We began with a shark.
The image was the same.
The music changed.
And so did the way viewers experienced the shark.
From that simple observation, a surprisingly large question emerged:
How can meaning arise between things that do not mean the same way?
The film score has given us a particularly clear way of approaching the question.
Music can matter without being, by itself, a symbolic system.
Images can represent without containing all the meaning of a scene.
A musical theme can become a sign through repeated association.
An image can change the meaning of music.
Music can change the construal of an image.
Contradiction can become meaningful.
Memory and anticipation can be carried through sound.
The score can become part of the story.
And the film as a whole can function as a semiotic ecology in which different modes participate in a shared, evolving field of meaning.
What, then, has the score taught us?
Meaning need not originate in a single mode
Perhaps the most important lesson is also the simplest.
We are accustomed to asking what a particular sign means.
What does this word mean?
What does this image mean?
What does this piece of music mean?
But film suggests that this can be the wrong level of analysis.
The meaning of a scene may not reside in any one component.
It may emerge from the relation between them.
The image provides one set of possibilities.
The music provides another.
The dialogue provides another.
The editing establishes relations among them.
The viewer brings a repertoire through which these resources can be construed.
The resulting meaning belongs to the configuration.
This does not make the individual modes meaningless.
It means that their meaning-making capacities can be relationally amplified.
Music brings mattering with it
The score also confirms something we discovered before turning to film.
Music can matter before it means.
A rhythm can coordinate.
A harmonic movement can create expectation.
A timbre can alter affect.
A repeated pattern can become memorable.
A familiar musical style can evoke a cultural history.
These are not necessarily symbolic meanings.
They are already organised ways of mattering.
Film can recruit those capacities.
This is perhaps the deepest reason music is so powerful in cinema.
The filmmaker does not have to begin with an empty sign system.
The music arrives carrying a history of bodily, perceptual, affective and cultural significance.
The film can place that history into new relations.
Recruitment is not translation
This suggests a useful distinction.
A film does not have to translate music into some other symbolic language.
It can recruit music into semiosis.
The music remains music.
Its rhythm remains rhythm.
Its harmonic organisation remains harmonic organisation.
Its capacity to create expectation remains intact.
But those capacities now operate within a larger configuration.
The score can make an image threatening.
The image can make the music nostalgic.
A recurring motif can become associated with a character.
A musical absence can become meaningful.
None of this requires the musical form to be replaced by a verbal equivalent.
The film uses what music already affords.
Meaning can emerge without being contained
This is perhaps the most important consequence.
We are accustomed to looking for meaning inside things.
We ask what the music means.
What the image means.
What the word means.
But multimodal meaning suggests another possibility:
meaning can emerge without being contained in any one component.
Consider the triumphant music over catastrophe.
The music does not contain the irony.
The image does not contain the irony.
The irony emerges from their relation.
Likewise, the threatening quality of the shark footage is not simply in the shark or simply in the soundtrack.
It arises from the audiovisual configuration.
The meaning is therefore distributed.
Meaning is relational all the way through
This should not be misunderstood as a special property of cinema.
Meaning was relational before we reached film.
A sign means through its relations within a semiotic system.
A metaphor brings semantic categories into junction.
A word acquires significance through its relations to other meanings.
A visual sign depends upon its cultural context.
Film simply makes these relations exceptionally visible.
What cinema reveals is that meaning can become relational across semiotic modes.
The relation is therefore not added to meaning.
It is one of the ways meaning exists.
The mode contributes its own affordances
But if meaning is relational, why not simply say that all modes are interchangeable?
Because they are not.
Music contributes temporal organisation, expectation, affect, rhythm and recurrence.
Images contribute spatial configuration, appearance and simultaneity.
Language contributes particular resources for classification, explicit sequencing and logical relation.
Editing contributes relations among events.
Silence contributes through the absence of an expected resource.
Each mode therefore enters the configuration with its own potential.
Multimodality does not erase difference between modes.
It makes their differences productive.
Difference is what makes combination powerful
This is another important lesson.
We might initially imagine that multimodal meaning works best when all the modes agree.
Sometimes it does.
But the most interesting examples often depend upon difference.
The image says one thing.
The music suggests another.
The audience must negotiate the relation.
The difference becomes meaningful.
So multimodal integration does not necessarily mean harmony.
It can involve:
reinforcement,
complementarity,
contradiction,
irony,
ambiguity,
transformation.
