IT IS NOT true that watching too much television makes you go square-eyed. Graeme Stephen will confirm this – and he should know. The Edinburgh-based guitarist has spent more hours in front of the screen than he cares to count as he prepares to premiere his new score to the classic silent movie Metropolis on the Edinburgh Fringe.

Stephen has made a specialism of putting his own music to the works of Fritz Lang, who directed Metropolis, and his film making contemporaries including F W Murnau and Robert Wiene over the past few years. Metropolis will be his seventh soundtrack and is one of three that Stephen will be performing in Edinburgh this month.

The guitarist, who has been one of the Scottish jazz scene’s most compelling figures since he came down to the central belt from his native Aberdeen in the mid noughties, became interested in composing film scores round about the time he made the move south. Nashville country-soul collective Lambchop performed the soundtrack to F W Murnau’s Sunrise that they’d originally created for San Francisco International Film Festival at the Usher Hall in late 2004. Stephen went along and was mesmerised.

“I’ve always been interested in films,” he says, “but it was seeing that Lambchop gig that made think, I’d like to have a go at this. I’d seen the film before and I remember being in tears watching it for the first time, so there was a definite attraction in working with it for me. Other favourite musicians of mine, like the guitarist Bill Frisell, have written music for silent films, and people have told me that my music has a lot of imagery in it, so when I was looking around for some inspiration that would make me write I decided to try and write a score for Sunrise.”

His music for Sunrise appears on a double CD, Films, which Stephen released in 2013. Its companion on the disc set, his score for Nosferatu will be reprised this month along with his one for The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. These films have an element of escapism but for Stephen one of the attractions of working on Metropolis is that, almost a century after it was made, much of the industrial world it portrays is strikingly relevant today.

To help him to realise the music that the film stirred in his imagination he has returned to the Amsterdam-based string quartet Zapp4, for whom Stephen composed his 2015 suite Distances, and long-time collaborator, drummer Tom Bancroft, one quarter of the Playtime Collective that Stephen put together with saxophonist Martin Kershaw and bassist Mario Caribe to explore new and old music in regular sessions in Edinburgh’s Outhouse bar-venue.

Introduced to Zapp4 by another long-time colleague, saxophonist-piper Fraser Fifield, who’d worked with one of the group’s violinists, Oene van Geel on another project, Stephen found the string quartet to be his soul mates.

“The way they improvise together is amazing,” he says. “I know from working with them on Distances that I’m probably writing too much for Metropolis and that when we get to the rehearsal stage, we’ll probably throw out a lot of what I’ve written because I’ll arrange a passage for the four instruments and they’ll take, say, the cello line and put their own stamp on it as an ensemble. They have a way of bringing their own sound to something and yet staying true to the original idea.”

Bancroft, who will feature alongside bassist Caribe and Stephen on the Nosferatu and Dr Caligari gigs at the Fringe, is given even more freedom than the string players.

“Tom tends to focus on what’s happening onscreen rather than watching the parts I’ve written for him,” says Stephen. “And that’s absolutely fine because I know him well enough to trust that whatever he’ll play, it’ll fit in with what the rest of us are doing. It’s not as if anything that doesn’t get used will be wasted – I’m forever reworking ideas that ended up on the cutting room floor for other situations.”

With Metropolis, as with his other soundtracks, Stephen hopes that his music will let the audience see the film the way he sees it without his music making big statements that distract from the storyline.

“I think as a composer you can add to the impact that certain scenes make and because I’ve watched the film hundreds of times now, there might be something that I’ve noticed and can highlight that the audience might not pick up on if they’re seeing it for the first time,” he says. “But ultimately the important thing is that we don’t get in the way.”

Graeme Stephen’s Metropolis is on at Summerhall from August 18 -20 (10:15pm). It is part of the Made in Scotland showcase. Nosferatu with Live Score by the Graeme Stephen Trio is on at the Jazz Bar from August 17 -19 (12:15pm), and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari with Live Score by the Graeme Stephen Trio is on at Leith Depot on August 26 and 27 (8pm).