I have no problem with incidental music, Captain's Logs, dodgy uniforms, interspecies Craig's Listing etc. I do doubt the ability of mankind, at any time in the future, to invent workable transporters or break Warp Travel, but that's another debate. I merely stated an absolute unquestionable fact, that there is no sound in a vacuum, it doesn't spoil my enjoyment of Trek or any other Sci Fi when I hear explosions in space etc, I'm really beyond worrying now. Guess I'll just have to agree to disagree with you and some others on this subject
There is, however, a Starship Violin Corps stationed in the cabin next to Kirk's quarters that plays whenever he romances someone.
There's a rather fundamental issue here that I haven't seen addressed: What space sounds in Star Trek should we not be hearing in terms of physics? I mean, why would space be silent to somebody who is in space? The audience usually is supposed to associate with the characters on screen. Those characters aren't deaf. And they aren't in silent locations. They are aboard starships that have every excuse to rumble when there's an explosion nearby - after all, they shake as the result of that explosion, too. A passing spacecraft is also likely to make a noise by affecting the hero ship in some fashion, there being plenty of real and fictional media in vacuum for transmitting that effect - this noise need not be the exact same thing that would be heard in an atmosphere, but that was never a requirement in the first place. Sometimes the camera may be outside a starship. But the characters are not. We may not be seeing what the characters are seeing at that moment, but there's nothing wrong with us hearing what they would be hearing - or what somebody in a fictional UFP Prime Time News space chopper would be hearing if filming that scene. Asking us to instead associate with somebody skinny-dipping in the vacuum of a space battle would be the unrealistic and aphysical part! Timo Saloniemi
2001 got it right. Nobody else before or since has made the effort to show the grandeur of space without the cheezy pinball machine sound effects.
Gravity is essentially a movie about silence in space... Plenty of flicks do this for mood nowadays, though. Moon got mileage out of the soundscape, too. And assorted recentish Mars movies rely heavily on there being little besides the wheezing of breath inside the helmet, even if only a few agree to tone down the dramatic music, too. But this is about space as experienced through NASA hardware. A Trek starship ought to be a different place, full of sounds, including those transmitted across the vacuum by the fantastic media of that universe - subspace vibrating, jets of propellant raining down on the hulls, warp fields grating against each other. We just have to accept that our camera and microphone aren't out there in that vacuum, but inside that ship (or then a putative "camera ship" recording the action). Timo Saloniemi