You know it was quite a while ago I had heard this. And now that I was trying to dig up resources on it, I remembered that this was proven false as 2001 was being made well before The Pink Floyd were hugely famous.
However, according to this site, Kubrick approached Floyd to use "Atom Heart Mother" for part of the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange.
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/faq/index4.html
Is it true that Pink Floyd were asked to do the music for 2001? I heard that if you play the track Echoes from their album Meddle and the Stargate sequence from 2001 at the same time they match.
There is an apparent correlation between the track Echoes and the Stargate sequence in that they are both 23 minutes long, and changes in the music seem to follow changes in the images. This has led some Pink Floyd fans to suggest that the coincidence is deliberate and that Pink Floyd composed the Echoes as an alternative soundtrack to the Stargate sequence of 2001. This is very unlikely. Here is a relevant quote from James Howard's new book 'The Stanley Kubrick Companion' that explains why:'
"The choice of suitable music for the film [2001] was by now becoming a significant factor in Kubrick's method of film-making. Although earlier movies had relied on relatively basic - and fairly unremarkable - music scores, Alex North's music for Spartacus had been rightly acclaimed, though still within the mainstream Hollywood tradition.... For the upcoming space epic, Kubrick - whose opinion was that, "in most cases, film music tends to lack originality" - initially thought that "a film about the future might be the ideal place for a really striking score by a major composer." The director spent endless hours listening to a wide range of contemporary recordings - including electronic - searching for "something that sounded unusual and distinctive but not so unusual as to be distracting." One source later claimed that Pink Floyd had been considered at one point - highly unlikely since they had yet to even release their first single while Kubrick was filming 2001 and, by 1968, had just sacked their main songwriter Syd Barrett and were yet to achieve anything like the fame and respect which Dark Side of the Moon would give them five years later. It was in December 1967 [...] that Alex North was brought on board to score 2001: A Space Odyssey".
Although Pink Floyd released 'A Saucerful of Secrets' in 1968, Kubrick would certainly not have heard this by the time the film was being completed - by December 1967, when North was engaged, their catalogue consisted only of two singles (Arnold Layne and See Emily Play) and one album (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn), none of which would have hinted at their suitability for 2001.
As for 'Echoes', this was not written, recorded or released until 1971 as one side of the 'Meddle' album, and - even if it does fit in with the 'Stargate' sequence from 2001 - could not have been written for the film.
Mr Chop Chop wrote: There is no evidence to suggest that Pink Floyd were ever asked to do any music for 2001. But the book 'Pink Floyd - In the Flesh' quotes the band's ex-bassist Roger Waters, who describes Kubrick's interest in using sections of their 1970 track 'Atom Heart Mother' as the basis of the soundtrack for the upcoming A Clockwork Orange. However, Kubrick wanted license to edit the track in any way he saw fit. Waters said no, so that was that.
Kubrick, never seemingly one to forget, got the last laugh 20 years later, refusing Waters the rights to use a sample from one of his films in a track on the solo album 'Amused To Death', hence Waters' backward-masked anti-Kubrick message on the album.
To fans of 2001 the zealousness by which some Pink Floyd fans appropriate 2001 little more than a visual accompaniment to a Pink Floyd song is sometimes a little irksome, as Ichowhip aptly put it: " I think it great that the Floyd are Kubrick fans. But for them to presume that they thought 2001 needed some "dressing up" is a display of intense hubris IMO. It would be like a really excellent tailor looking at Michelangelo's David, and then taking a tape measure to size him up, and then coming back and fitting a nice blazer on him because he thought he would look better."
Here is a fun little site that talks about all sorts of Pink Floyd Album/Movie Sync Ups:
http://breton.home.boone.net/kitchensynchs.html