"They had focus test groups who said they wanted to have a bit more of a whoosh sound or we need to have more sparkle on top," says Russell. "Eventually, 84 percent of consumers liked it." Visa's new chime will release sometime this year, and hundreds of millions of people will hear it and not give it any thought. That's the life of a composer: turning piles of confusing feedback into pleasing noises.

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 ... "

Even high-level Hollywood composers are willing to do just about anything to get the sound right. The Lone Ranger soundtrack included the sound of somebody smashing a train with a sledgehammer, and the opening scene of Casino Royale included the composer rattling dried goat testicles. When it came time to make Star Trek: The Motion Picture, composer Jerry Goldsmith utilized a metal contraption known as a "blaster beam," which was 18 feet long and reportedly gave some women orgasms.

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 ...

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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