About the project

watching films
with your ears

For the song you went looking for. The score you kept thinking about. And the music that followed you home.

choonfish.org is an independent film music project founded in Glasgow, Scotland, and now based in London. It brings together a research archive, essays and listening notes, with a shared curiosity about what music does in—and beyond—a film.

A word for the pursuit

choonfish verb

The act of finding a piece of music, song or tune—a “choon”—that caught your ear in a film.

For the determined listener, the search can involve an unpredictable expedition through credits, recordings, websites and apps. It calls for patience, curiosity and the occasional lucky catch. Hence the fishing.

“King Kong just got choonfished!”

Explore the King Kong (2005) research →

Where it began

The project began with a familiar frustration: loving music in a film, then discovering that the official soundtrack album contained only part of what I had heard.

I wanted to make those gaps easier to explore. Over time, I personally gathered film-credit information and mapped it against soundtrack releases. That work became the research archive at the heart of choonfish.

It remains a labour of love. The ambition is a careful, useful map of film music—one that helps other listeners find their way.

How the archive works

The original archive was built from primary sources: film credit sequences viewed on physical or digital editions. Its raw credit information was gathered directly, rather than copied from online song lists.

Start with the credits. Record what the source edition actually names, including performers, writers and other relevant details.
Compare specific releases. Identify which credited songs appear on the soundtrack editions examined, and which are absent.
Make the basis visible. State the source edition, comparison and last-checked date, so the figures can be understood in context.

A count of credited songs is not necessarily a complete scene-by-scene cue sheet. Likewise, a “missing” percentage describes the releases documented on that page; it should not be read as a claim about every soundtrack edition available today.

Some entries preserve earlier research, with older dates and links. They are starting points for further listening, and may need checking against newer releases.

Beyond the song list

The essays make room for questions that a catalogue cannot answer on its own. Why does a piece of music change the way a scene feels? How can two musical identities inhabit one film? What happens when a recording becomes an object we collect and keep?

I publish these pieces under the pen name Ellis Vane. They offer readings, connections and possibilities, with a different purpose from the archive’s documented comparisons.

Explore the essays and listening notes →

A listening archive in the making

My notes on Sound of Cinema aim to preserve a written trail: music cues, references, discoveries and personal reflections that can become harder to recover as programme availability changes.

This is an independent listening project, for posterity, entertainment and edification. It is a written record of my listening, rather than a complete archive of the programme’s audio.