The meaning arises from the relation among the different potentials.
Congruence creates fluency; incongruence creates attention
This gives us a useful distinction.
When music and image are congruent, they can guide us smoothly toward a shared construal.
When they are incongruent, the relationship becomes more visible.
The viewer may begin to notice the construction itself.
Why this music?
Why this image?
Why this combination?
The incongruence can therefore make the semiotic process reflexive.
We become aware not only of what the film is showing, but of how the film is making it meaningful.
This is one reason counterpoint can be so powerful.
Expectation is the hidden infrastructure
Yet none of this works without expectation.
A musical event surprises because other continuations were possible.
A cinematic convention can be violated because we have learned the convention.
A motif can acquire significance because it has appeared before.
Silence can matter because sound was expected.
An incongruent soundtrack can be striking because a more congruent pairing was available.
Meaning therefore depends heavily upon fields of possibility and expectation.
This takes us back to the beginning of our broader theory.
Particular instances matter because they occur within structured potentials.
Film does the same thing at multiple levels simultaneously.
Meaning has a history
The score has also taught us that meaning is temporal.
The first appearance of a motif differs from its fifth.
A later scene can change how an earlier occurrence is heard.
An association can become conventional through repetition.
A musical theme can carry its history into a new scene.
Meaning therefore is not necessarily fixed when a sign first appears.
It can develop.
Accumulate.
Reverse.
Deepen.
The semiotic system has a memory.
The film can use that memory to create meaning that no single moment contains.
Absence becomes meaningful
The score has also shown us something extraordinary about signs.
Meaning does not require presence.
A character can be absent.
The theme can remain.
A past event can be invisible.
The music can recall it.
A future event can not yet exist.
The score can anticipate it.
A theme can disappear.
Its absence can itself become significant.
The semiotic system can therefore make absence productive.
This is one of the great powers of symbolic organisation.
The present can be construed through what is not physically present.
The audience learns the film
Another lesson is that meaning is not simply delivered to an audience.
The audience learns the film's semiotic system while watching it.
A theme appears.
We do not yet know what it means.
It returns.
We notice an association.
It returns again.
We recognise it.
Later, it is transformed.
We reinterpret it.
The film has altered our repertoire.
By the end, we may be capable of construals that were not available to us at the beginning.
The work has not merely communicated meanings.
It has taught us a new potential for meaning.
The work can create its own conventions
This means that an artwork can become a small evolutionary environment.
It introduces a new relation.
The audience learns it.
The relation becomes conventional within the work.
The work then exploits its own convention.
A motif can be established and later subverted.
A colour can acquire significance and then be reversed.
A musical theme can begin as reassuring and later become threatening.
The film has therefore developed a semiotic history inside itself.
It has created and then manipulated its own conventions.
Meaning can become portable
Once the film's conventions become stable, they can escape the film.
A theme becomes culturally recognisable.
A visual image becomes iconic.
A phrase enters common usage.
A musical gesture can evoke an entire genre.
The local semiotic ecology contributes resources to the wider cultural reservoir.
This is how artistic innovations can become cultural conventions.
A meaning created in one work can become a possibility for other works.
The history of cinema is therefore partly a history of semiotic innovations becoming shared resources.
Music can become a sign without becoming language
The score also allows us to state an important negative conclusion.
Music can acquire symbolic functions without becoming a language in the full sense.
A leitmotif can signify a character.
A musical quotation can invoke a historical period.
A song can become an identity marker.
A melody can represent a relationship within a particular film.
But none of this requires music itself to possess the complete architecture of natural language.
It can participate in a semiotic system without being one by itself.
That distinction is worth preserving.
It allows us to acknowledge music's symbolic capacities without reducing music to a deficient form of language.
The score reveals the difference between mattering and meaning
Perhaps this brings us back to the question with which the larger inquiry began.
The musical passage matters before the film gives it a narrative role.
Its organisation affects us.
Its rhythm creates expectation.
Its timbre creates affect.
Its cultural associations evoke possibilities.
The film recruits these forms of mattering into relations with image and story.
The musical resource acquires symbolic functions.
Meaning has emerged.
But the original mattering has not disappeared.
It has become one of the things through which the meaning works.
This gives us a particularly precise formulation:
Meaning does not replace mattering. It reorganises it.
The score reveals the feedback loop
The film score also makes the reverse process visible.
Once music has acquired meaning, that meaning changes how the music matters.
