A tiny hobby I have is to notice similarities in film soundtrack.
That is, because the music of a film is often made after the film has already been directed and edited, it is not rare to use "temp tracks", temporary music that fills the space and is supposed to give an idea of how the music will be. Then the "real" soundtrack is composed and put in place. Some directors will have very precises instructions to their composer about how the music should sound, but some will just say "make me something that sounds like the temp track".
Which of course can be quite a curse for the composer that has to make something that is very similar but not identical to already existing music. This has in some cases resulted in the composer and/or director actually giving up on the idea and just using the temp tracks as the final soundtrack (the most famous example of this happening is
2001: A Space Odyssey).
But often this will results in music where, if you know what the temp track was, you can clearly tell it's based on it. Now of course it varies by composer and some are more or less good at navigating this problem (James Horner was for instance notorious for reusing the same 4 notes "danger" motif taken from a Rachmaninoff piece in almost all the soundtrack he composed).
For recent movies this can be fairly blatent, because they often use as temp track music from *other recent films* (there are many movies released in recent year where you can tell the temp tracks were taken from "The Dark Knight" or "Inception").
But for older movies the temp tracks can be much more obscure and thus much harder to "reconstruct" from the final sountrack. So I always find it fun when I find one of those.
Today's find was pretty neat.
Exhibit A, the soundtrack of the 1984 film
Dune (listen from 3 minutes 17 second to 3 minutes 43 seconds roughly)
Exhibit B, the soundtrack of the 1948 film adaptation of
Hamlet (listen from 10 minutes onward)
I feel it's really fun to find these completely obscure correspondences.
