When Music Makes the Film Mean: VI. When the Absent Appears in Sound

We have now reached a curious point.

A musical theme begins as music.

Through repeated association with a character, place, event or idea, it acquires a semiotic function.

Eventually, the image need not be present.

The music alone can bring something absent into the viewer's experience.

A character can be off screen, yet suddenly feel present.

A past event can return without being shown.

A future event can become anticipated before it occurs.

A place can be recalled without appearing.

A relationship can become audible before the narrative makes it explicit.

The score has acquired a remarkable power:

It can make the absent present.

Absence is not nothing

In ordinary perception, absence seems straightforward.

The character is not there.

The place is not visible.

The event has already happened.

The future has not happened yet.

But narrative film has a more interesting relationship with absence.

Something can be physically absent while remaining semiotically present.

A photograph can do this.

A word can do it.

A memory can do it.

And once a musical theme has become a sign, music can do it too.

The character need not appear for the audience to think of them.

The earlier scene need not be shown for its significance to return.

The future event need not occur for it to become anticipated.

The score can carry the relation across time and space.

The theme as memory

Suppose a character has been associated with a particular theme.

The character leaves the scene.

Later, the theme returns.

The character remains unseen.

Yet the audience remembers.

The music has become a thread connecting two moments that are otherwise separated.

This is more than simple recall.

The theme can make the earlier event relevant to the present.

Its significance has entered the current scene even though its original image has disappeared.

Music can therefore function as a form of narrative memory.

Memory changes the present

The power of this device lies partly in the fact that remembering is not neutral.

When a theme returns, we do not simply retrieve an old piece of information.

We bring a history into the present.

Suppose a theme was originally associated with happiness.

Later it returns after the character has suffered a loss.

The same notes now carry both histories.

The earlier meaning remains.

But the present context changes how we hear it.

The theme can sound nostalgic.

Bitter.

Regretful.

Ironic.

The musical sign therefore does not merely retrieve the past.

It reconstrues the present through the past.

The theme as anticipation

The opposite movement is equally powerful.

A musical theme can appear before the thing it signifies.

The music begins.

The character has not yet appeared.

The threat has not yet been revealed.

The event has not yet happened.

But the audience anticipates something.

The sign has made a future possibility present to the viewer.

This is one of the reasons film music can create suspense so effectively.

The image is still innocent.

The music is already telling us that the image should not be taken at face value.

The future has entered the present as a possibility.

Music can know more than the image

This can create a distinctive narrative relationship between film and audience.

A character may not know that danger is approaching.

The audience does.

The character sees an ordinary room.

The audience hears the threatening theme.

The film therefore creates two perspectives at once.

The character inhabits one.

The viewer inhabits another.

The score participates in the distribution of knowledge.

It can make us aware of something that the represented world has not yet revealed.

Music becomes a carrier of narrative information.

Foreshadowing without exposition

This is one reason music can achieve effects that dialogue would make clumsy.

A character does not have to say:

"Something terrible is about to happen."

The music can establish that possibility without stating it.

The viewer senses that the present scene contains more than the image explicitly shows.

The score has therefore become a resource for implicit narrative construal.

It can establish a future relation without describing it.

The Jaws example again

The Jaws motif provides an unusually clear example.

Once the audience has learned its association with the shark and approaching danger, the motif can appear before the shark is visible.

The shark is physically absent.

But the audience anticipates it.

The music has therefore become more than an accompaniment to an image.

It has become a warning sign within the film's semiotic system.

The original audiovisual relation has been transformed into a portable sign.

And the absence of the shark is precisely what allows the musical sign to do its work.

Absence becomes a resource

This suggests an important principle.

A sign becomes especially powerful when what it signifies does not have to be present.

The absence creates a space for construal.

A musical theme can occupy that space.

The audience mentally supplies what is missing.

The score can therefore contribute to the film without visually representing anything at all.

This is one reason film music can enlarge the narrative world beyond what the camera shows.

Off-screen becomes meaningful

Film already possesses techniques for making the off-screen world significant.

A voice comes from outside the frame.

