Echoes and 2001: A Space Odyssey Synchronization Rumours
Similar to the Dark Side of the Rainbow effect, at-large rumors suggested that "Echoes" coincidentally synchronizes with Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, when played concurrently with the final segment (titled "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite").
"Echoes" was released three years after the film's production and is 23 minutes and 31 seconds in length, quite similar to the "Infinite" segment. Sound effects in the middle section of the song convey the feeling of travelling through, or flying over, an alien world. The drone vocalizations heard in the final scenes of 2001 seem to match with the discordant bass vibrations in the middle of "Echoes" as well as the choral glissandos of its finale. Another notable link occurs during a change in scene at precisely the moment when guitar and keyboards crescendo as the lyrics re-enter for the final verse. The early lyrics vaguely convey reference to planets, which seems entirely suitable for the film's depiction of Jupiter and its moons. Adrian Maben re-created this marriage of music and image in his director's cut of Live at Pompeii using CGI.
The members of the band always denied that the synchronization was intentional. Furthermore, the technology to play back film in a recording studio circa 1971 would have been expensive and difficult for the band to acquire. However, the band had experience with creating film soundtracks by that point, having created the soundtrack to the French art house film More in 1969. Waters is sometimes quoted as saying that the band's failure to contribute music to 2001's official score was his "greatest regret".
The 1973 George Greenough film Crystal Voyager concludes with a 23-minute segment in which the full version of "Echoes" accompanies a montage of images shot by Greenough from a camera mounted on his back while surfing on his kneeboard.
Read more about this topic: Echoes (Pink Floyd Song)
Famous quotes containing the words echoes, space and/or rumours:
“Good and evil are repaid in kind, just as shadows follow bodies, and echoes follow sounds.”
—Chinese proverb.
“A set of ideas, a point of view, a frame of reference is in space only an intersection, the state of affairs at some given moment in the consciousness of one man or many men, but in time it has evolving form, virtually organic extension. In time ideas can be thought of as sprouting, growing, maturing, bringing forth seed and dying like plants.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely the presidency. The people are well cured by then of election fever, during which they think they are choosing Moses. In the third year, they look on the man as a sinner and a bumbler and begin to poke around for rumours of another Messiah.”
—Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)