Music in Film

Music and film are both based on communication of meanings through time. The emotional, mood, and perceptual effects of music in film can reinforce visual and textual components or act independently of the dramatic elements as a counterpoint to dramatic visual/textual elements, and thus create satire or irony. The study of these effects involves measuring subject response to combinations of music and film and determining goodness of fit, changes in affect or emotional response, and changes in attention or memory. Measurement has often been achieved by rating scales, based on variations of the semantic differential, an approach using bipolar opposite words in three factors, such as good-bad (evaluative), active-passive (activity), and strong-weak (potency), thus operationalizing dependent variables, such as affect, meaning, and emotion. Independent variables ...