A sound suggests that something is happening elsewhere.

A character looks towards something we cannot see.

Music can do something similar at a more abstract level.

It can invoke a person, place, memory or danger without giving us an acoustic representation of that thing.

The off-screen world becomes not merely spatially absent but semiotically present.

The theme can represent a relationship

A musical sign need not signify a person or object.

It can come to signify a relationship.

Two characters may acquire a shared theme.

It may appear when they are together.

Later, one character hears it alone.

The music recalls the relationship even though the other person is absent.

The sign now refers not to a thing but to a relation.

This is a more sophisticated form of narrative meaning.

Music can make the invisible structure of a story perceptible.

Themes can combine

Once musical signs have been established, they can interact.

Imagine one theme belonging to a character and another belonging to a relationship.

The two themes appear together.

The audience hears that the character is now implicated in the relationship.

Or two characters' themes become musically intertwined.

The combination can suggest intimacy, conflict or transformation.

The score has acquired something like a relational syntax.

Not a language in the full sense.

But a system in which signs can combine to generate further construals.

Absence can become conspicuous

The opposite can happen too.

A theme that we expect does not appear.

The character is present, but their music is missing.

Suddenly the absence itself becomes meaningful.

Perhaps the character has changed.

Perhaps the film wants to distance us from them.

Perhaps we are not seeing the situation from their point of view.

The audience notices the missing sign because the film has trained us to expect it.

The absence of a sound has become a positive semiotic event.

This is an extraordinary consequence of a learned convention.

Silence can signify

The same principle applies to silence more generally.

Silence is not automatically meaningful.

But if music has established an expectation, its sudden absence can become significant.

A score stops.

The scene becomes acoustically bare.

The viewer notices.

Perhaps the music's disappearance corresponds to emotional rupture.

Perhaps it marks a change in point of view.

Perhaps something terrible has happened.

The significance of the silence depends upon the history of the soundtrack.

What is absent can matter because something was expected to be present.

The score creates temporal depth

We can now see that music can give a film several temporal dimensions simultaneously.

The present scene is visible.

The past is available through musical memory.

The future is available through musical anticipation.

The absent can therefore coexist with the present through the score.

The film is no longer confined to what the camera is showing at this moment.

The soundtrack can carry a temporal history of meaning.

Retrospection

The process becomes even more interesting when later events alter the meaning of earlier ones.

Suppose a theme accompanies an apparently happy scene.

Much later, we discover that the character was already planning a betrayal.

The theme returns.

We hear the earlier scene differently.

What seemed affectionate now seems sinister.

The music has participated in a narrative structure that only becomes fully intelligible retrospectively.

The present changes our hearing of the past.

This is one of the extraordinary properties of narrative semiosis.

Meaning can travel backwards.

The score can create a second narrative

A film can therefore have something like two narratives unfolding at once.

The visible story tells us what the characters do.

The score tells us something about how those events relate across time.

A theme can announce a future event.

Recall a past one.

Connect distant scenes.

Suggest an unspoken relationship.

Mark a transformation.

The music becomes a kind of parallel narrative resource.

Not a second story told in words.

A second organisation of relations.

But the audience must learn the code

None of this happens automatically.

If a theme appears only once, its significance may remain ambiguous.

The audience needs a history.

The film establishes a relation.

Repeats it.

Modifies it.

Reinforces it.

The viewer learns.

This is why the repertoire of the audience matters so much.

Some associations are culturally inherited.

Others are created inside the film.

The viewer participates in acquiring them.

The film's meaning potential grows as the viewing experience unfolds.

The film creates a local semiotic potential

This gives us a useful way to think about the score.

At the beginning of a film, a musical motif may have a broad and relatively open potential.

By the end, its possible interpretations have been shaped by everything that has happened.

The film has created a local semiotic system.

The motif's later uses occur against this history.

A musical phrase heard for the first time is not the same semiotic event as the same phrase heard for the fifth time.

The material form may be identical.

Its potential significance is not.

The absent becomes culturally portable

Sometimes the association escapes the film altogether.

A theme becomes recognised outside its original context.

