“Commutation Tricks” and “Forced Marriages.” Videographic Manipulation as a Tool for the Analysis of Music in Films (original) (raw)

Film music - Part 1: The interaction between image and sound

We all know that music scores play an important role in movies. But which specific functions does music fulfil with respect to the other film elements? And how does it manage to communicate emotions and to help shape the global meaning of a cinematic experience? Part 1 of and Interactive Workshop - Part 2: The functions of music is also available at Academia.edu

Interaction between Music and Image in Film – Presumptions and Typology

In this article I shall make an attempt to present a systematic model of the relationship between music and image in film. The interaction between music and image can be approached in various aspects. The functional aspect is one of the principle ones, when speaking about that. Glancing at this issue can distinguish several different types of this interaction. First of all the exploitation of music in film can be determined by merely practical and pragmatic functions as well as by commercial and ideological reasons (a pragmatic interaction). Seconds -formal compositional tasks, linking/separating, etc. structural functions (a structural interaction). Third -the reasons of rendering semantic functions, non musical (literary, narrative and like) senses (semantic interaction). Each of these interactions is realized by certain phenomenologically singled out situations of music and image contact: diegetic/non-diegetic (the source aspect), synchronicity-parallelism/asynchronicitycounterpoint (a community aspect), foregrounding/backgrounding (predominant aspect). The whole complex of phenomenological and functional aspects compose a hexagonal sound and image model embracing cardinal analytical points of cinema music.

Bimodality in films: the meaning of music in the sound-track

This paper explores the status of music as a case of expression or communication. In order to demonstrate that music can be a communicative, not only an expressive behavior, the domain of the sound-track in films is tackled, a case where music typically provides information that may be linked in different ways to images. A research study is presented where subjects had to describe the emotions, sensations, thoughts and images induced in them by sound-track sequences, either with or without seeing the film images. The results show that music in film can provide information of an emotional, narrative and metatextual kind, and that narrative and metatextual information are caught also in a direct way, not only indirectly through inference from emotional information.

Narrative Music, Visuals and Meaning in Film

Visual Communication, 2010

Narrative media music, music used for narrative purposes in multimedia such as film, television or computer games, is becoming one of the largest sources of musical experience in our daily lives. Though typically experienced on an unconscious and unreflected level, this kind of music actively contributes narrative meaning in multimodal interplay with image, speech and sound effects. Often, what we (think we) see is to a large degree determined by what we hear. Using Halliday's (1978) metafunctions of communication as a starting point, two short film scenes (from Jaws and The Secret of My Success) are examined, with a focus on the intermodal relationships of music and image. The examples illustrate how musical and visual expressions combine to form multimodal statements where the whole is certainly different than the sum of the parts.

A Gestalt Approach to the Analysis of Music in Film

In the field of film music studies, Cognitive Psychology remains perhaps the stronger approach as an alternative to Post-Structuralism and Cultural Studies. Yet, Gestalt Psychology has recently seen a revival of interest. (Donnelly, 2014; Kulezic-Wilson, 2015) Gestalt can offer enlightening concepts not only to theorise how music and visuals combine in an audiovisual whole, but also productive tools to analyse concrete instances in films. While Cognitivism tends to be concerned with single mechanisms of how the brain processes the perceptual data and gives much salience to the higher cognitive operations, Gestalt is concerned with the holistic nature of our experience and attributes more importance to the lower perceptual operations. As Donnelly points out, the combination of sound and visuals into an audiovisual whole has not so much to do with cognitive elaborations as with that hard-wired orientation of our mind towards completeness and stableness that is studied by Gestalt. (Donnelly, 2014: 22-24) Employing the Gestalt concepts, I shall propose an analytical approach based on the similarity/difference between the configuration (gestalt) of the music and that of the other cinematic components (cinematography, editing, acting, lighting, colour palette...). A stabilised experience of the xiii audiovisual whole – the basis for both a formalistic analysis and a critical interpretation – is reached when their encounter makes the gestalts of the cinematic components reciprocally reconfigure and fuse to produce a wider all-including gestalt: the macro-configuration of the audiovisual experience. This Gestalt approach – being based on the fusion of the aural and visual factors into a whole that is 'different from the sum of its parts' (Koffka, 1935: 176) – is also helpful to supersede the long-standing visual bias that influences Film Studies (Altman, 1980; Kalinak, 1992: 20-39), which leads to think of music as something that is externally added to either reinforce or contradict what is already there in the visuals. An analysis of excerpts from A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Hateful Eight (2015) will illustrate the approach.

The «Musicalised Image»: A Joint Aesthetic of Music and Image in Film

Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico, 2019

Despite traditionally having been studied within the field of Musicology, the analysis of music in film should be approached as an aesthetic study of the relationship between «image» and «music» which is central to the cinematographic framework. From this interdisciplinary perspective numerous theoretical and methodologi-cal issues emerge. The aim of this article is to investigate, using both a synchronic and diachronic focus, some of the key issues arising from this joint music-image approach, in an attempt to develop a theoretical framework for a joint aesthetic of music and image: a study of «cinematographic expression» that brings together the visual and the sound dimensions and which we call the «musicalised image», a neologism of our own creation.

Film music - Part 2: The functions of music

We all know that music scores play an important role in movies. But which specific functions does music fulfil with respect to the other film elements? And how does it manage to communicate emotions and to help shape the global meaning of a cinematic experience? In Part 2 of this Interactive workshop we will explore the functions that music plays in movies. Part 1: The interaction between image and sound is also available at Academia.edu

A question of method: notes on sound and music analysis in films

2017

To establish accurate methods that enable the rigorous study of the soundtrack in audiovisual products has been a recurring problem in film studies in Brazil. This essay critically examines manuals, books and articles from different areas of study, including Social Communication, Film Analysis and Sound Studies, in order to compile suggestions of methods of sound and music analysis in audiovisuals that may help future