Electronic Dreams’ Sound Architect, Thomas Bankalter
There are few people in the music industry with the kind of reputation Thomas Bankalter has. He has developed the sounds of electronic music for many years and his reputation has earned him the title of ‘sound architect’. He is able to develop rhythms and emotional atmospheres with different electronic and analog synthesizer sounds and textures.
Bankalter is able to arrange sounds in a way that is very play and cinema and very easy to absorb. This is the motivation behind the title.
The Beginning of Thomas Bankalter
Thomas Bankalter was born in Paris, France and as a child was surrounded by music due to his father’s work as a music producer and songwriter. Because of this, he was always going to have a head start and advantage over others with his first hand experience in music composition.
Him and his father used to work in studios and from an early age of 10 he was fascinated about how sounds could be layered and edited, framed and expressed in new ways. This was his first exposure and intrigue into the world of synthesizers.
The Beginning of Something Big
The world got to know Thomas Bankalter due to Daft Punk, the music duo he founded with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. The duo had a firm grasp of the fundamentals of music and they constructed an imaginary world of both visual and aural elements.
Albums like Homework, Discovery, and Random Access Memories created a new genre of electronic music that incorporated house, disco, funk, and sound design.
Thomas Bankalter, through Daft Punk, made electronic music emotional and nostalgic, revealing the genre’s capacity to be more than fundamentally digital.
The Architecture of Sound
Thomas Bankalter’s sound design is unique. He likens music to architecture.
Precision is key in the construction of every track. Every beat serves the purpose of being a foundation. Every synth serves the purpose of creating an atmosphere. Every vocal serves the purpose of being a texture.
With this mindset, Bankalter music comes across as huge, and listeners believe it is something that can be experienced, rather than just something that can be heard.
Blending Analog and Digital Worlds
Thomas Bankalter fuses together two worlds: analog and digital. Unlike most electronic music, which is entirely made up of sounds generated by a computer, Bankalter’s music contains a lot of live instruments and even orchestral sounds.
Creating this fusion causes a contradiction in his music of being mechanical and emotional or nostalgic and futuristic.
An example of this is found in Random Access Memories, where there is an abundance of live instruments and the notion that electronic music can be as alive as an orchestra.
Beyond Daft Punk: Individual Evolution
After years of success and fame, Thomas Bankalter decided that he would slowly separate himself from Daft Punk. This meant that he would be evolving, not ending.
He started putting more focus on his own compositions, scoring for films, and focusing on other experimental endeavors. A good example of this new experimentation is his orchestral compositions, in which he examined classical structures, but didn’t use electronic production as the primary element.
This shift also shows us another part of Bankalter’s personality. He is also a genre-bending explorative composer.
The Driving Emotion in His Music
Thomas Bankalter is known for futuristic sound designs. However, he is also known for emotional music, and strong expression. Nostalgic and reflective music is in his repertoire.
He makes sure his presence is known in his electronic compositions. His compositions are driven by emotion, and this is his differentiating factor. He is not a tech-savvy composer. His compositions are technological tools for expressing emotions.
His mark is on numerous genres. It includes, but is not limited to, house music and pop, and film scoring and experimental electronic music. Countless artists are inspired by his meticulousness and structure, and the emotion and flexibility.
His compositional boundaries may have defined the legacy of electronic music.
The Idea of the Sound Architect
He is a sound architect in the literal sense. His music is intentional and purposefully layered and spatially designed.
Like a structure, a piece of his music has a foundation, framework, and space that can be filled with different types of emotions. The audience can walk through these “space” similar to how one would walk through different sections and rooms of a building and experience different feelings.
This is what preserves his legacy.
Conclusion
Thomas Bankalter is not simply a musician, he has the ability of constructing worlds using sounds. Since the well-known Daft Punk era and through his solo work, Bankalter has altered the perception of music.
He has illustrated that passion and creativity can construct a world using sounds; music is a world we can live and walk through.
