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 have included the use of visual elements alone, musical elements alone, and their combination for comparative analysis. This entry considers research on the interaction between music and visual elements of film.

Sandra Marshall and Annabel Cohen conducted an early series of experiments on how music affects subject characterization of animation figures relative to musical combinations. Animations of a small triangle, large triangle, and small circle were combined with strong and weak composed music prototypes. The weak music, in C major with high tessitura (pitch/frequency range), was contrasted with strong music, in Aeolian minor in low tessitura. Subject ratings on evaluative, potency, and activity scales were collected for the animation alone, the music alone, and combinations thereof. Results indicated that the large triangle had the highest activity and potency ratings and the lowest (most unpleasant) evaluative ratings. They found that ratings of the animation alone were altered by combination with the music, particularly as the small triangle increased in activity with strong music. Based on these results, Marshall and Cohen proposed the congruence-associationist model (CAM). Congruence is the consonant (appropriate) connection of ratings of the visual and musical elements. The proposed model of association (e.g., big triangle = strong, fast and minor music = strong) and time congruence, loosely connected to tempo and accent, led to a greatly expanded model by Cohen that includes text, speech, visual surface, music surface, and sound special effects, elements in relation to short-term and long-term memory. Most of these elements remain unexplored in experimental research as of this writing.

Scott Lipscomb and Roger Kendall conducted an experiment focused on whether the composer's intent in combining music and film was communicated to the perceiver. Five excerpts from the film Star Trek IV (music by Leonard Rosenman) were presented in their original combination of music and visuals and in all crossed combinations. Subjects were asked to rate the degree of fit in [Page 607]randomly presented excerpts. The combinations were carefully edited by film composition students for temporal congruency, defined as the coordination of music and visual accent structures (periodic times of attention), a variable of perceptual importance. They found that the composer-intended excerpts were rated as best fit overall. Excerpts of visual and musical elements that were less concrete in their use of time organization and musical elements, such as musical tonality and repetitive accent (beat) and visually abstract patterns, were most often mismatched with the composer intent.

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