We began with a simple question.
How can music participate in the meaning of a film?
We then discovered that the question was more complicated than it first appeared.
Music can change how we construe an image.
An image can change how we hear music.
Congruence can reinforce a construal.
Incongruence can create one.
A recurring musical theme can become a sign.
A sign can make an absent character present.
A musical motif can become part of the narrative itself.
At each step, the same principle has reappeared:
meaning emerges through relations.
We can now take the final step in this part of the investigation.
Rather than treating a film as a collection of separate semiotic channels, we can think of it as a semiotic ecology.
The film contains many kinds of resource
A film can draw upon:
image,
dialogue,
music,
sound effects,
gesture,
movement,
lighting,
editing,
silence,
space,
cultural convention.
Each has its own possibilities.
Images can organise spatial relations.
Language can classify, narrate and make propositions explicit.
Music can organise time, expectation and affect.
Sound can enlarge the world beyond the frame.
Editing can establish relations among events.
Silence can interrupt an established expectation.
The film's possibilities therefore exceed those of any one mode.
But the important point is not simply that there are many modes.
It is that they interact.
An ecology rather than a bundle
A bundle is a collection of things that happen to be together.
An ecology is different.
Its elements affect one another.
The possibilities available to one part depend partly upon the presence and activity of others.
That is exactly what happens in film.
A musical theme changes the significance of an image.
The image changes the significance of the theme.
A line of dialogue can make the music ironic.
An edit can transform the relation between both.
A silence can become meaningful because music was expected.
Each resource therefore participates in a larger field of constraints and possibilities.
The film is not simply carrying several messages at once.
It is organising relations among semiotic resources.
Meaning belongs to the configuration
This gives us a useful way of thinking about the shark.
The shark footage by itself has one range of possible construals.
The music has another range of possibilities.
When the two are combined, a new range appears.
The soundtrack can make the shark threatening.
The shark can make the music ominous.
The result is not simply:
visual meaning + musical meaning
It is a new configuration.
The meaning of the scene belongs partly to the relation between the two.
This is why removing the music can change the meaning without changing the image.
The semiotic ecology has changed.
No mode has to carry the whole meaning
One consequence is that we should stop asking every mode to perform the same job.
The music does not have to describe the shark.
The image does not have to express everything about the threat.
The dialogue does not have to explain the emotional situation.
The edit does not have to represent causality explicitly.
Different modes can contribute different things.
The film becomes powerful partly because it can distribute meaning across modes.
One mode can leave something open for another to specify.
One can contradict another.
One can provide temporal organisation while another provides spatial organisation.
One can establish expectation while another fulfils or violates it.
Meaning can emerge between modes
We can now formulate the central proposition of the series more generally:
Meaning can emerge not only within a mode, but between modes.
This does not mean that the modes themselves cease to have their own organisation.
Quite the opposite.
The richer their differences, the more interesting their interaction can become.
Music can do things that images cannot.
Images can do things that music cannot.
Language can do things neither can do in quite the same way.
The film's expressive power comes partly from bringing these different possibilities into relation.
The viewer belongs to the ecology too
There is one participant we have not yet placed explicitly within the picture.
The viewer.
A film does not simply transmit meaning into a passive mind.
The viewer arrives with a repertoire.
They have learned musical conventions.
Visual conventions.
Genre expectations.
Narrative structures.
Cultural references.
They remember previous scenes.
They anticipate what might happen.
They recognise recurring motifs.
The film's semiotic ecology therefore includes not only the resources on the screen and soundtrack, but the semiotic resources available to the audience.
Meaning emerges through the coupling of film and viewer.
But the viewer is not free to make anything mean anything
This does not imply that interpretation is arbitrary.
The film provides a structured field of possibilities.
An ominous musical cue creates some expectations more readily than others.
A recurring motif establishes a history.
A visual composition constrains what can plausibly be construed.
Cultural conventions narrow some possibilities.
Narrative context narrows others.
The viewer participates, but participation occurs within a system of affordances and constraints.
Meaning is therefore neither completely encoded nor completely invented.
It is relationally achieved.
Films can teach their audiences
We have already seen that films can create their own musical conventions.
A theme appears.
It acquires an association.
It returns.
The viewer learns.
The same thing can happen visually.
A colour may become associated with a character.
A particular camera movement may become associated with memory.
A recurring image may become symbolic.
The film establishes a pattern, and the audience learns to use it.
The work therefore contains a developing semiotic environment.
Its meaning potential is not entirely fixed at the beginning.
It can grow as the film unfolds.
The film's own history becomes part of its meaning
This is especially important for narrative.
The first appearance of a theme has one significance.
The fifth has another.
The viewer remembers all the earlier occurrences.
A later event may reinterpret them.
A musical motif can therefore acquire meaning through its own history within the work.
The film creates a temporal accumulation of significance.
The same applies to images, lines of dialogue, colours and sounds.
The film is therefore not simply a sequence of meaningful moments.
It is a history of changing relations among signs.
The ecology can become recursive
At some point, the film can begin to use its own conventions against themselves.
A theme associated with safety can suddenly accompany danger.
A familiar image can return in altered form.
A recurring musical phrase can be deliberately withheld.
A character's motif can be transferred to another character.
The film can quote itself.
It can parody its own conventions.
