Using silence deliberately within a film's background score
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Skilled composers sometimes choose to withhold music entirely at a scene's most significant moment, trusting that sudden silence, following a build-up of score elsewhere, can carry more genuine emotional weight than any additional music could actually provide at that particular point in the story, even as the surrounding technology keeps shifting from one decade to the next.
This technique requires real compositional confidence, since silence only achieves its intended dramatic effect when it follows an established musical presence, meaning composers have to plan a scene's overall musical arc carefully to ensure the eventual silence lands with the intended, deliberate impact, however the wider industry happens to be changing around it.
Directors and composers typically discuss these silent moments carefully during the scoring process, identifying precisely which scenes genuinely benefit from the absence of music rather than simply defaulting to continuous scoring throughout an entire film's runtime without considered variation, long before most viewers ever stop to think about why.
When used deliberately, silence becomes a genuine compositional tool in its own right, proof that a composer's craft lies as much in knowing precisely when not to add music as in the actual writing of the music itself, long before most viewers ever stop to think about why.