La Land: The Importance Of Music In Film

The Importance of Music in Film

La La Land, the 2016 American musical romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Damien Chazelle, won an Academy Award for Best Original Score this past March. Audiences worldwide were captivated by the catchy and heartfelt jazz tunes produced by composer Justin Hurwitz. The romantic boy-meets-girl tale is surrounded by “big numbers and intimate reveries”. The ultra-powerful impact this musical and its soundtrack had on its audience is evident in this award and its numerous others. While oftentimes we as movie viewers do not take note of this, the immense success of this film can be attributed in part to the setting and emotion that its score creates. The importance of music in film is tremendous, and

awards like “Best Original Score” are created to highlight this importance. Music’s involvement in film is multipurpose. It can serve as a part of the entertainment or as the background, create atmosphere, or enhance emotional reactions. Ultimately, the success of a film is often extremely dependent of the success of its score.
Since the beginning of time, sound and music have been used by human beings for communication and much more. Our reaction to sound and music is deeply rooted in our biological makeup and survival instincts. Composer Neil Brand asserts that, “’Human beings are very good at interpreting sound. Right back to when our prehistoric selves will have heard a twig snap in a forest and thought 'that's it, I'm dead'.’” For example, we often react to dissonant, screeching sounds like that of an animal in distress with fear and nervousness, as our brains associate tones of this pitch and frequency with dangerous or potentially deadly situations. With this knowledge, composers can use various sounds to invoke emotion and set the tone. “A 2010 study by the University of California found that human sensitivity to non-linear alarm sounds, such as ones made by groundhogs to warn about predators, is being employed by film composers to unsettle and unnerve.” (Stewart) Our reactions to a variety of sounds can be traced back to our primal instinct.
The history of music as an accompaniment to visual entertainment extends back hundreds of years.

Before film there was theater, which utilized the musical gusto of entire orchestras to serve many purposes, including that of background and atmosphere. When film first became popularized in the 19th century, silent films were the predominant genre. These films presented a moving picture without sound. Pianos and organs were used to both mask the noise of the loud projectors used to display the film as well as to give emphasis to the story. The first “talkie” movie, or the first example of sound film, was the original Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson, released in 1927. This film changed the way music interacted with film in the early 20th century. Composers began to use song to open and close motion pictures. These songs reinforced the mood and themes of the film. In the early use of music to accompany visual stimuli in movies a phenomenon called “Mickey Mousing” often occurred. “Mickey Mousing” can be defined as “the tendency for the music to follow the action too closely like a cartoon”. Cartoons like Tom and Jerry often portray this phenomenon where movement and music are matched. For a while, film composers were not highly regarded and were looked down upon by serious composers. With all-time classic Gone with the Wind, composer Max Steiner established success for songwriters attracted many more trained musicians to the craft. With his success also came one of the first ever successful theme songs, which is now widely known by millions. Extremely unusual for its time, Disney’s Fantasia is an example of a film where the music comes first and the visuals are created to fit the music. Bernard Hermann, a composer who supported Alfred Hitchcock in many of his films was a key in the new genre created for horror films, a genre whose purpose is to assist in the building of tension and the shock factor. Quickly came the realization that film could be used to launch hit songs