People hum it.

Quote it.

Parody it.

Use it to evoke the character or situation elsewhere.

The film has contributed a new cultural sign to the wider reservoir of meaning.

This is what happened, on a large scale, with the Jaws motif.

The shark no longer needs the ocean.

It can be conjured by two notes.

The original audiovisual relation has become cultural shorthand.

But the sign remembers its origins

Even when the music becomes culturally portable, its meaning still carries a history.

The reason the Jaws motif evokes danger is not contained in the intervals themselves.

Its cultural meaning is the sediment of its repeated use and the history of the film.

This reminds us of something we established in From Mattering to Meaning:

Meaning is not an arbitrary label placed on an indifferent form.

It grows from relations.

The musical sign carries the history of those relations.

Beyond the shark

The same mechanism is not limited to leitmotif.

A piece of music can become associated with:

• a particular place;
• a historical period;
• a memory;
• a relationship;
• a state of mind;
• a narrative possibility;
• an entire film.

In each case, music can make something absent present.

The sign does not need to reproduce the absent thing.

It only needs to make the relation available.

The paradox of musical presence

There is therefore a curious paradox.

The more established the musical sign becomes, the less the film needs to show.

A character can disappear.

The music remains.

A memory can be unspoken.

The music evokes it.

A future event can remain unseen.

The music anticipates it.

A relationship can become invisible.

The music keeps it present.

The score gains power partly by becoming independent of the image that taught us how to hear it.

That is one of the deepest transformations in film music.

From absence back to presence

But perhaps we should describe this differently.

The absent character does not actually become physically present.

The music gives the audience a way of construing the present as related to the absent.

That distinction matters.

The score does not conjure a ghost into the frame.

It changes the semiotic field in which the present is experienced.

The absent becomes relevant.

It becomes available.

It becomes part of what the current scene means.

Meaning stretches the present across time.

The next question

We have now seen how a musical sign can invoke what is not visually present.

It can remember the past.

Anticipate the future.

Carry a character's identity.

Mark a relationship.

Make an absent event significant.

Even silence can become meaningful when a musical presence has been established.

But this raises a larger question.

If a score can carry narrative relations that are not explicitly stated in the image or dialogue, then perhaps music is doing more than reminding us of people and events.

Perhaps it is helping construct the story itself.

A musical theme can make a character sympathetic.

Or sinister.

A relationship can become intimate before anyone speaks.

A scene can become memory rather than present action.

A revelation can transform the significance of everything that came before.

The score is no longer merely invoking things.

It is helping determine how the things belong together.

That is our next question:

When does the score become part of the story?

When Music Makes the Film Mean: V. When Music Becomes a Sign

At first, a musical passage may simply accompany an image.

Then the image changes how we hear the music.

The music and image recur together.

We begin to recognise the relationship.

Eventually, something remarkable can happen.

The image is no longer necessary.

The music can appear by itself and still bring the image, character or situation to mind.

This is the transition we have been approaching:

When does music become a sign?

The answer is not that music suddenly becomes a symbolic system.

Something subtler happens.

A musical form that already possesses its own possibilities for mattering becomes conventionally associated with something else within the film's semiotic system.

From coupling to association

Imagine that a musical theme accompanies a particular character for the first time.

At that moment, the audience hears music and sees a character.

The music may affect how we construe the character.

The character may affect how we hear the music.

Nothing yet requires the music itself to have a fixed reference.

But suppose the pairing recurs.

The character appears.

The theme returns.

Later, the character appears again, and the theme returns again.

A relation has begun to stabilise.

The audience can now recognise it.

The music has acquired a history.

This is the foundation of the leitmotif.

The Jaws study that we encountered at the beginning of this series describes precisely this process: repeated pairing of a short musical phrase with a character can eventually allow the theme alone to conjure that character.

Repetition changes what the music can do

Repetition is important because the first occurrence and the fifth occurrence are not semiotically equivalent.

The first occurrence provides material.

The second creates a connection.

Further occurrences strengthen the association.

Eventually, the audience does not have to reconstruct the entire history consciously.

