Introduction
If you have ever watched a film muted, you can’t help but notice how the experience changes. The link between film and sound, particularly music, was established early in the history of the medium, and the relationship has become very closely tied. Even during the silent cinema period scores were added and/or played live to accompany the moving images. We’ll briefly discuss the move towards this inclusion of sound in cinema and how it became such a vital component of filmmaking.
It’s hard to pinpoint any specific role music plays in film because it can serve such a wide variety of functions. In general, music can serve several purposes that are either important on the emotional side of the movie or help/enhance the storytelling. Music can help the images on screen seem more true to life, emphasize emotions, alter perceptions of time, and can change the audience’s perspective of a scene altogether simply by a change of chord. While it is doing all of this, “film music encourages our absorption into the film by distracting us from its technological basis—its constitution as a series of two-dimensional, larger-than-life, sometimes black-and-white, and sometimes silent, images” (Kalinak, 2010). Of course, film music doesn’t do all of these things all of the time. But music is so useful to film because it has the potential to do so much simultaneously. As filmmakers, it’s important to understand the role music can, and most likely will, play in your own films and how you can start to develop yet another essential tool in your filmmaking toolbox.
A Brief History of the Evolution of Film Music
Why did music come to accompany moving images at all?
Film exerted a gravitational pull toward music from the very beginning; though the standard explanation for the combination of image and music is functional: music compensated for the lack of sound in silent film, and it covered the noise produced both by the projector and by audiences unschooled in cinema etiquette (Kalinak, 2010). Music was readily available in the early homes of cinema, the cafes, vaudeville theaters, music halls, carnivals, and traveling exhibitions where musicians would play for the moving images on the program as they would for live performances. But noisy projectors and audiences were soon quieted, motion pictures moved into their own screening spaces, and it wasn’t long before synchronized sound became the norm. Yet musical accompaniment persisted in film long after its initial utility had faded.
The trajectory that the relationship between film and music has taken, I believe is in part due to the role that music can play as a means of storytelling. Though music, the use of sound in general, had been cautioned against by many theorist and filmmakers of the silent period, music much like sound, when done appropriately, have the ability to both unlock and enhance new potentialities of the medium. By this I mean that certain qualities of film e.g. subjective alignment with characters, interpretation of tone, emotion, and the passage of time are all things that we have learned can be established and/or emphasized through the incorporation of sound, and specifically for this post music.
(Here I’ll add more based on today’s comments.)
Some Common Functions of Music in Film
Diegetic Music
As a function of music in film, diegetic music is as you might guess from the name, music that can be heard both by the viewing audience and by the characters in the film. Examples of this sort of music include car radios, music heard from a CD player, or even a live band in the film. The scene below is a quick excerpt from Her (2013) in which the two main characters are improvising a song:
Diegetic music can have a lot of positive impacts on a scene. It can behave almost like dialogue would at times. We see this often in teen movies where for example one character wrote a song and performs it in front of their person of interest. It can have an expositional purpose: if we think of the amount of scenes in movies that feature a character or two listening to a song they really like that helps show us rather than tell us something about that character as a person. In any case the music choices being made are serving to help propel and/or enhance the narrative arc. That is one of the more promising potentialities of sound design, and film scoring in particular, that it doesn’t always serve such an internally motivated purpose, but when it does it becomes so integral to the scene that something would truly be lost in its absence. Below are a few scenes that incorporate diegetic sound in different ways and for different ends. I think they both do so successfully, so I include them here as an example of some of the ways this type of sound can work.
Setting
Music as a function of setting can do a few key things. Perhaps the most obvious of these being helping to establish the film’s world. If, for example, I have set my film in Italy the choices I make musically can have a great impact on both the believability and the overall feel of the film. Particularly in considering non-diegetic music choices, if I’m telling a story about a small village in traditional Italy, I should have already done some research on what instruments and what particular styles of play are characteristic there. Musical choices can be the difference between a well-crafted and well-received score and something that just seems like an unmotivated attempt at adding another dimension to a scene.
