Science & Tech Quote by Fred Frith

Frith is describing a kind of artistic mischief: making music that the film does not ask for, simply because the world already offered a sound worth conversing with. The candy machine is a perfect emblem here - banal, mechanical, almost aggressively “non-musical” - and Frith treats it as a collaborator. That move signals his larger ethic as a composer: the boundary between score and environment is porous, and “found” sound isn’t just texture, it’s material with agency.

The telling phrase is “totally unnecessary.” In film production, necessity is the religion: every cue must justify its seconds. Frith pushes against that economy. He’s not claiming the work is random; he’s claiming it’s free. The subtext is a quiet critique of functional scoring, where music often exists to instruct the audience how to feel. Instead, he’s chasing a parallel logic, a private counterpoint that doesn’t overwrite the scene’s meaning but riffs alongside it.

His point about the sounds having “their own logic” is almost philosophical. A location sound is not neutral; it carries rhythm, repetition, accident, and social context (a public space, a consumer ritual, a machine mediating desire). Writing “unnecessary” music becomes a way of listening harder, of acknowledging that the world is already composing - and the composer’s job, sometimes, is to respond rather than dominate. In that light, the “unnecessary” becomes the most honest kind of scoring: music as attention, not instruction.