A musical theme can remind us of a character.
It can anticipate a character's arrival.
It can recall a past event.
It can suggest something that has not yet happened.
But at this point, the score is doing more than bringing absent things into the present.
It can begin to change how we understand the events themselves.
A character's music can make an action appear compassionate or sinister.
A theme can transform a scene from present action into memory.
Music can make two apparently unrelated events seem connected.
It can suggest a relationship before the characters acknowledge it.
It can make a revelation retrospective, causing us to hear earlier scenes differently.
The score is no longer simply accompanying the story.
It has become part of the story's construal.
Beyond mood
This takes us beyond the familiar claim that film music "sets the mood".
Mood certainly matters.
But imagine two identical scenes in which a character enters a room.
In one version, the music suggests affection.
In another, suspicion.
In a third, impending violence.
The image remains the same.
What changes is not merely how the audience feels.
The character's role within the narrative changes.
We ask different questions.
Why has the character come?
What do they know?
Can we trust them?
What are they about to do?
The score has therefore altered the narrative possibilities available to us.
It has helped determine what kind of event we are watching.
Character is relational
A character in a film is not simply a body on the screen.
The character is a node in a network of relationships.
What they want.
What they know.
What others know about them.
What we believe about them.
What they have done before.
What they may do next.
Music can participate in the organisation of these relations.
A recurring theme can make an otherwise ambiguous action intelligible.
A distorted version of the theme can suggest that the character has changed.
The disappearance of the theme can suggest that something has been lost.
Its return can announce recognition or transformation.
The score can therefore participate in character construction.
The music can know what the character does not
One of the most powerful narrative uses of music occurs when the audience knows more than the character.
A character walks into an apparently ordinary room.
The image tells us little.
The music tells us something is wrong.
The character does not know.
We do.
The score has therefore become part of the distribution of narrative knowledge.
It can create dramatic irony before anything visible confirms it.
The audience's construal of the present is based partly on information that the represented character does not possess.
This is not simply emotional accompaniment.
It is narrative information organised musically.
The score can mislead us
But the process can work in the opposite direction.
A film can deliberately give us music that makes us expect one interpretation and then reveal another.
A threatening theme accompanies an innocent character.
We suspect them.
Later, we discover that the apparent threat belonged elsewhere.
The earlier music now acquires a different significance.
The film has used the score to manipulate our expectations.
Meaning is not simply delivered.
It is constructed, revised and sometimes overturned.
Narrative meaning can be retrospective
This brings us to one of the most interesting properties of film music.
A later event can change what an earlier musical occurrence means.
Suppose a theme accompanies a seemingly innocent relationship.
Much later, we discover that one character has been deceiving the other.
The theme returns.
Suddenly the earlier appearances may sound different.
Perhaps they were genuinely affectionate.
Perhaps they were ironic.
Perhaps we had simply misunderstood them.
The music has participated in a narrative whose meaning unfolds over time.
The significance of an earlier occurrence can be reorganised by a later one.
The score can connect events
Film narrative depends heavily upon relations among events.
One scene can explain another.
A later event can give an earlier one significance.
An image can echo something seen much earlier.
Music can help establish these connections.
A theme can appear in two scenes that otherwise have little in common.
The audience begins to construe them as related.
Perhaps the scenes concern the same character.
Perhaps they reveal different versions of the same experience.
Perhaps they express the same underlying conflict.
The score can therefore create narrative cohesion.
Music can imply causality
This becomes particularly interesting when the relation is causal.
Imagine a musical theme associated with a character whenever they make a particular choice.
Later, the theme appears before the choice itself.
The audience may begin to expect the action.
The music has become part of the narrative logic.
Or imagine two events accompanied by the same musical material.
We may infer that one explains the other.
The score does not literally state a causal proposition.
But it can make a causal construal more probable.
This is one of the ways music can participate in narrative reasoning without functioning like language.
The score can construct point of view
A film can also use music to suggest whose perspective we are inhabiting.
The same event can sound different depending on whose experience the score appears to represent.
A frightening event may receive beautiful music if we are experiencing it through a character who finds it beautiful.
A seemingly romantic scene can receive disturbing music if the film is asking us to distrust the character's perspective.
The score can therefore participate in point of view.
It helps determine not only what happens but how we are positioned in relation to what happens.
Subjective and objective music
This becomes particularly interesting when the music seems to belong to the fictional world.
A character hears a song.
The music is playing on a radio.
An orchestra is visible.
A singer performs in the scene.
Now the same musical event can participate at multiple levels.
Within the story, the music may be something the character hears.
For the audience, it can simultaneously perform a larger narrative function.
The musical event therefore belongs to the represented world and to the film's meaning-making system.
The distinction between the two levels can itself become meaningful.
The score can become ironic commentary
A film score can also comment upon what we see without directly representing anything.
Imagine a character performing an apparently noble action while the music associated with them is comic.
The music may undermine the character's self-image.
Or imagine an act of cruelty accompanied by a beautiful piece of music.
The juxtaposition may suggest aestheticisation.
It may expose the character's detachment.
It may force us to confront the uncomfortable coexistence of beauty and violence.
The score becomes a kind of commentary on the story.
But the commentary does not need words.
It emerges through the relation between musical and visual construals.
Music can construct significance without explicit reference
This is worth emphasising.
The score does not have to signify a particular object in order to contribute to narrative meaning.
It can establish:
importance,
urgency,
intimacy,
distance,
uncertainty,
inevitability,
absurdity,
transformation.
These are not necessarily objects of reference.
They are relations within the story.
Music can therefore participate in narrative construal at a level deeper than simple identification.
