How noisy is the engine of a Light Cycle? How does its muffler sound? Does it even have an engine? Does it make any noise at all? How does an orchestra sound inside a computer memory? Electronic or romantic? Or both? And how does it reverberate from those computer-graphics walls?
Does a Solar Sailer glide silently, propelled only by music? Does it whoosh like a glider? Or whine like a Mach 3 fighter? Or roar like the interior of a power plant?
For most of us, these questions are the 1982 equivalent of discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But for the people who created the soundtrack for Tron, Disney's fantasy of a superprogrammer who is thrust into a universe of computer software to do battle with the evil Master Program, these and many like them were serious questions. Since nobody (that I know of, at least) has actually heard a light cycle go past his front lawn, or has actually played a gig inside a computer memory, the question of what sounds authentic and realistic takes second place to the question of what is original and exciting, yet appropriate. […]
