Tron: Legacy (soundtrack)
Tron: Legacy (soundtrack)
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Tron: Legacy (soundtrack)

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Tron: Legacy (soundtrack)

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Tron: Legacy (soundtrack)

Tron: Legacy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is the soundtrack album to the 2010 film of the same name, with twenty-two tracks featuring music by French electronic music duo Daft Punk. The first film score written by Daft Punk, the music was composed and produced by Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, arranged and orchestrated by Joseph Trapanese, and conducted by Gavin Greenaway.

Walt Disney Records released the album on December 3, 2010, and has since released several editions of the soundtrack with an additional nine tracks since then. The album also includes "Derezzed", which was released as a single on December 8.

Daft Punk's score received generally positive reviews, receiving praise for its interpolation of orchestral and electronic music. Daft Punk received a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media for the score. The album debuted at number 10 on the Billboard 200 chart, peaking at number 4 on the aforementioned chart by its fifth week of release. The album has been certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski and music supervisor Jason Bentley approached Daft Punk and requested that the duo compose the film score. When asked why he wished to work with the duo, Kosinski replied, "How could you not at least go to those guys?" The producers initially attempted to reach Daft Punk in 2007, but the duo had been unavailable due to their Alive 2006/2007 tour. Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk had previously produced the soundtrack to Gaspar Noé's 2002 film Irréversible. Noé had asked Bangalter to compose the soundtrack to the film Enter the Void, but Bangalter was working on Tron: Legacy at the time and instead served as sound effects director. After agreeing to score the film, Daft Punk worked exclusively on the score for nineteen months, putting off all other projects, as well as consulting with film composers Hans Zimmer, Alexandre Desplat, John Powell, and Christophe Beck. The music was written at Henson Recording Studios.

The score of Tron: Legacy features an 85-piece orchestra, recorded at AIR Lyndhurst Studios in London. Kosinski stated that the score is intended to be a mixture of orchestral and electronic music. Daft Punk's score was arranged and orchestrated by Joseph Trapanese, who stated he is a fan of Daft Punk as a duo and as solo artists. The band collaborated with him for two years on the score, from pre-production to completion. The orchestra was conducted by Gavin Greenaway. Trapanese cited the collaboration between the different genres to work out well in the end, stating:

It seems complicated at the end of the day, but it's actually quite simple. I was locked in a room with robots for almost two years and it was simply a lot of hard work. We were just together working throughout the whole process and there was never a point where the orchestra was not in their minds and the electronics were not in my mind. It was a continual translation between the two worlds and hopefully we put something together that will be something different because of that.

In an interview regarding the Tron: Legacy score, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo noted that "Synths are a very low level of artificial intelligence, whereas you have a Stradivarius that will live for a thousand years. We knew from the start that there was no way we were going to do this film score with two synthesizers and a drum machine." Daft Punk cited Wendy Carlos, the composer of the original Tron film, as well as Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, John Carpenter, Vangelis, Philip Glass, and Maurice Jarre as inspirations for the soundtrack. Homem-Christo also stated that Tron was a strong influence on him as a child. "Maybe I only saw it two or three times in my entire life, but the feel of it is strong even now, that I think the imprint of the first [film] will not be erased by the new one. It has a real visionary quality to it." Bangalter recalled that he had composed heroic themes for the protagonists, while Homem-Christo had written the darker musical cues. Homem-Christo concluded that Tron: Legacy "was cut to the music. Usually, composers come in at the end when everything is done."

The song "Computerized" featuring Jay-Z surfaced online in 2014, almost a half decade after the film was released. It tells a cautionary tale about relying too much on technology, with a robotic voice singing "Everyone will be computerized" in the chorus. Jay-Z takes on the role of a Luddite in the lyrics, complaining about holding conversations over text messages and having a "broken heart on the email" and "an iTouch but I can't feel". Later, he raps: "Somebody tell me what's real / I don't know how I feel." "Computerized" was originally intended to be a single to appear in and promote Tron: Legacy, but was discarded after concerns of the lyrical content being too grounded to fit the fantastical setting of the film. Portions of the score appear in the song's instrumentation.

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