In the previous post, we saw something simple but remarkable.
The same shark footage can be construed differently when accompanied by different music.
The image remains constant.
The soundtrack changes.
The viewer's response changes.
But this leaves an important question unanswered:
What exactly does the music bring to the picture?
It would be easy to answer: emotion.
Ominous music makes the shark frightening. Tender music would make it seem vulnerable. Comic music might make the same animal seem absurd.
There is truth in that.
But "emotion" is too narrow.
Music can do much more than make us feel something.
It can establish expectations, organise time, direct attention, create tension, invoke memory, suggest relationships and establish a sense of what kind of event we are witnessing.
To understand the film score, we therefore have to begin with what music can already do before it becomes part of a film's meaning.
Music brings its own organisation
Music is not an empty medium waiting for the film to give it significance.
A musical passage already has organisation.
It has rhythm, tempo, pulse, duration, dynamics, timbre, register, harmony, melodic contour and formal pattern.
These resources affect how listeners experience what happens next.
A sustained note can create anticipation.
A sudden change in dynamics can produce surprise.
A repeated rhythm can establish expectation.
A harmonic instability can prolong uncertainty.
A return can produce recognition.
A change in tempo can alter our sense of urgency.
None of this requires the music to represent an external object.
Music can matter through its own organisation.
That matters enormously when we bring it into relation with an image.
Music organises time
Perhaps music's most distinctive contribution to film is temporal.
An image can show us a shark.
Music can tell us how to experience the time in which that shark approaches.
A steady pulse can make the approach feel inevitable.
A rapid rhythm can make it feel urgent.
A slowing passage can make time seem stretched.
A repeated figure can make us anticipate a return.
Silence can make the next sound feel momentous.
The image supplies visual duration.
Music can organise how that duration is experienced.
This means that music does not merely accompany the temporal unfolding of a film.
It can construe that unfolding.
Music creates expectation
Expectation is one of music's most powerful resources.
A musical pattern establishes possibilities.
Listeners learn, consciously or otherwise, what sorts of continuation are likely.
A phrase approaches a cadence.
We anticipate resolution.
A rhythm establishes a pulse.
We anticipate its continuation.
A repeated figure creates the possibility of recurrence.
Then the composer can fulfil the expectation, delay it or violate it.
These differences matter because the musical system has already established alternatives.
Music therefore creates a field of temporal possibility.
When it is placed beneath an image, that field becomes available in relation to the visual event.
The shark approaches differently
Return to our shark.
The animal's physical motion has not changed.
But imagine three soundtracks.
The first establishes a slow, ominous pulse.
The second is bright and energetic.
The third is silent.
The same movement can now be experienced as three different kinds of event.
The ominous pulse makes each movement toward the camera feel consequential.
The bright music may make the movement seem lively or even benign.
Silence leaves more of the interpretation to the visual information and the viewer's existing expectations.
The music has therefore not simply supplied an emotion.
It has reorganised the temporal affordances of the image.
Tension is relational
Musical tension is particularly useful for understanding this.
Tension does not reside simply in an isolated chord.
It arises from a relation between what has happened and what is expected.
A harmonic instability matters because some resolution is anticipated.
A rhythmic displacement matters because a pattern has been established.
A long crescendo matters because something is being prepared.
This makes musical tension inherently relational.
And once such tension is placed beneath an image, the image becomes part of the field against which the musical expectation operates.
We may begin to anticipate something happening in the image because the music has prepared us for it.
The music has created a future in the film before the image has confirmed it.
Music can make the absent present
This temporal capacity has another consequence.
Music can establish significance before the relevant visual event occurs.
A threatening theme begins.
We have not yet seen the threat.
But we anticipate it.
A character's motif plays.
The character has not appeared.
But we expect them.
A familiar musical passage returns.
We remember an earlier scene.
Music can therefore connect moments that are separated in time.
It can make the absent relevant to the present.
That possibility will become particularly important when we examine leitmotif later in the series.
For now, the point is simply that music brings memory and expectation into the picture.
Music brings affective orientation
Emotion nevertheless remains important.
But perhaps we should describe what music provides more carefully as affective orientation.
Music can make a situation feel expansive, intimate, triumphant, threatening, mournful, playful, uncanny or serene.
The point is not that particular emotions are encoded as simple musical labels.
Rather, musical organisation can establish a field within which certain affective responses become more probable.
A film can then recruit that field in relation to an image.
A scene of empty landscape can feel contemplative.
The same landscape can feel ominous.
The image is unchanged.
The affective orientation has changed.
Culture adds another layer
Music does not arrive in film as pure acoustics.
Listeners bring cultural histories with them.
Certain instruments can evoke particular traditions.
A military rhythm can suggest discipline or conflict.
A lullaby can evoke childhood.
A fanfare can suggest ceremony or achievement.
A quotation can invoke another work.
A musical style can signal genre.
These associations are not simply properties of sound waves.
They belong to a cultural semiotic environment.
The film can recruit them.
This makes the score more powerful than its immediate acoustic effects might suggest.
Music can invoke genre
Imagine a scene that is ambiguous on its own.
The image could belong to horror, comedy, romance or adventure.
The score can help determine which genre becomes salient.
Strings trembling beneath an approaching figure may invite horror.
A jaunty rhythm may turn the same movement into comedy.
A lush romantic theme may make it intimate.
