What the hell does a blue snowball sound like? A sexually frustrated Jack Frost? Well, this is what they went with, if you're curious:

But at least he got to watch the scenes he was scoring, knowing that if the hero is being brutally tortured by terrorists, he could safely assume a jaunty sea shanty would feel out of place. Sometimes, they don't even get that. Composers like John Keltonic (an Emmy Award winner who, among other things, has composed music for NBC's Olympics broadcasts) are asked to score a piece they're not allowed to see, because if they did, America would have to kill them.

"I was scoring a film for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I didn't have the right security clearance to actually watch the thing. So they'd say stuff like, 'At 41 seconds and 9 frames, something really big happens.' And I'd ask, 'Is it a good thing?' And they'd say, 'Oh no! It's really, really bad.'"

"Oooh, well, I've already sort of written something ... "

On one occasion, Russell says, "I really wasn't getting where the director wanted me to get, so I decided to leave it up to chance. I actually placed my chihuahua on my keyboard and let her walk around a bit. I recorded around what she had written and sent it off. The director loved the result, and that's what ended up in the finished film."

Well, they cleaned it up a bit. Here's what Jonathan's dog wrote:

And here's what ended up in the final film:

Nearly every video game soundtrack is done this way, and even movies that do record a live orchestra will overlay it with electronically enhanced "samples" to give the score a massive, hyper-real sound. "This is why scores like Interstellar, Inception, Da Vinci Code, Sherlock Holmes, Saving Mr Banks, Man Of Steel have such a huge sound that you can't quite get by recording the same music live," says Russell. "You will not be able to just sit down and play Pirates Of The Caribbean as it is shown on the page and get the same results."

Hans Zimmer, of Inception and "BRAAAAM" fame, was one of the pioneers of this technique. Zimmer still wanted the sound of traditional orchestral instruments, but he couldn't get real instruments to conform to whatever crazy noises were bouncing around his brain. Early music samples weren't great at mimicking "pretty" instruments, like an airy flute or a delicate harp, so Zimmer's scores employed more heavy percussion, brass strikes, and rhythmic, choppy strings, as those samples tended to translate better on a computer. This eventually led us to the modern sound we hear in blockbusters today, which we'll dub "Batman music":

You'll recognize that style of score as "decidedly modern" and "exactly what's in literally every single action movie of the past decade." That's a 90-piece orchestra being heavily augmented by tons of electronic samples. The Batman Begins score influenced a generation of composers, and movie music became the way it is today in part because Zimmer's computer sucked at woodwinds. And also because ...

In general, composers need to see a movie before creating music for it, which means that part comes last. But the film's director needs some kind of music in the background during editing, so they use a temporary track (often a score from some other movie, or some other piece of classical music). But then, as Keltonic says, "they listen to it so much, they can't imagine the scene without it." At that point, the director basically says, "Give me something exactly like the temp score!" Thus you wind up with a score that's almost a cover version of somebody else's.

To be clear, this isn't at all a new thing. "The temp track for Star Wars is quite close to the finished product (not that John Williams isn't a genius, because he clearly is)," says O'Boyle, "and Stanley Kubrick famously liked the temp track that he threw together for 2001: A Space Odyssey so much that he decided not to use a single note of the music he'd hired Alex North to write and record for him. North didn't find out until he sat to watch the premiere."

The main difference between then and now isn't that composers are ripping each other off; it's what they're ripping off. All of those forgettable Marvel soundtracks were influenced by Zimmer's Batman music. Although it's undeniably cool, it isn't really what you'd call "memorable." (Can you hear it in your head?)

If you heard it again somewhere -- for example, while purchasing donuts with your Visa card -- you wouldn't immediately think Batman's coming. According to O'Boyle, this is absolutely intentional. What they want above all else is consistency.

"It means that if you watch a big-budget Marvel movie, for instance, the music is unquestionably grand and impressive when it comes to creating a general sound world, but there's no way that the average person on the street could hum one of their melodies. It's created music that sounds typically 'big' and 'Hollywood,' but it's fairly devoid of general musical character."

Great scores do still come along, of course. And as for Marvel, well, let's just say they didn't exactly stick with the template with Black Panther, which includes African flutes and drums the composer picked up during a trip to Senegal:

Damn, why can't that be the sound it makes when you swipe a Visa card?

You can check out John Keltonic's work here, Jonathan Russell's work here, and Thomas O'Boyle's work here. Jordan Breeding also writes for a bunch of people, the Twitter, and has done some music himself, if you care about that kind of thing.

You know what's a fun instrument to pick up and doesn't get played enough in soundtracks? The theremin.

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