Paramount Pictures is working with a team of 40 student interns from Boston’s Berklee College of Music to create the first full-function database of its immense archive of film music. The online music library database will make it easier for filmmakers and others to access music and obtain rights to music from the Paramount catalog for use across a range of media platforms.
Students will conduct an in-depth analysis and interpretation of audio clips from a number of films (totaling thousands of clips) from Paramount’s 99-year-old library, including Star Trek, Forrest Gump, Chinatown, Mission Impossible, Love Story, and Airplane, with scores by Elmer Bernstein, Danny Elfman, Philip Glass, Jerry Goldsmith, Ennio Morricone, and Berklee alumnus Alan Silvestri, among others. Using their expertise in music, production and composition, the interns will provide detailed descriptions of the clips, capturing the feeling and mood of the music, audio notes, and keywords to enhance the search capability and functionality of Paramount’s music library database.

The project began last semester with 30 film scoring majors at Berklee, who were also given the unique opportunity to compose original scores to five-minute short films from Paramount’s archives, some of which date back to the early 20th century. The shorts will be featured on a dedicated website and can be included on the composer’s professional reel.