Emotional Enhancement
Another very strong function. Music can serve the movie by getting into the emotions of the characters. A face with a neutral expression can be pushed into “feeling” many different things just by what kind of music is used. In the same way it works of course very well to evoke certain emotions with the audience. This sort of effect works both to emphasize pre-existing emotion in the film whether that be visual, spoken, etc. and to add a new layer of emotion in support of and/or in contrast to the emotive qualities of the image. In both cases, the music becomes central to the work itself. Its inclusion becomes integral to the weaving of the story, to the portrayal of the affect; whatever specific function it plays, the image is enhanced by its presence.
Here is a quick example of a scene from La La Land (2016) that I think does a good job of using the score, as diegetic sound, to portray and emphasize the emotional weight of the scene. A scene which might I add was pretty sad even on mute but brought me to tears the first time I watched the film.
And another short clip from a short film I co-directed that I think also demonstrates this:
I think of the Kuleshov effect that colors some of the theory behind particular types of editing. The way in which we could have the same image impress different emotions on an audience simply through changing the images surrounding it. Likewise, I believe that the choice of music that accompanies an image can affect the way in which the audience perceives the emotional state of the character. I’ve put together a brief video that is quite on the nose but helps as a base demonstration of this “musical” Kuleshov effect:
Montage
Music helps very well to glue scenes together. Rather harsh scene changes can be softened by adding music over the scene change. One of the extremes of these forms are montages which work beautiful with music. Even though we might have a lot of jumps in time/places or even periods, when the montage is covered under one score cue it will at the same time be glued together and understood as a whole. It can also work to express the passage of time itself. Where we sometimes have sequences of images that are more so an expression of changes through time than a connection of differing narrative arcs, we might also see music being used to help convey both the emotive undertones of the images and the concrete acknowledgement of a passage of (sometimes indistinctly prolonged) time.
In the following scene from The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009), we see both usages of the music/montage pairing. We have the beginning scene that establishes that months have passed even though nothing in the space (not even her outfit) changes. Then we have a montage of images that establish the life of her and the people close to her (or that were close to her) throughout another undefined length of time. All of this was partially brought together by the soundtrack that they chose to accompany the image. This without mentioning the song itself which given the wider context of the film, and the series, also serves to emphasize some of the character psychology that we come to recognize as distinctly Bella.
Build Suspense
Music can also be used in a film to convey anticipation of a subsequent action. Sort of a self-explanatory function, here the music quite literally builds suspense that suggests the action to follow. It could change from light and happy to more dark and sinister or go from a soft soothing sound quickly to a sharper more forceful sound. Either way, these sudden changes create tension since the audience is unaware of what is to follow.
We see this technique used a lot in horror or thriller movies. In conjunction with jump cuts and other visual cues, the added music changes the audience’s mood entirely and provokes strong emotions from them, or at least in a horror movie it lets us know when we should cover our eyes! We just need to keep in mind that with this particular function the music and the image should be fairly related to each other to properly achieve the effect. In the scene below from Monster’s Inc. (2001), it’s not necessarily a horror or thriller film, but you can certainly see how the score is molding the suspense building of the scene up unto the big “scare” moment.
Conclusion
This is far from a comprehensive list of the ways in which music can impact your visual storytelling, but these are some of the key functions it can serve. This essay was not to be prescriptive in telling you which ways to use music and which ways not to. Rather my goal here was to give you some things to consider before you make the decision to include music into your own work. Bad sound design is one of the pitfalls that student films face often and an unmotivated inclusion of score or soundtrack music does nothing but add to that negativity. I, for one, am a proponent of the usage of music though I seldom do so in my own work. I think that much like we spend a substantial amount of time learning about image composition, parallel editing, and what have you, so too should we spend time learning about how we can use music to tell a compelling story and for that matter why we would use music in the first place. It’s my hope that this post can be a starting point for some of you that are hoping to make your own films and may not be sure how you can incorporate music artistically and purposefully.
References
Kalinak, K. M. (2010). Film music: a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
No cited but another great book for further reading:
Aesthetics of Film Music by Zofia Lissa
CMA SENIOR SEMINAR 2018 