Uploaded June 2014 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Born in 1891 Carl Stalling began his career as a theater organist in the days before films had soundtracks. He would compose music for the films live at the organ several times every night.
Stalling was hired by Walt Disney to score music for Disney's "Silly Symphony" cartoons. There he invented the "tick" method, where a tempo map was created with a metronome so that the composer could match the on-screen action to a particular beat. With this click track, Stalling could then pre-record the soundtrack and the animators could use his tempo map to animate.
In 1930 Stalling left Disney to work exclusively for Warner Brothers, where he now had access to Warner's vast publishing catalog and could incorporate many popular songs into the cartoons.
Because of Stalling's tick method, almost every on-screen action had a musical punctuation. Today this is known as "mickey-mousing". Even though film composers still use a form of Stalling's tick method, they don't attempt to punctuate the on-screen actions. That's the function of the effects track. The musical score is the emotion that the director wants you to feel at that particular point in the film.
Born in 1891 Carl Stalling began his career as a theater organist in the days before films had soundtracks. He would compose music for the films live at the organ several times every night.
Stalling was hired by Walt Disney to score music for Disney's "Silly Symphony" cartoons. There he invented the "tick" method, where a tempo map was created with a metronome so that the composer could match the on-screen action to a particular beat. With this click track, Stalling could then pre-record the soundtrack and the animators could use his tempo map to animate.
In 1930 Stalling left Disney to work exclusively for Warner Brothers, where he now had access to Warner's vast publishing catalog and could incorporate many popular songs into the cartoons.
Because of Stalling's tick method, almost every on-screen action had a musical punctuation. Today this is known as "mickey-mousing". Even though film composers still use a form of Stalling's tick method, they don't attempt to punctuate the on-screen actions. That's the function of the effects track. The musical score is the emotion that the director wants you to feel at that particular point in the film.
