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?
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