It can help determine how events are related in significance.
The score can become inseparable from a scene
At some point, a musical passage can become so closely integrated with a scene that it is difficult to imagine the scene without it.
This is stronger than saying that the music accompanies the scene.
The music has become part of the scene's identity.
The viewer remembers the image through the music.
The music recalls the image.
The two have become culturally coupled.
This is perhaps the strongest form of audiovisual integration.
The meaning no longer seems to belong to either component independently.
It belongs to the configuration.
But not every score does this
We should resist making the score sound more powerful than it actually is.
Some music really is largely atmospheric.
Some supports a scene without significantly altering its narrative interpretation.
Some is foregrounded deliberately.
Some remains almost unnoticed.
Different films use music differently.
The point is not that every score constructs story in the same way.
It is that film provides a semiotic environment in which music can acquire narrative functions beyond mood.
The interesting question is when, how and to what extent that happens.
Musical motifs can form a narrative system
Once several motifs have acquired associations, the score can become internally organised.
A character has one theme.
A place another.
A relationship combines elements of both.
A transformation alters one theme.
A final scene brings several themes together.
The audience can begin to hear the narrative architecture in the music.
The score has become a network of signs.
Those signs can interact.
Their combinations can produce meanings that no individual theme possesses alone.
The musical sign becomes grammatical
We should still be cautious about calling this a musical language.
The score does not necessarily possess the generative semantic and grammatical properties of language.
But something language-like in a limited sense has emerged.
Musical signs can occupy different relations.
They can recur.
Combine.
Transform.
Contrast.
Anticipate.
The audience can learn those relations.
The film can therefore develop something like a local grammar of musical associations.
This is a useful analogy, provided we do not mistake analogy for identity.
Narrative makes the sign historical
A musical sign becomes especially powerful when it has a history.
Its first appearance establishes a possibility.
Its repetitions develop an association.
Its variations refine the association.
Its absence becomes meaningful.
Its return transforms earlier meanings.
Its combination with other themes generates new relations.
The sign therefore becomes a historical object within the film.
Its significance at any moment depends partly upon everything that has happened to it before.
Meaning is cumulative
This cumulative character distinguishes filmic semiosis from a simple signal-response model.
A signal may trigger a response in the present.
A musical sign can carry a history into the present.
The viewer hears not merely the current sound.
They hear its previous occurrences.
They anticipate possible future occurrences.
The current scene is therefore experienced through a temporal network of meaning.
Music gives the film a way to remember itself.
The score can transform an entire genre
At a larger scale, musical conventions can help establish genres.
The audience learns to associate certain musical forms with horror, romance, adventure, science fiction or comedy.
A filmmaker can then exploit the convention.
Reinforce it.
Subvert it.
Parody it.
A supposedly romantic theme can accompany a disturbing scene.
A heroic musical gesture can accompany failure.
The audience recognises the convention and notices its transformation.
The score is now participating not only in this film's story but in a larger cultural history of film meaning.
What does it mean for music to be part of the story?
We can now answer the question more precisely.
The score becomes part of the story when it begins to participate in the organisation of the film's narrative relations.
It can identify characters.
Connect events.
Shape expectations.
Establish point of view.
Mark transformations.
Invoke memories.
Foreshadow events.
Create irony.
Reorganise the significance of earlier scenes.
The score is no longer simply affecting how the story feels.
It is helping determine how the story hangs together.
This is still multimodality
None of this requires us to abandon the distinction between modes.
The music remains music.
The image remains image.
Dialogue remains language.
Editing remains editing.
Their contributions are not interchangeable.
What changes is their relation.
A musical sign can enter a narrative configuration with visual and linguistic signs.
Its significance emerges partly through those relations.
This is why multimodal meaning is more than a collection of parallel messages.
The modes form a system of mutual constraints and possibilities.
From score to semiotic ecology
We can now see the larger picture.
The film contains:
musical potential;
visual potential;
linguistic potential;
narrative potential;
temporal and spatial organisation;
cultural conventions;
the viewer's repertoire.
Each contributes possibilities.
The film composes them.
Some relations are established by convention.
Others are created within the film.
Some meanings are immediate.
Others emerge only through repetition.
Some are explicit.
Others depend upon inference.
The film becomes a semiotic ecology.
The score is one participant within it.
But sometimes it becomes one of the ecology's organising structures.
Why this matters for our original question
We began by asking how music could participate in meaning when music and image are different modes.
We can now give a more precise answer.
Music can enter the film carrying its own potential for mattering:
rhythm,
expectation,
affect,
cultural association,
memory,
temporal organisation.
The film places those resources in relation to image, dialogue and narrative.
The musical material becomes associated with characters, events and relationships.
Repeated coupling stabilises those relations.
The audience learns them.
The resulting musical signs participate in the story's organisation.
Meaning emerges through the relations among the modes, not within the music alone.
But something larger is now visible
We have spent several posts examining particular mechanisms:
music changes the image;
image changes music;
congruence reinforces;
incongruence creates tension;
repetition creates association;
absence activates memory;
motifs become narrative signs.
Together, these point towards something larger.
The film is not simply a set of modes that happen to coexist.
It is a system in which those modes can constrain, transform and interpret one another.
The meaning of the film therefore belongs increasingly to the configuration as a whole.
And that raises the next question.
If the film is a system of interacting semiotic resources, can we still meaningfully talk about "the meaning of the music" or "the meaning of the image"?
Or should we instead ask:
What happens when the modes themselves become participants in a larger semiotic ecology?
That is where we now need to go.
No comments:
Post a Comment