The Struggle Behind the Soundtrack: Inside the Discordant New World of Film Scoring

Do you want to pick up a light saber whenever you hear John Williams' Star Wars theme? Get the urge to ride into the desert and face down steely-eyed desperados to the refrain of Ennio Morricone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly? Does Hans Zimmer's Pirates of the Caribbean score have you talking like Jack Sparrow?

From the Westerns of the 1960s to current blockbusters, composers for both film and television have faced new challenges--evermore elaborate sound design, temp tracks, test audien...