AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The millions of dollars presidential candidates spend on ads support an industry that doesn't get a whole lot of attention outside of campaign season. As part of our series Snapshots 2016, NPR's Tamara Keith introduces us to a man who helps give those ads their epic sound.
TODD HAHN: My name is Todd Hahn. I'm a composer.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Todd Hahn has been composing music for campaign ads for 25 years. But it's not what he imagined for himself when he was a budding musician growing up in the '70s. He wanted to write music for television and movies.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN WILLIAMS SONG, "OVERTURE")
HAHN: Seeing those big, epic movies as a young person, like, you know, "Star Wars" or "The Magnificent Seven" - any of these big, epic movies and Westerns that had just these gorgeous scores. You'd say, I want to do that.
KEITH: Hahn studied composition at Juilliard but never finished. For a while, he was scoring documentaries for the Discovery Channel and National Geographic. And then a producer of campaign ads asked if he could score an ad for a down-ballot race in Pennsylvania. He did, and the rest is more or less history.
HAHN: One thing leads to the other, and if, you know, you're a composer or any sort of creative person and you have steady work, you know, and it's good work, you sort of stay with it.
KEITH: At the peak of the campaign season, Hanh says he'll score as many as 18 ads a day. Over the course of his career, he figures he's done 12,000 or 15,000.
HAHN: And most of them are, you know, during the election cycle, negative ads.
KEITH: He's a master at composing music that gives ads an emotional punch. For negative ads, Hahn says an ethereal sound works well.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
HAHN: They work really nice for negative ads or - like a candidate could just be speaking, like, at 3 o'clock in the morning on, you know, September 4.
KEITH: But he gets to do positive ads, too, the kind of sweeping bio ads that introduce people to a candidate or reintroduce them.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
HAHN: Music needs to be a metaphor for what you're seeing and what you're hearing, you know? I mean, that works the analytical side of your brain. But then when you hear the music, you know, with the visuals, it - something inside you is tweaked.
KEITH: And the best ads, the most cinematic, get Hahn close to that thing he dreamed of when he was a kid.
HAHN: To me, they are like little film scores. In my humble way, I try to make that like a little film score. Those are the fun kind of jobs.
KEITH: Hahn works for both parties, which leads to some interesting contrasts. In 2004, he scored a Democratic Party ad for presidential candidate John Kerry.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHN KERRY: I defended this country as a young man, and I will defend...
KEITH: A couple of weeks later...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: I served with John Kerry.
KEITH: ...He wrote the music for the now-infamous Swift Boat ad that helped sink Kerry's candidacy.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: He is lying about his record.
KEITH: It might be surprising, but Todd Hahn says he's not a political person. He failed his high school government class. Hahn really sees himself working for the producers of the ads, not the candidates themselves.
HAHN: The candidates - to me, I've done it for so long that they're political candidates. They come and go (laughter), and God bless them.
KEITH: Because they pay the bills. Tamara Keith, NPR News.