The relation has become available as part of the viewer's repertoire.

The musical form can now do something it could not do at the beginning.

It can invoke.

This is a new possibility for the music.

The Jaws theme

The famous two-note Jaws motif provides a particularly clear case.

Within the film, the motif becomes associated with the shark and the anticipation of danger. The association is built through repeated audiovisual coupling, so that the motif can eventually evoke the shark without the animal appearing.

Notice the direction of development.

Initially:

music + shark → construal of threat

Later:

music → shark/threat

The original multimodal relation has become portable.

The music can now carry part of the history that originally depended upon the image.

Has the music acquired a meaning?

In one sense, yes.

But we should be precise.

It has not acquired an intrinsic meaning in the way a word belongs to a language.

The two-note figure does not contain the concept shark inside itself.

The relation has been established by the film and learned by its audience.

Its significance depends upon a history of repetition and recognition.

The music has therefore become a sign within a semiotic system.

That is different from saying that music, in itself, is a symbolic system.

A sign is portable

This is one of the important things that changes when a musical form becomes a sign.

It can survive the immediate context that established it.

A character can disappear.

The theme remains.

A place can be left behind.

The theme returns.

An event can be remembered.

The music recalls it.

A threat can be absent.

The music can announce its approach.

The sign has acquired a degree of semiotic portability.

It can carry a relation from one situation into another.

The theme can anticipate

Once the audience knows the association, the music can appear before the character or event.

This is particularly powerful in narrative.

The theme begins.

We know something is coming.

The character has not yet appeared.

The threat has not yet been shown.

The music has made an absent or future element relevant to the present.

The score is no longer merely commenting on what we see.

It is organising anticipation.

The viewer's construal of the present is shaped by what the music suggests about the future.

The theme can remember

The reverse is equally important.

A theme can return after an event has disappeared.

We hear a melody associated with an earlier relationship.

The image is elsewhere.

The original scene is no longer visible.

But the music recalls it.

The score becomes part of the film's memory.

This is why leitmotif is so powerful narratively: each recurrence can reactivate a history of earlier occurrences.

Some accounts of film music explicitly describe the leitmotif as a device through which repeated musical associations can evoke a protagonist, event or idea even in its visual absence.

Music has become a carrier of narrative memory.

The theme can transform

A sign need not repeat unchanged.

The theme can return in a different key, orchestration, tempo or instrumentation.

It remains recognisable.

But its new form can alter its significance.

A character's theme can become fragmented when their identity is threatened.

A love theme can return in minor mode after a separation.

A heroic theme can become slow and distorted after defeat.

The musical identity persists while its contextual meaning changes.

The sign is therefore not a rigid label.

It is a potential for variation.

Recognition and difference

This is important.

If every recurrence were identical in every respect, the motif could function as a stable identifier.

But variation allows the film to say more.

The recognisable element provides continuity.

The variation provides new construal.

A theme can therefore carry both:

identity

and

difference.

The audience recognises the same musical resource while noticing that something about its present occurrence has changed.

This is one way film music can make character development audible.

The sign can become relationally richer

A motif need not remain associated with a single object.

Suppose a theme begins as the music of a character.

As the film develops, it becomes associated with the character's relationship to another person.

Later, it may come to represent not the character alone but love, betrayal, memory or loss.

The sign's semantic field has expanded.

The original association has not necessarily disappeared.

It has become a resource for further associations.

This is exactly the kind of semantic growth we encountered in our earlier discussion of metaphor.

A meaning becomes a resource for additional meaning.

The audience learns a miniature language

We should nevertheless be cautious about saying that the film score has become a language.

The audience may learn a system of associations without acquiring anything like the productive semantic and lexicogrammatical potential of a natural language.

What has emerged is more specific.

The film has established a local semiotic convention.

The audience learns:

this sound belongs with this character;

this theme recalls this event;

this motif anticipates this danger.

The system can become surprisingly rich without becoming a language.

That distinction is important because it preserves the specificity of musical semiosis within multimodality.

Film creates conventions for itself

A particularly fascinating consequence follows.

The convention does not necessarily have to exist before the film.

