Music And The Mind

12 Pages 2949 Words

Even before film, music has been used to enhance dances, rituals, ceremonies and plays because of music's ability to characterize certain settings and determine the audience's reaction. Filmmakers also use music to accompany their works for several practical and aesthetic reasons. The job of creating the musical accompaniment for film has taken various forms, but as film production and technology has evolved, the process of scoring music for films has been refined into a standard process. This process creates a set of parameters a composer must work within in order to create new music for a film or in some cases adjust existing music. Composers invent innovative forms of musical expression unique to the specific intention of the film’s visuals. The film composer, through years of experience has acquired specific compositional techniques, that allows work within these production guidelines while still composing new, artistically revealing music that enhances the film’s storylin!
e. Through the scoring of any film, the music can easily manipulate an audience into any emotion by simply existing through the seemingly appropriate and sometimes contradicting use of space and time.
The job of scoring film took on various forms, shapes and sizes through the years, as the task was entrusted to a pianist, followed by live orchestras, and briefly, according to London, gramophone records (85). Eventually, technology allowed sound to be recorded to the same film that showed the picture, which effectively re-standardized the presentation of film. Filmmakers then delivered the whole package. Up to then, the original composition of music for film existed, but was severely limited because of the "amateurism" of the local cinema orchestra (London 84). But in 1929 with the new standard of the sound-movie, the original composition of music for a specific film became standard procedure. About a decade later, composer Aaron Copland observed new ways t...