It can make the audience aware that it has been taught how to interpret something and then deliberately change the rules.
The semiotic ecology has become reflexive.
It can operate upon its own history.
Silence belongs to the ecology
This is why silence deserves special attention.
Silence is not simply the absence of a semiotic resource.
Its significance depends upon what has previously been present or expected.
If a film has used music continuously, its sudden disappearance can become striking.
If a character's theme has reliably appeared in their scenes, its absence can signal a transformation.
Silence can therefore participate in meaning because the ecology has established expectations around sound.
Absence is meaningful because the system has a history.
Sound enlarges the world
The same principle applies to sound effects.
A film can show an empty room and allow us to hear activity elsewhere.
A voice can come from outside the frame.
A distant siren can imply a world beyond the visible scene.
Sound therefore extends the represented environment.
It tells us that the world exceeds what the camera is showing.
Music can do something related at a more abstract level.
It can make absent characters, memories or possibilities present.
The soundtrack can therefore enlarge not only the space of the film but its semiotic world.
The score can reorganise narrative structure
We have also seen that a musical theme can connect scenes separated by time and space.
A motif can return across several plotlines.
Two themes can become intertwined.
A theme can appear before its narrative object.
Another can disappear when its significance has been resolved.
The score therefore participates in the organisation of the film's large-scale structure.
It can create relations across distances that the image and dialogue alone might not establish as strongly.
The soundtrack can become part of the film's architecture of memory and anticipation.
Multimodality is not redundancy
This gives us another reason to reject a common picture of multimodality.
If every mode simply says the same thing, combining modes would be largely redundant.
But the most interesting films often do the opposite.
They distribute different aspects of the construal among modes.
The image may establish what is happening.
The music may establish what it means emotionally.
The dialogue may establish what a character believes.
The editing may establish a relation between what the character believes and what the audience knows.
The silence may signal that something has changed.
The modes therefore do not duplicate one another.
They compose.
The film creates meaning through differences
This brings us back to a principle that has guided the whole investigation.
Meaning depends upon difference.
The music matters partly because another music was possible.
The image matters partly because it could have been framed differently.
The edit matters because another sequence was possible.
The silence matters because sound was expected.
Incongruence matters because congruence was possible.
A recurring motif matters because it could have been absent.
The semiotic ecology is therefore also an ecology of alternatives.
The film makes choices.
The viewer construes those choices against the field of possibilities.
The film as a living semiotic system
We should not take the word ecology too literally.
A film is not an organism.
But the analogy captures something important.
Its components are interdependent.
Changes in one part can alter the functioning of others.
Patterns can stabilise.
New relations can emerge.
The system has a history.
Participants learn how it works.
Its conventions can change as the work unfolds.
Its meaning can therefore be understood as emergent organisation rather than a collection of messages.
And this returns us to music
Music has been our privileged case because it makes the argument unusually clear.
We began with the observation that music can matter without being, by itself, a semiotic system.
Film gives that mattering a new environment.
The score enters a system with images, narrative, dialogue, editing and cultural conventions.
Its existing possibilities are recruited.
They alter the visual construal.
The visual context alters the hearing of the music.
Repeated relations produce signs.
Signs become narrative resources.
The entire configuration acquires meaning.
Music has not ceased to be music.
It has become part of a larger semiotic ecology.
The ecology can extend beyond the film
The film's semiotic ecology does not necessarily end when the film ends.
A theme can become culturally familiar.
An image can become iconic.
A line of dialogue can enter popular speech.
A visual motif can become a convention.
The film can therefore contribute new resources to the wider cultural reservoir.
Its innovations can be taken up by later films.
Its musical associations can be reused.
Its conventions can be parodied.
Its images can become cultural symbols.
The local semiotic ecology can feed into the larger one.
This is cultural evolution in miniature
A film can therefore be a small laboratory of cultural evolution.
A new relation is introduced.
The audience learns it.
The relation becomes recognisable.
It may later be borrowed.
Another filmmaker transforms it.
The transformed convention becomes familiar.
The process continues.
The cultural potential changes.
The film is therefore not just an artefact of culture.
It can become a resource for subsequent cultural meaning-making.
What have we discovered?
The question with which we began was:
How can music participate in filmic meaning?
We can now give a fairly precise answer.
Music brings its own potential for mattering: temporal organisation, expectation, affect, cultural association and memory.
The film places these resources in relation to visual, linguistic and other semiotic resources.
The relations may reinforce one another or conflict.
Repetition can stabilise associations.
Associations can become signs.
Signs can become narrative resources.
Different modes can contribute different aspects of a larger construal.
And the resulting meaning can belong to the configuration of the modes, rather than to any one mode independently.
But something remains to be explained
We have deliberately moved from the individual score to the film as a whole.
That has clarified the ecology.
But it leaves one final question.
Why does any of this matter beyond the particular film?
What happens when the meanings constructed by the film begin to change what matters to its audience?
A melody can become an anthem.
A scene can become iconic.
A character can become a cultural symbol.
A metaphor can enter everyday language.
A film can change the way a historical event is remembered.
Meaning can feed back into the world of value from which it emerged.
We began this investigation by asking how music can make an image mean.
We may now be ready to ask the larger question:
What can a film make matter?
That is where the score, the image, the story and the audience finally come together.
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