The film can create it.

At the beginning, the audience knows nothing about the motif.

The film establishes the association.

The audience learns it through repetition.

The new convention becomes part of the audience's repertoire within the film.

The film has therefore created a small semiotic system and taught its viewers how to participate in it.

This is cultural learning occurring on a very small temporal scale.

Music can signify an absence

We can now see why absence is such a powerful test.

If the character has to be visible every time the theme occurs, the association remains tightly bound to the image.

But once the theme can occur without the character, something has changed.

The music has acquired the capacity to make the absent character semiotically present.

The viewer hears the theme and constructs the character mentally.

The film no longer needs the image.

The musical sign has become independently deployable within the larger narrative system.

The relation has become reversible

This is perhaps the most revealing point.

At first:

image helps determine the construal of music.

Then:

music helps determine the construal of image.

Eventually:

music can invoke the image even when the image is absent.

The original multimodal relation has become reversible.

The sign can now carry information across the boundary between modes.

Something that began as a relation between them has become a resource that can operate within the system more independently.

That is a significant step in semiotic differentiation.

Culture can carry the association beyond the film

There is another stage.

A film's motif may become familiar beyond the film itself.

The Jaws theme is an obvious example.

The motif has become part of popular culture and can now evoke sharks or danger outside the original movie context. The original film helped establish the association, and subsequent cultural repetition has reinforced it.

The sign has therefore moved from:

film-specific convention

toward:

cultural convention.

The semiotic potential has expanded beyond the original work.

The theme can even become the film's identity

Film themes can acquire an association with the film as a whole.

A melody becomes "the theme from" a particular film.

The music no longer simply signifies something within the fictional world.

It can evoke the film itself.

Research on film themes notes that memorable themes can become part of a film's broader cultural identity, as well as acquiring associations with characters, relationships and places.

The musical form has therefore moved through several layers of reference.

It can signify within the story.

It can signify the story.

And eventually it can signify the cultural object constituted by the film itself.

But mattering has not disappeared

We should not lose sight of where this began.

The musical theme still matters musically.

Its rhythm still creates expectation.

Its timbre still affects us.

Its harmonic organisation still matters.

Its performance still has expressive and perceptual qualities.

The symbolic function has been added to these capacities.

This is precisely why the distinction between music and sign remains useful.

The film does not need to strip music of its existing possibilities in order to make it meaningful.

It recruits them.

Semiotic recruitment

We can now give that process a more precise name.

A musical resource is recruited into a film's semiotic system.

The film establishes relations around it.

Repetition stabilises those relations.

The audience learns them.

The musical form becomes capable of carrying those relations forward.

What began as musical mattering becomes a resource for symbolic construal.

The resulting sign is therefore historically layered.

Its semiotic function rests upon earlier musical and audiovisual relations.

The score as a system of signs

Once several motifs have acquired stable associations, the score itself can become a network.

One theme belongs to a character.

Another belongs to a place.

Another represents a relationship.

A variation combines two themes.

A quotation recalls an earlier event.

A missing theme becomes significant because we expected it.

Silence can become meaningful because the theme is absent.

The score is now participating in a complex semiotic ecology.

Its signs can interact with one another.

The music is no longer merely commenting on the film.

It has become part of the film's narrative architecture.

And yet the image remains necessary to the history

There is a final paradox.

The music can eventually function without the image.

But that does not mean the image was irrelevant to its meaning.

Quite the opposite.

The image helped establish the relation that made the musical sign possible.

The absence of the image is therefore itself part of the sign's history.

The music carries an invisible history of previous audiovisual couplings.

This is why a leitmotif can feel so rich when it returns.

We hear not only the present music.

We hear its memory of the film.

From multimodal relation to sign

We can now describe the transition that this post has explored.

At first:

music + image → emergent construal

Then:

repetition → recognised association

Then:

association → stable convention

Then:

convention → musical sign

And finally:

musical sign → portable reference

This is not a universal developmental sequence.

But it describes one important way in which music can become semiotically powerful within film.

The deeper lesson

What has happened to the music?

It has not changed into language.

