In a Hollywood overrun with remakes, a new Tron has quite a daunting challenge. The original film may be a cult hit for its 80s arcade cool, but it also was a seminal moment in the evolution of computer animation, at the nexus of obsessive-compulsive optical effects that came before and digital effects that came after. (Google Perlin Noise, if you must.) But where the bits of the effects look uneven or dated alongside the brilliant, it’s nearly impossible to top the genius of Wendy Carlos’ score. Her deft blend of choirs, orchestras, organs, and rich electronics wasn’t just forward looking: it’s fresh today, an alternative to some of the signature sameness in today’s games and films.

Perhaps Tron Legacy will do what other belated sequels have not: express love for the original. With Daft Punk helming the score and a reverent, inspired crew ready to make Tron live again, the trailer last week was the real sleeper hit of Comic-Con.

If that’s not enough layers of fandom, though, head to GearSlutz for a lesson in film scoring and a recreation of the trailer in Reason, custom Reaktor patches, and Ableton Live. This is not much of an infomercial for Live: because Ableton’s arrange view doesn’t quite understand frames, scoring with Live is a bit of a beast. (Live 9, anyone?) But it’s a great example of love for the movie and its original score. And hey, everyone need a source of joy, even a film.

Ableton Live for Sound Design :Tron Legacy [GearSlutz forum]

Stripped the original audio and redid all of the sound from scratch using Reason/NI Reaktor/Ableton Live 8. An M-Audio Axiom 49 was used to perform the Lightcycle Engine Oscillations

Wendy Carlos, if you’re out there, we get it. You revolutionized film scoring and electronic orchestration, and we’re all in your debt. It’s not so much that you switched on Bach or switched on Moog or even switched on Kubrick and guys in glowing skin-tight outfits. You switched on sound, and nothing has been quite the same since.

Now, we just have to hope 2010 can show us a good time, too.

The appeal of newer music apps for phones, current-generation mobile game systems, and PDAs is portability first. But for the Game Boy music scene, it’s as much about a distinctive sound, and acquiring Game Boys as a kind of unique synthesizer. Our friend and mobile game musician Peter Swimm points us to the new documentary Reformat the Planet. It’s available for a week free on pitchfork.tv, with screenings to follow. It’s a pretty nice survey of the New York corner of the scene, at least. I’m personally getting increasingly interested in tools like PSPSEQ, which have a distinctive sound all their own — think string modeling rather than vintage game glitches — but that puts this in additional perspective.

Reformat the Planet [available this week only, pitchfork.tv]

Cinematographer Asid Siddiky writes:

My partners and I have spent the last few years documenting the Chip Music scene in New York. It is a predominantly underground, but vibrant community in which musicians utilize video game hardware (Game Boy, Nintendo, Commodore 64, etc) to create songs of their own. This footage eventually became the feature-length film, “Reformat The Planet.”

While the movie isn’t being officially distributed yet, it has enjoyed some well-received screenings around the world…premiering at the South By Southwest Film Festival earlier this year…playing overseas at the Melbourne International Film Festival…and over the next few months, it will screen at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle and the International Amsterdam Film Festival.

Paul, Paul, and I are honored to have been selected by such prestigious groups and are pleased to announce that Pitchfork, an online publication devoted to the criticism and coverage of independent music that is hated and revered in equal (i think?) measure, has decided to stream Reformat The Planet, for free, for one week. To date, this represents our most widespread and accessible presentation of the film.

The film will be available for viewing from now until the end of the day next Thursday, August 21.

Suffice to say, we at CDM discourage pirating music. I should hasten to add, though, that we’re also generally opposed to terrorism, illegal firearms, and narcotics — just in case there’s any doubt. According to a training film produced by the National District Attorneys Association and Recording Industry Association of America, and leaked on the Interwebs (doh!), these things typically go hand in hand.

In the course of the film, the producers do stumble upon an interesting solution to the issue of sagging sales of physical CDs:

“There are some sayings in certain parts of the jurisdiction when you buy a CD, ‘would you like it with or without’,” Walters adds. “The ‘with’ is a CD enclosing a piece of crack or whatever the case may be. We, continually, in working with law enforcement, find that these locations have everything from handguns to large quantities of narcotics.”

Reviewing the RIAA’s “Reefer Madness” for the digital age [Ars Technica]

Wow, free crack with my pirated CD? This lends an entirely new layer to our ongoing coverage of the future of the compact disc.

All of this seems doubly peculiar when mixed with the RIAA’s anti-piracy campaign, which has been largely directed at online music piracy. It’s hard to squeeze in narcotics with a torrent.

But, since I know a lot of our readers are from outside the United States and have a terrifyingly skewed opinion already of, say, life in New York, let me say, for the record, I have never gotten a free handgun with a CD. Really. I am right now not hearing a stream of bullets being fired. I also weigh less than five hundred pounds, and I don’t own an SUV. I can take you to some cool record stores in town, and I promise the discs are both legal and drug-free. And we’re spending CDM’s donation drive proceeds on bandwidth and servers, not my crack habit. Come visit America. Once you clear that whole fingerprinting / retinal scan / whatever, it’s a good time. Okay?

In the meantime, a quick roundup:
Lightsabers recreated with Wii remotes and granular synthesis … and reflections on the more organic, non-digital process that created the original.

Why sound designer Ben Burtt is our hero.

Why Vader makes a great DJ.

Updated: 10 Greatest Sounds from Star Wars, via the wonderful Unidentified Sound Object

(Agree? Disagree?)

Let’s not stop there, though. Let’s help Star Wars celebrate its big three-oh in style. Additions?