In 1974, Francis Ford Coppola made a movie about surveillance called The Conversation in which Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert named Harry Caul.
Surveillance is the art not just of listening, but of pinpointing which sounds, which signals, which frequencies are the important ones.
To Harry, this is only a job, and just as he absolves himself from caring about what his targets, Mark and Ann, are saying or why his client wants to record them, the soundtrack shifts into discordant music—chords that are severely out of tune—in an oddly beautiful theme song composed for the movie by David Shire.
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