It has not acquired a fixed meaning independent of context.

Rather, a history of audiovisual relations has become sedimented in the musical form's cultural use.

The music now carries something of that history.

It can make absent things present.

It can anticipate.

Remember.

Identify.

Contrast.

Ironise.

It has become a sign because the film has taught us how to hear it as one.

And this gives us a crucial refinement of our original question.

The film score does not simply have meaning.

It can acquire meaning through repeated participation in relations.

What happens next?

We have now seen how a musical resource can become associated with something beyond itself.

But the sign need not remain tied to one fixed meaning.

The same theme can change as the story changes.

Its return can reinterpret what came before.

Its absence can become significant.

Its transformation can tell us that the character has transformed.

Its combination with another theme can create a new relation.

In other words, once music becomes a sign, it enters a world of narrative possibilities.

The next question is therefore not simply what a musical theme signifies.

It is:

What can a musical sign do inside the unfolding story of a film? 

When Music Makes the Film Mean: IV. Congruence, Incongruence and Expectation

When music and image work together, they do not always agree.

Often, they appear to.

A threatening scene receives tense music.

A romantic scene receives tender music.

A celebration receives triumphant music.

The music and image seem to point in the same direction.

This is what we might call congruence.

But film becomes especially interesting when the relationship breaks down.

A violent scene can be accompanied by cheerful music.

A peaceful image can be accompanied by disturbing sound.

A comic scene can receive solemn music.

The modes appear to disagree.

And yet the result is not necessarily confusion.

Sometimes the disagreement is precisely what makes the scene meaningful.

This gives us the next question:

What happens when music and image do not agree?

Congruence makes meaning easy

When music and image establish broadly compatible expectations, the result can be remarkably fluent.

Tense music beneath a threatening image reinforces the sense that danger is approaching.

The music does not need to tell us that the scene is dangerous.

The image does not need to tell us that the music is tense.

Each supports the other.

Research on audiovisual perception broadly finds that congruent combinations can facilitate processing and make crossmodal integration easier.

But there is an important qualification.

"Congruence" can mean several different things.

A pairing can be congruent in its emotional tone, in its timing, in its rhythm or structure, or in its cultural associations. Researchers themselves have warned that the term can become ambiguous unless the particular dimension of congruence is specified.

For our purposes, we can use it simply to mean that the musical and visual construals are broadly compatible.

The exact mechanism can vary.

When expectations are violated

Now imagine the same threatening scene accompanied by jaunty music.

Something changes.

The viewer cannot simply absorb the music and image as mutually reinforcing.

A discrepancy becomes perceptible.

We begin to ask:

Why this music?

The question may be conscious.

Often it probably is not.

But the discrepancy invites us to search for a relation that can account for it.

Recent work on audiovisual counterpoint describes precisely this phenomenon: deliberate conflict between music and image can invite reflection on why the particular combination has been chosen and can generate effects such as irony, distancing or surrealism.

The important point is that the incongruence does not necessarily destroy meaning.

It can create a new problem for meaning to solve.

The silent question

Imagine a film showing a person committing an act of violence.

The music is beautiful.

At first, we may experience the combination as strange.

Then possibilities begin to emerge.

Perhaps the film is making the violence beautiful.

Perhaps it is exposing the character's aestheticisation of violence.

Perhaps the music is ironic.

Perhaps the scene is being viewed from a disturbing subjective perspective.

Perhaps the film wants us to notice the gap between beauty and brutality.

The music has not simply contradicted the image.

It has created a question:

What relation could make these two things belong together?

That question is itself a semiotic effect.

Incongruence is not simply "mismatch"

Calling the music a mismatch can be misleading.

A mismatch sounds like a mistake.

But deliberate audiovisual incongruence can be highly organised.

The music may be chosen precisely because it does not provide the expected accompaniment.

The conflict is functional.

The viewer is meant to notice it.

The incongruence therefore becomes a resource.

This is what distinguishes deliberate crossmodal counterpoint from an accidental or arbitrary pairing.