The Jaws motif is no longer merely a musical figure.
Hearing it can produce anticipation of danger.
A character's theme can generate affection.
A distorted theme can create anxiety.
A musical quotation can provoke nostalgia.
The symbolic association changes the affective and social significance of the sound.
So:
music matters → music becomes meaningful → its meaning changes how it matters.
The loop is complete.
From multimodal meaning to a general theory
We can now formulate a broader principle that extends beyond film.
Whenever a resource that already has significance enters a larger semiotic system, its existing capacities can be recruited into new relations.
A sound can become a sign.
A gesture can become symbolic.
An image can become representational.
A place can become sacred.
A musical passage can become a character.
The resource does not cease to be what it was.
It acquires additional possibilities through its relations within the larger system.
That may be one of the most general principles to emerge from our investigation.
The film score as a model of semiosis
The score is therefore more than an interesting special case.
It provides a model.
We can see the sequence almost in miniature:
musical potential
↓
musical event
↓
mattering
↓
coupling with image
↓
multimodal construal
↓
repetition and recognition
↓
semiotic convention
↓
narrative function
↓
cultural sign
Each step adds a new relational possibility without erasing the earlier ones.
The same piece of music can participate in several of these organisations simultaneously.
That is why the score is such a rich object of study.
What, then, is the meaning of a score?
Perhaps the question itself needs changing.
Instead of asking:
What does this score mean?
we might ask:
What does this score become capable of meaning through its relations with the film?
That formulation is much more revealing.
It acknowledges the music's own potential.
It acknowledges the film's semiotic organisation.
It leaves room for the viewer's repertoire.
It allows meaning to develop historically.
And it avoids the misleading idea that meaning is a substance contained inside the music.
The larger lesson
The film score has taught us that meaning is not necessarily located in objects.
It can emerge in relations among organised potentials.
A musical potential encounters a visual potential.
Their actualisations become coupled.
Their differences create expectations.
Their histories stabilise associations.
The audience learns those associations.
The associations become signs.
The signs enter narrative relations.
The film creates a semiotic ecology in which meaning is distributed across modes.
And then the meaning feeds back into how the modes themselves matter.
This is a more dynamic picture of semiosis than the simple model:
form → meaning
We have something closer to:
potential → instance → relation → construal → new potential
The system continually creates possibilities for further meaning.
The score has brought us back to the beginning
We began with a shark.
A piece of music changed the way the shark was perceived.
We then discovered that the image could change the way the music was heard.
The two could agree.
They could conflict.
They could create expectations.
They could establish conventions.
A musical sign could make an absent character present.
It could become part of the story.
The whole film could become a semiotic ecology.
And now the original shark is almost beside the point.
What it revealed was something much larger:
Meaning can emerge between modes when their distinct potentials are brought into a relation that makes new construals possible.
The film score is therefore neither merely decoration nor a hidden language.
It is a participant in meaning-making.
And the participation is possible because the music already matters.
One final distinction
There is a temptation, after all of this, to say that the score "means" whatever the filmmaker intends.
But intention is only one part of the story.
The film has its own conventions.
The music has its own affordances.
The audience has its repertoire.
Cultural history contributes associations.
The work develops a history through repetition and variation.
Meaning emerges from the interaction of all these relations.
The filmmaker can shape the field.
They cannot simply dictate every construal.
A semiotic ecology is more than an author's intention.
It is a system of possibilities.
What the score teaches us
So what does the score teach us about meaning?
Perhaps this:
Meaning is not something a form possesses by itself.
It is something a form can become capable of through participation in relations.
Music can matter before it means.
An image can matter before it is symbolically construed.
A word can acquire new meanings through context.
A sign can acquire new significance through repetition.
A mode can transform another mode's possibilities.
A film can create conventions that did not exist before.
A culture can inherit those conventions and transform them again.
Meaning is therefore not static.
It is historical, relational and generative.
And perhaps the most important lesson of all is the one with which we began our larger investigation:
Meaning does not arrive from nowhere.
It emerges from a world already rich in differences, values, expectations, practices and possibilities.
The score makes this visible.
It takes something that already matters as music and places it in relations through which it can mean something more.
And once it means, that meaning changes what the music matters as.
The direction of the process is therefore not:
music → meaning
but:
mattering → relation → meaning → new mattering
That is not merely a theory of film music.
It is a theory of how meaning can grow.
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