Classical Hollywood cinema
The beginning of the sound era itself is ambiguously defined. To some, it began with "The Jazz Singer", which was released in 1927 and increased box-office profits for films, as sound was introduced to feature films. To others, the era began in 1929, when the silent age had definitively ended. Most Hollywood pictures from the late 1920s to 1960s adhered closely to a genre—Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, and biopic (biographical picture)—and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. For instance, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films; Alfred Newman worked at Twentieth Century Fox for twenty years; Cecil B. DeMille's films were almost all made at Paramount Pictures; and director Henry King's films were mostly made for Twentieth Century Fox. Similarly, actors were mostly contract players. Film historians and critics note that it took about a decade for films to adapt to sound and return to the level of artistic quality of the silents, which it did in the late 1930s.
The X-Files
Snow was tasked with composing the score for both "The X-Files" films. The films marked the first appearance of real orchestral instruments; previous music had been crafted by Snow using digitally sampled instrument sounds. Snow's soundtrack for the first film, "", was released in 1998. For the second film, Snow recorded with the Hollywood Studio Symphony in May 2008 at the Newman Scoring Stage at 20th Century Fox in Century City. UNKLE recorded a new version of the theme music for the end credits. Some of the unusual sounds were created by a variation of silly putty and dimes tucked into piano strings. Snow commented that the fast percussion featured in some tracks was inspired by the track "Prospectors Quartet" from the "There Will Be Blood" soundtrack. The soundtrack score, "", was released in 2008.