Recent scholarship distinguishes such artistic counterpoint from laboratory situations in which participants may simply be presented with seemingly random auditory and visual combinations. In a film, the audience generally assumes that an unusual pairing has been deliberately constructed and therefore looks for its significance.

Expectation comes first

But why does the incongruence have such power?

Because something was expected.

We have already learned that musical systems create expectations.

Film has expectations too.

Genre creates them.

Narrative creates them.

Repeated audiovisual conventions create them.

Cultural experience creates them.

We have learned that tense strings usually accompany suspense.

That certain kinds of music accompany romance.

That a triumphant fanfare belongs to victory.

That a lullaby belongs to childhood.

These expectations form part of the viewer's repertoire.

When a film violates them, the violation becomes noticeable.

Incongruence therefore depends upon a history of congruence.

The violation becomes a difference

This returns us to an important idea from From Mattering to Meaning.

A difference becomes significant when it occurs within a field of alternatives.

A musical choice is not remarkable in isolation.

It becomes remarkable because something else was expected.

The same is true here.

The film establishes a field of audiovisual possibilities.

The music selects one.

The image establishes another.

Sometimes they converge.

Sometimes they diverge.

The divergence becomes salient because the viewer has a sense of what would normally fit.

The incongruence itself becomes a meaningful difference.

The triumphant disaster

Now we can return to our earlier example of triumphant music over catastrophe.

The music establishes one domain:

victory, achievement, celebration.

The image establishes another:

destruction, loss, disaster.

The clash is not simply a collision between two unrelated things.

Each mode provides a structured potential of associations.

The film deliberately brings those potentials into relation.

The resulting question might be:

Why is catastrophe being presented as triumph?

Or:

Why does triumph sound grotesque here?

Or:

Whose triumph is this?

The viewer is pushed beyond the immediate surface.

The incongruence can therefore generate a higher-order construal of the relation between the modes.

Irony lives in the gap

This is one reason audiovisual incongruence is so powerful for irony.

Irony often depends upon a discrepancy between what is presented and what is understood.

The music may appear to celebrate while the image invites condemnation.

The viewer must occupy both perspectives.

The music says one thing.

The image says another.

The meaning emerges from the distance between them.

This is not simply "double meaning".

It is a meaning about the relation between two meanings.

And that is an important development in our investigation.

Counterpoint can become reflective

Once the viewer notices the discrepancy, attention can shift.

We stop merely following the scene.

We begin to attend to the way the scene has been constructed.

Why this music?

Why this image?

Why this combination?

The medium becomes more visible.

The film begins, in a small sense, to expose its own meaning-making.

This is why counterpoint can feel intellectually richer than straightforward accompaniment.

Congruence may allow the viewer to move fluently through the scene.

Counterpoint can make the viewer notice the process of construal itself.

But incongruence does not always succeed

There is an important caution.

An unusual pairing is not automatically meaningful.

If the music seems random, the audience may simply experience it as a mistake.

If the incongruence is too extreme, the viewer may have no plausible relation through which to construe it.

A deliberate artistic discrepancy therefore depends upon enough coherence for the viewer to search for a relation.

This is one reason recent discussions of audiovisual counterpoint distinguish purposeful divergence from arbitrary mismatch. The interpretive effect depends partly upon whether the viewer has reason to treat the divergence as intentional and meaningful.

The film therefore walks a delicate line.

Too little difference, and the modes merely reinforce one another.

Too much, and the relation may become unintelligible.

Between them lies a productive space.

The productive middle

We can think of the possibilities roughly like this:

congruence → fluency

moderate incongruence → interpretive tension

extreme or apparently arbitrary incongruence → breakdown

This is not a universal law, but it is a useful way of thinking about the artistic problem.

A successful counterpoint does not merely disrupt.

It creates enough friction to make another construal possible.

The viewer senses that something is wrong — and therefore searches for what is right about the wrongness.

The image can become strange

Incongruent music can also transform the image itself.

A familiar scene can suddenly appear uncanny.

An ordinary person can seem sinister.

A beautiful landscape can seem threatening.

A comic action can seem cruel.

The image has not acquired new visual information.

