1 - INTRODUCTION

[ 1 ]
INTRODUCTION

1.1 Brief history of film soundtracks

Throughout human civilization music has always accompanied lyrics, dance, drama, ceremony. Thus, in the twentieth century music for film was probably a natural evolution of this accompanying role.
Even the very first films ever made employed music, which was played live by musicians as the film was being shown. The reason of this was mainly aesthetic, but also practical since early film projectors were rather noisy (Berg, 1976).
Within a few years, an entire music industry was built around “silent movies”, where the contribution given by music itself was most definitely essential. Then, when “talking films” were introduced, the movie industry expected background music to confuse the audience who now was delivered a sound much more realistic and adherent to the content of films.
For the sake of being as realistic as possible, filmmakers tried to remove all music, but ended up feeling that something was missing. Musical accompaniment in fact enhanced rather that detracted from the film viewing experience.
Musical soundtracks were found to be necessary (Larson, 1985).
Unfortunately, the aesthetics and technique of film music have been somewhat neglected by researchers, so we know very little about how movie soundtracks interact with filmed scenes and “communicate” with an audience.
Even though most people would agree that music plays an important role in film perception, what this exact role is and what cognitive processes it influences has been little explored and explained (Cohen, 1990).
How is film music integrated with the visual element on the screen? Does the accompaniment by music necessarily mean subordination of music to all other aspects of the film? What is the role of music in the sensory hierarchy dominated by vision? To what extent does a soundtrack influence and alter the interpretation of a film?
The present paper is particularly aimed to this issue.

1.2 Why study film music

Whereas experimental psychology has now a history of over a century, it is only in the last twenty years that psychomusicology has brought its contribution to experimental psychology.
Psychomusicology is primarily focused on psychological aspects underlying structural and perceptual aspects of music, such as pitch, tonality, and rhythm (Tighes & Dowling, 1993).
But it is not these phenomena that characterize our everyday experience of listening to music: for most listeners in fact, it is emotion and meaning that stand out as the most important aspects of musical experience (Sloboda, 1985; Storr, 1992).
Being profound aspects of musical experience, emotion and meaning are difficult to investigate. On the other hand emotion and meaning also characterize the movie watching experience, thus film soundtracks can be a starting point for exploring the relations between music and meaning, and between music and emotion. On this account, the study of psychology of film music helps us examine difficult but important aspects of music perception such as musically evoked meaning and emotion.
Another important reason to study film music is a growing amount of literature in film criticism focusing on sound and music (Gorbman, 1995). This is likely symptomatic of the increasing significance given to the musical components in filmmaking, and the effects this literature describes seems to involve psychological processes.
Some critics and filmmakers advocate for audiovisual analysis. An example can be a filmmaker exercise called forced marriage (Chion, 1994) that consists in pairing a film excerpt with a number of different pieces of music. Directors are suggested to observe the specific types of soundtrack the visual part resists and the ones it yields to, in order to appraise and investigate the potential expression and signification of the scenes they are going to edit.
Ever since the music industries and market have made them available, soundtrack albums have been appealing and popular. Filmmaker and critic Gorbman (1995) suspects that this appeal is due to the ability that film music has to bring the listener back into the film itself. That is probably because, among the elements of a film viewer’s affect and memory, music is among the most powerful.

1.3 Technology, society and music listening

Contemporary musicologists recognize that it is only in recent times that music has been listened to for its own sake, that is, accompanying nothing at all (Rosen, 1980). Instead, film music listening is really one of the most conventional forms of perception of music as accompaniment in the last century.
In the Forties there was very little recorded music, and it was in movie theatres that public was mostly exposed to music. Some say that it was actually through film scores that public musical taste was being formed: according to Handzo (1995), the average person who visited a movie theatre for a couple of hours was being unconsciously “emotionally conditioned” for better music.
Therefore, to a certain extent, such musical acculturation through film music is still happening today and through many other channels then before. The different media we are exposed to every day of our lives, they are all broadcasting background music.
In addition to that, in the last few years multimedia has become a common word and the problem of studying the impact of such audio-video material on perception and understanding has become a very interesting issue.
Film music is probably one of the first examples of multimedia and therefore it is able to provide a representative and largely attended venue for psychological investigation of these phenomena.
Psychology of film music can help us understand audiovisual phenomena in general and such understanding has become more and more important with the increasing popularity of multimedia.
Nowadays, music is also disseminated in many places that people attend for reasons other than listening to it. We can really say that it has become extremely difficult for incidental listeners to evade the sound of music and the psychological effects of such exposure (Hunter, 1974).
In addition to that, we have a widely spread access to video, film, music and all recorded media in general. This is of course due to both technological development and socioeconomic changes industrialized countries have gone through, resulting in a huge increase in the amount of leisure time and disposable income.
As a consequence of this augmented access, soundtracks and film music have become an even more common source of exposure to musical experience.
New developments in digital technology now provide very accurate control of stimulus materials of film and music. Through electronics and computer technology, the non-linear editing of auditory and visual information is easily accomplished, and the same material can be edited in a virtually unlimited number of ways.
This new control of audio and visual media promotes experimentation that can address the many psychological questions about the interaction between film and music.

1.4 Purpose and structure of the present research

This paper is aimed to investigate the effects of music in film.
The focus is mainly on the interaction between the visual and the auditory part of the stimulus when appraising film/music combinations using semantic differential rating scales.
Previous research unveiled that two independent factors, namely Pleasure and Arousal, seem to lie beneath the appraisal of complex stimuli like musical tracks and film scenes.
Will different underscoring influence the perceived Pleasure and Arousal degree of the film? And what happens when music is contrasting with what is seen in the film? Will the spectator interpret what she/he is watching differently than when music and film are instead congruent?

The research is divided in three parts:

- In the first part we measured the Pleasure and Arousal factor for the musical and the filmed material. Different groups of participants rated the musical tracks and the film excerpts separately.

- In the second part we selected a number of soundtracks and of film scenes and combined them. Participants to this part were asked to rate the degree to which film and music fit well (or badly) together.

- Finally in the third part participants appraised the film/music combinations on the Pleasure and Arousal rating scales, also they are asked to pick an interpretation for each of the excerpt they are presented.

[ next ]-[ index ]