Blood Diamond Score - Quest For Glory V influenced?

[discobobdude]

So I was listening to the score for "Blood Diamond" (great film btw) and noticed one track sounded EERILY familiar. Is it just me or does the track "Maddy & Archer" sound like its ripped right out of QFGV (almost a mix of the apothacary/erana's island)? I posted it for others to take a listen to (but please, delete after you download... dont want to break any laws)

http://www.zshare.net/audio/23907006b2e557/

Weird.

[Caliburn]

I wouldn't say "ripped right out of QFGV," but no, it's not just you.  There are some textural similarities.  I didn't write out the chord progressions (underlying movements in the harmony, usually best heard in the lower instruments) to see if a key moment in which those corresponded might be heightening the sense of familiarity for you, but often that's what happens for me when I hear similarities in things that otherwise don't share melodies.*  Certainly the string line in the Apothecary theme and the acoustic guitar line in the Erana's Garden theme are both much more "active" and ornate melody lines (embellished with more notes) than James Newton Howard's music for "Blood Diamond."

At any rate, the similarities are slight enough that I'm pretty sure they're purely coincidental.  I don't imagine Chance Thomas' score for QFGV is very high profile among Hollywood film composers, and we could probably find numerous other pieces that would serve just as well for influences on James Newton Howard's music in that track.  The musical palette is really quite limited when you think about it, especially if we're only talking about tonal music in the western world.  It's amazing that composers squeeze out as much variety as they do!

* Actually, it would be a fascinating psychological study to investigate what elements most frequently cause people to hear similarities between one piece of music and another.  For example (let's use melodies, since chords are harder to discuss), when one melody calls another to mind for me, it usually isn't because of what you'd think, that the melodies share a large percentage of notes (i.e. 80% is literally the same, with only 20% different).  Nor is it even necessarily that both melodies share the same skeleton (meaning that if you take away the embellishing notes and left only structurally necessary notes behind, they would both move in the same fundamental way, i.e. from tonic to dominant and back again-- DO RE MI FA SO FA MI RE DO), though I do sometimes hear this source of similarity in melodies as well.  Instead, it often is just because the same large interval (like a major sixth, i.e. SO up to MI) is used in both melodies in a key location.  In other words, just two notes from the melody can form the impression of sameness for me.  Weird, huh?  I may be an atypical case, however.

I hope I am explaining enough that even with several music theory terms in there, what I am trying to say can still be deciphered.  If anyone reading this wants me to re-explain something, I will gladly try.

-Luke

[discobobdude]

That's actually a really fascinating idea! I never actually thought about it but that is a really cool idea.

Needless to say, I agree that there it is highly unlikely that Blood Diamond's score was actually influenced by QFGV but I thought it was worth mentioning over here because the minute the song started playing in my iTunes I actually thought I had accidentally skipped to my QFGV soundtrack.

[glendower]

There is a phenomenon called "cryptomnesia" where your mind recalls old memories as new creations. Say you read a chunk of text somewhere on a particular subject, later, when writing about that subject, you inadvertently quote, nearly verbatim, a passage from that first text. It's not uncommon, but it can get you into legal trouble! It can be linked back to poor source-monitoring and memory organization-- if you hear something, pay little attention to it or aren't particularly interested in it, there's a better chance that you'll recall it later accidentally. For example (and one of my favorites) there was a study done where Ss were asked to read a fictional passage. There was something in it that had something to do with preventing or curing cancer... it was pretty absurd (I remember that much ). After they read the passage, they were asked to rate their interest in the passage on a scale of 1 - 100. People who rated the lowest were more likely to recall the fictional "facts" as true in follow ups.

So, I guess the point is that you should pay attention so you don't accidentally plagiarize stuff. I think that there is a *chance* that the author of the Blood Diamond score did hear the QFGV sound track at one point, maybe he played the game and it just sort of stayed resident somewhere. I have song that i sang to my rats (I raised rats a couple of years ago... they're like tiny cats ) and I'm sure that i pulled the tune out of a video game or something... it just has that "Japanese RPG Battle Music" feel to it... but I can't remember where it came from. I want to figure it out and write it down, but I'd probably just feel like a moron once someone said "Yeah, that's form Chimpiko Fuki Alpha EX III."

[mace]

There is a phenomenon called "cryptomnesia" where your mind recalls old memories as new creations. Say you read a chunk of text somewhere on a particular subject, later, when writing about that subject, you inadvertently quote, nearly verbatim, a passage from that first text. It's not uncommon, but it can get you into legal trouble! It can be linked back to poor source-monitoring and memory organization-- if you hear something, pay little attention to it or aren't particularly interested in it, there's a better chance that you'll recall it later accidentally. For example (and one of my favorites) there was a study done where Ss were asked to read a fictional passage. There was something in it that had something to do with preventing or curing cancer... it was pretty absurd (I remember that much ). After they read the passage, they were asked to rate their interest in the passage on a scale of 1 - 100. People who rated the lowest were more likely to recall the fictional "facts" as true in follow ups.

So, I guess the point is that you should pay attention so you don't accidentally plagiarize stuff. I think that there is a *chance* that the author of the Blood Diamond score did hear the QFGV sound track at one point, maybe he played the game and it just sort of stayed resident somewhere. I have song that i sang to my rats (I raised rats a couple of years ago... they're like tiny cats ) and I'm sure that i pulled the tune out of a video game or something... it just has that "Japanese RPG Battle Music" feel to it... but I can't remember where it came from. I want to figure it out and write it down, but I'd probably just feel like a moron once someone said "Yeah, that's form Chimpiko Fuki Alpha EX III."

Interesting phenomenon. I would suspect it works on roughly the same (failing?) mechanism as déjà vu's do.