The soundtrack has changed its semiotic environment.

This is another way of saying that meaning is distributed across modes.

The image cannot always determine its own interpretation.

Its meaning is partly constructed by the relations in which it is encountered.

And the music becomes strange too

But the reverse is equally important.

A familiar piece of music can become strange when placed in an unexpected context.

A cheerful song can sound chilling.

A solemn composition can sound comic.

A beautiful melody can seem grotesque.

The music has acquired a new significance through its relationship with the image.

This means that audiovisual counterpoint is genuinely reciprocal.

The image changes the music.

The music changes the image.

The resulting tension belongs to their relation.

Culture determines what counts as incongruent

There is another complication.

What counts as a mismatch is not universal.

A musical style that seems romantic to one audience may not carry the same associations for another.

A particular instrument may evoke celebration in one culture and mourning in another.

A genre convention familiar to one audience may be invisible to another.

Even the perception of emotional expression varies culturally.

Research on audiovisual incongruence therefore cautions against treating congruence as an entirely objective property of a pairing. What counts as appropriate or inappropriate can depend upon learned cultural frameworks.

This returns us to the importance of the viewer's repertoire.

The film provides possibilities.

The repertoire makes some of those possibilities more immediately available than others.

The film can teach its own expectations

A film does not have to rely entirely on conventions imported from outside.

It can establish expectations within itself.

Suppose a particular musical motif has appeared three times in moments of danger.

The audience begins to anticipate that relation.

Now the fourth appearance occurs during a peaceful scene.

The music suddenly seems ominous.

Why?

Because the film has created its own convention.

The meaning of the music is now partly determined by its internal history.

The film has created an expectation and then violated it.

Incongruence can therefore occur not only between music and image, but between present and past within the film.

Expectation creates narrative meaning

This becomes especially powerful in narrative.

A motif that traditionally signals safety may suddenly sound threatening.

A theme associated with love may appear after a relationship has ended.

A triumphant musical return may accompany failure.

The audience recognises the convention.

Its violation becomes significant.

A musical figure can therefore comment on the story without saying anything explicitly.

The film is using its own semiotic history as a resource.

Congruence can also become meaningful

We should not let the drama of incongruence make congruence seem uninteresting.

After a long series of disruptive counterpoints, a genuinely congruent musical return can be enormously powerful.

Suppose a character has been associated with a melody that gradually becomes distorted.

At the end, the melody returns in its original form.

The restoration itself becomes meaningful.

What matters is the contrast between the previous incongruence and the renewed congruence.

Meaning can therefore arise from the movement between alignment and misalignment.

Counterpoint as a relation among potentials

We can now describe what is happening more precisely.

The music brings one structured potential of associations.

The image brings another.

The film establishes expectations about how they might relate.

Sometimes the potentials align.

Sometimes they diverge.

When they diverge in an intelligible way, the divergence becomes a new relation.

The viewer construes not simply the music or the image, but the relation between their construals.

This is why counterpoint is so conceptually interesting.

It makes visible the principle that meaning can emerge between modes.

From congruence to counterpoint

We began this post with a simple distinction.

Music and image can agree.

They can disagree.

But the deeper issue is not agreement versus disagreement.

It is what the relation does.

Congruence can reinforce.

Incongruence can destabilise.

Counterpoint can invite reflection.

Either can become meaningful depending on the larger system.

The filmmaker is therefore not asking:

Does this music match the picture?

but:

What relation between the music and the picture will make the scene mean what I want it to mean?

That is a much richer problem.

The next transformation

We can now see how far we have come.

Music can alter the construal of an image.

The image can alter the construal of music.

Their convergence can reinforce an interpretation.

Their divergence can create another.

Repeated relations can create expectations.

Expectations can be confirmed or violated.

Violations can become meaningful.

And eventually, a musical form can acquire a stable significance through its history of audiovisual coupling.

That is the next step.

When a musical theme repeatedly accompanies a character or idea, it can become more than a source of affect or tension.

It can become a sign.

And once that happens, the music may no longer need the image that taught us how to hear it.

When does a score become a sign?