Dark Side of The Rainbow - Technical Considerations

Technical Considerations

An important aspect which is often discussed is the technical difficulties that would have been hard to overcome if Pink Floyd and others involved in the recording of The Dark Side of the Moon did attempt to sync the music of the album to the movie. This view is surprising since it was evidently possible to create a movie soundtrack at the time of the recording and there was no specific need to have a copy of the movie at hand nor was it necessary to play it during the composing or the recording, even if there are common claims that this was absolutely necessary. Furthermore, the band was becoming quite proficient at creating movie soundtracks by the time they started the recording of The Dark Side of the Moon and they even interrupted their work on the album so they could score yet another movie. In the book Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd, Nick Mason makes it clear that the technical process that Pink Floyd used to score movies was rather simple when he wrote about the recording of the 1972 Obscured by Clouds movie soundtrack:

After the success of More, we had agreed to do another sound track for Barbet Schroeder. His new film was called La Vallée and we travelled over to France to record the music in the last week of February... We did the recording with the same method we had employed for More, following a rough cut of the film, using stopwatches for specific cues and creating interlinking musical moods that would be cross-faded to suit the final version... The recording time was extremely tight. We only had two weeks to record the soundtrack with a short amount of time afterwards to turn it into an album.