and vice versa. Movies like Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting have soundtracks that are packed with popular music.
Oftentimes listening to music can be an extremely physical and psychological experience. Music’s success in creating atmosphere, establishing tone, or serving as entertainment, depends on its ability to be successful in inducing emotional reaction. For example, listening to lush romantic scores can sometimes produce goosebumps. In a 2011 experiment at Canada’s McGill University the neural mechanics of why this reaction takes place were studied. “Far from a purely aural experience,” says Helen Stewart, a journalist for BBC summarizing the findings, “scans suggested that the regions of the brain that light up with music are those linked to euphoric stimuli such as food, sex, and drugs. Blood flow in the brain is responding to areas associated with reward, emotion, and arousal.” Brain imaging during music listening also reveals patterns of activation in the limbic system, including the amygdala, hippocampus, and hypothalamus, as well as parts of the paralimbic system. Music listening can also lower arousal levels to favorable levels in the presence of stressors. For example, “participants who listen to relaxing music show faster recovery from a subsequent stressor compared to participants who listen to the sounds of nature or simply rest beforehand.”
Jessica Green, a recently graduated author with her M.A. in English rhetoric and composition from Brigham Young University and a graduate research fellowship award for work in reflection and critical thinking in first-year composition emphasizes the importance of a film score in film.
“Films that fail to use much music or fail to use it well often have a problem involving the audience as completely as films that embrace music as a tool that can expose the inner feelings and thoughts of characters and can shape the way that viewers feel about what’s happening on screen.”
She argues that “While most audiences would certainly be able to cite numerous instances of music reflecting the feelings of characters or the general mood of the film, some people might be surprised by the extent to which film music shapes and affects meaning in film.” There are numerous types of music that are used in film scores, well-defined by Stam, Burgoyne, and Flitterman-Lewis as the following: redundant music, which reinforces the emotional tone; contrapuntal music, which runs counter to the dominant emotion; empathetic music, which conveys the emotions of the characters; a-empathetic music, which seems indifferent to the drama; and didactic contrapuntal music, which uses music to distance the audience. Oftentimes these terms can be limiting because music can fulfill more than one role in a scene, they demonstrate that music is making an argument, proving that film music is behaving rhetorically. In addition to fulfilling the basic roles of conveying emotion and suggesting connections or themes in the film, film music also works in more complex roles to affect the meaning in film. Through music’s development of specific leitmotifs, themes, and cues, the calculated use of film music in conjunction with the other channels of information helps to create the narrative and control the way that the audience interprets a film.

Horror movies like the classic Psycho and the more contemporary scare Paranormal Activity rely heavily on the use of sound to inspire fear in their viewers. One crucial component of the horror film music genre is infrasound. Infrasound, or low-frequency sound, is sound of frequency lower than 20 hertz. Richard Lord, an acoustic scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in England, with the help of Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in southern England, played four contemporary pieces of live music, some of them laced with infrasound. The reports from the audience included statements about feelings of uneasiness, sorrow, chills, and nervous feelings of revulsion or fear. Composers of horror film scores often pair infrasound, which is often inaudible, with frightening images to heighten negative feelings. Imagination is also a crucial part of the success of film scores in horror movies. Another component of sound in scary movies is nonlinear acoustics. This is a branch of physics dealing with sound waves being distorted as they travel. In horror films, nonlinear sounds would be classified as a dissonant chord, a child’s cry, or a baby animal’s scream. Dr. Blumstein, a professor at the University California Los Angles with a Ph.D. in Animal Behavior teamed up with film score composer Peter Kaye and communications professor Greg Bryant to create an experiment to discover the power of nonlinear acoustics with and without images. The results proved to be extremely surprising. Humans tend to be more frightened when hearing nonlinear sounds alone than nonlinear sounds with imagery. This is because the brain can be as imaginative as possible. If the subject is given sounds and imagery that provides an exact picture of what is going on, there would be no room left for creativity. In the research study, Affect Computing in Film Through Sound Energy Dynamics, researchers created a sound energy detection algorithm to collect and analyze changes in sound energy and how they influence emotion.

Examples of films that have displayed monumental success due to their film scores go far beyond movies like Pulp Fiction, Psycho, and Gone with the Wind. The Godfather, a classic, has a score composed by Nino Rota regarded by many as one of the best film scores of all time. “This astonishing score not only enhanced the popularity of the first two Godfather films, but ingeniously underscored the immigrant family experience with passages with a broad emotional range: majestic, joyous, solemn, frivolous and melancholic,” according to David Gritten, journalist for The Telegraph, “One discerns deeply felt sentiment and yearnings for a birthplace and a culture left behind.” Another example of a film whose success depended largely on its film score is
In conclusion, whether or not we as the audience are aware of the fact or not, films are heavily dependent on the score that they are accompanied by. Music’s involvement in film is multipurpose. It can serve as a part of the entertainment or as the background, create atmosphere, enhance emotional reactions, create connections and themes, and also affect he meaning in film. The effect that film scores have on an audience and the perception of a film are rooted in biology and psychology, and horror movies in particular depend on sound to accomplish the goal of scaring the audience. Ultimately, the success of a film is often extremely dependent of the success of its score.