Hundreds of Contestants Soundtracked the Same Scene, and One Submission Stood Out
More than 200 contestants watched the same 40-second scene: a woman trudging through the snow in a picturesque mountain landscape. Some paired it with soaring orchestral music. Others leaned into indie rock, hip-hop, electronic textures, or stripped-down acoustic performances. A surprising number even selected their own music. We launched the Music Supervision Song Sync Contest to mark the debut of our new Master of Arts in Music Supervision program, and the remarkable range of interpretations was exactly what we hoped to see. It also made choosing a winner no easy task.
After a panel of six judges narrowed the field from more than 200 entries to a top 10, the finalists were sent to Sean McMahon, the chair of the Screen Scoring department at Berklee College of Music, and the author of the Berklee Online course Composing the Orchestral Film Score.
One Selection Rose Above the Rest
Joy Sterling, 59, of Orlando, Florida, paired the scene with a song called “Gifts to Your Future Self” by Adam Dodson, a choice that ultimately caught McMahon’s ear.
“They are all well done,” he says. “It was really interesting to hear the different and creative approaches. I would say my favorite is ‘Gifts to Your Future Self.’”
Though Sterling doesn’t consider herself an instrumentalist, she has built experience as a singer, lyricist, church sound engineer, and occasional music editor for social media videos. For her day job, she is a product specialist for Staples.
“I am thrilled to hear that my selection won the contest,” she says.
In her submission, she wrote, “This video highlights the serenity of exploring the natural world in solitude. I choose this music because its ethereal, calming quality invokes the feeling of peace.”
How Contestants Heard the Same Scene Differently
Each musical selection transformed the emotional character of the scene in a different way. A heavy dubstep track made it feel as though the woman was slogging through the heavy snow to avert some kind of global catastrophe, while a jaunty acoustic guitar pattern suggested she was simply trekking to a neighbor’s cabin to borrow some maple syrup.
Trekking through these submissions ourselves, a few interesting patterns emerged.
One surprise was how many contestants chose their own music. While the rules simply required that songs come from Instagram’s licensed music library—and choosing your own music wasn’t technically against the rules if it was in the Instagram library—roughly 15 percent of entrants selected original recordings. This raises an interesting question: in a professional setting, how might a movie director or producer react if a music supervisor said, “Hey, I composed a little something that we could use”?
Multiple ‘Gifts’ and ‘Outro’s
Other contestants independently gravitated toward the same commercially released songs, including the eventual winner, “Gifts to Your Future Self.” Other songs to make multiple appearances included:
| Song | Artist | Number of Appearances |
|---|---|---|
| “Outro” | M83 | 3 |
| “Click Clack Symphony” | RAYE (feat. Hans Zimmer) | 3 |
| “Holocene” | Bon Iver | 2 |
| “White Winter Hymnal” | Fleet Foxes | 2 |
Some trends were subtler. Several contestants selected songs whose titles echoed the snowy landscape with winter words, including “Glacier” by James Vincent McMorrow, “Alaska” by Maggie Rogers, “Snow Trek” by Roy Budd, “The Winter Wind” by Luke Faulkner and Özgür Kaya, to name a few.
The contest may have produced a single winner, but it also gave hundreds of musicians and music lovers a glimpse into the creative decision-making at the heart of music supervision. For those who discovered a passion for pairing music with picture, Berklee Online’s new Master of Arts in Music Supervision program offers the opportunity to take that first experiment much further.