A heroic orchestral gesture may turn it into adventure.
The music has therefore contributed to the generic construal of the scene.
This is an especially important point because genre is itself a cultural potential.
The viewer's repertoire contains expectations about how certain kinds of films behave.
Music can activate those expectations.
Music can establish point of view
A score can also suggest whose experience we are entering.
A character may appear calm while the music tells us that something is wrong.
The audience therefore knows more than the character.
Alternatively, the music may represent the character's subjective state rather than the objective situation.
Or it may deliberately mislead us.
Music can therefore participate in the film's distribution of knowledge.
It can tell us whether we should trust what a character sees, what they feel, or what they understand.
This is already moving beyond "mood".
The score is contributing to narrative construal.
Music can create irony
Suppose a character performs an apparently sincere action while the soundtrack uses music associated with triumph or romance.
The music may make us question what we see.
Perhaps the scene is being mocked.
Perhaps the character is deluded.
Perhaps the film wants us to experience a gap between appearance and reality.
Again, the music does not need to mean "irony".
The irony emerges from the relationship between musical and visual construals.
That relation is what we will investigate more closely later.
What music contributes is not necessarily symbolic
At this point, we should preserve the distinction that motivated this whole inquiry.
Music can bring all these things to the film without itself functioning as a symbolic system.
Its temporal organisation remains temporal organisation.
Its affective force remains affective force.
Its capacity to establish expectation remains a musical capacity.
Its cultural associations can be socially learned without turning every musical structure into a sign.
The film can recruit these capacities into semiosis.
That is a more subtle claim than saying "music has a meaning".
Recruitment
The word recruitment is useful because it preserves the distinction between the systems involved.
The music has its own organisation.
The film has a broader semiotic organisation.
The film places the music in relation to an image, narrative, edit or other resource.
The musical potential is thereby recruited for a function within that larger configuration.
Nothing needs to disappear.
Music remains music.
The image remains image.
But their combination creates new possibilities.
This is the phenomenon we are trying to understand.
The image can become more specific
One of the consequences of recruitment is that the image can become more determinate.
A person walking into a room is visually ambiguous.
Music can make the person seem dangerous.
Now another musical choice makes the same person appear vulnerable.
The image itself has not acquired new pixels.
But the range of plausible construals has changed.
The music has narrowed or redirected the field.
This is why multimodality is not simply additive.
One mode can change the meaning potential of another.
Music can also keep the image open
Recruitment does not always narrow meaning.
Sometimes the score increases ambiguity.
An image may be emotionally neutral.
A strange musical passage can make it uncertain whether we should experience the scene as comic, threatening or dreamlike.
The music can therefore expand rather than reduce the possible construals.
This is especially powerful in experimental cinema.
Instead of telling us what the image means, the score can make us uncertain about what it means.
Music can therefore function as a resource for opening semantic possibility, not merely closing it.
Music can create continuity
A film can use music to connect scenes that would otherwise seem separate.
A musical idea carries across a cut.
The viewer experiences continuity despite a change of place or time.
Alternatively, music can deliberately refuse continuity, making the cut feel abrupt or disorienting.
The score can therefore participate in the film's temporal architecture.
It can establish relations across scenes that the images alone do not establish.
Again, the music contributes something that is not reducible to visual information.
Music can change scale
A small visual event can be made to feel enormous by the score.
A close-up can become intimate.
A landscape can become monumental.
A mundane action can become comic or tragic.
The musical configuration changes the scale of significance.
This is another reason the soundtrack is not merely decorative.
It can alter our sense of what kind of event we are watching.
The score and the viewer
None of this happens entirely inside the film.
The viewer brings a repertoire of musical and cultural distinctions.
Someone familiar with the conventions of horror will respond differently to an ominous cue from someone unfamiliar with them.
A quotation from a well-known piece can invoke associations that depend upon cultural knowledge.
A musical style can identify a historical period or social world.
The score therefore operates through an interaction between:
musical affordance + cultural repertoire + visual context
The result is not arbitrary.
The film constrains possible construals.
But neither is meaning entirely contained within the soundtrack.
It emerges through participation.
The shark again
We can now return to the shark experiment with a little more precision.
The ominous soundtrack brings several resources into the film:
temporal expectation;
affective orientation;
tension;
cultural associations;
a particular way of organising attention.
These resources are not simply attached to the shark as a label.
They change the field in which the shark is perceived.
The viewer becomes more likely to construe the animal as threatening.
The same visual object has acquired a different significance within the audiovisual configuration.
The experiment therefore gives us a controlled glimpse of a much broader artistic phenomenon.
But there is still a puzzle
We have now described what music can bring.
But we have not yet explained what happens to the music itself when it enters the film.
Does its meaning remain independent?
Does it acquire a new significance?
Does the image alter the music's own construal?
Can a musical passage become a sign?
Can it acquire a reference?
Can it eventually mean something even when the image disappears?
These questions move us from musical contribution to multimodal interaction.
And here we need to reverse the direction of our investigation.
So far we have asked:
What does music bring to the image?
But the image has not been passive.
It can change the way we hear the music.
A piece that sounds tender in one scene may become disturbing in another.
A triumphant passage may become grotesque when paired with destruction.
A simple melody may acquire the significance of a character.
The next step is therefore reciprocal.
What does the picture bring to the music?
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