Narrative Music, Visuals and Meaning in Film

TLDR

Narrative media music, used in film, television, and games, is becoming a major source of musical experience and actively contributes narrative meaning through multimodal interplay with image, speech, and sound effects, often shaping what we perceive. The study examines two short film scenes (from Jaws and The Secret of My Success) to investigate the intermodal relationships between music and image. It applies Halliday’s (1978) metafunctions of communication to analyze how music and visual elements interact in these scenes. The examples illustrate how musical and visual expressions combine to form multimodal statements where the whole is certainly different than the sum of the parts.

Abstract

Narrative media music, music used for narrative purposes in multimedia such as film, television or computer games, is becoming one of the largest sources of musical experience in our daily lives. Though typically experienced on an unconscious and unreflected level, this kind of music actively contributes narrative meaning in multimodal interplay with image, speech and sound effects. Often, what we (think we) see is to a large degree determined by what we hear. Using Halliday’s (1978) metafunctions of communication as a starting point, two short film scenes (from Jaws and The Secret of My Success) are examined, with a focus on the intermodal relationships of music and image. The examples illustrate how musical and visual expressions combine to form multimodal statements where the whole is certainly different than the sum of the parts.