said the use of synthesised music in film scoring was long overdue:

"Maybe in about five or ten years it'll be very common to see this sort of thing done. It's just a question of time before people develop the same habits and techniques that I've been trying to work on all these years – to know how to use a synthesizer as more than just something that somebody comes in with a little Prophet-5 and sits down and plays a solo line while you're recording the rest of the orchestra – it ain't that, that's for sure, any more than having a bass drum and cymbal in the orchestra and considering it a percussion section. It's only one small tip of the iceberg, of what will become a very exciting family of the orchestra. That's what the percussion section became about a hundred years ago; woodwinds and brass continued to be modified over the years until they've reached a state of development where they don't know how to carry them much beyond that, and now we've going to do the same thing with the electronics. I feel like I'm just part of the growing pains necessary to make the electronic medium be as legitimate a family member of the orchestra as any of the other sounds."