Hans Zimmer, Fibonacci and Drama

Posted on May 21, 2006 | 0 comments
Filed under: Fibonacci, Film Music, Hans Zimmer

In today’s San Francisco Chronicle there’s a little profile of Hollywood film composer Hans Zimmer. It looks like I’ve never seen any of the film he’s scored so far: “Gladiator”, “Batman Begins”, “The Last Samurai”, “The Thin Red Line”…. shrug.

So, I have no opinion of him one way or the other as a composer, but apparently he came to a wise conclusion around using computer-generated melodies based on the Fibonacci Sequence as a basis for the score of “The Da Vinci Code”

“… I realized I can’t get away with a mathematical game because I’ll be found out. So I stopped writing the superficial riddle stuff… on the surface, ‘Da Vinci Code’ is a thriller — no more no less — “

Way to go, Hans! Nothing against the Fibonacci Sequence as a basis for musical composition. Debussy, Bartók and many others used it, and I wouldn’t pick a fight with those guys, but they didn’t do it with computers.

Also, it would strike me as a little weird to use computer-generated Fibonacci fodder in a dramatic work, such as a film score, where you already have an inherent basis for musical composition: the drama!