The Psychology of Film Music

I have looked into a lot of reading on film music, how film music in constructive, how character themes can be established and how music is different in film than say a stand alone composition but what I have not fully looked into that I need to understand is the psychology behind film music and how an audience relates to characters and how music can be used to gain an emotive response from an audience. 

One thought that I enjoyed reading was that people don't go to the cinema or watch movies at home for the experience of realism (Fischoff, S. 2005). He goes on to add that "Music adds something we might call heightened reality or supra-realism". The thought is that in reality we don't live our life with underscore. When we feel terror or we feel scared or sad we know the feeling, we ourselves feel that feeling and know how it feels. In film we don't know how the character feels as we aren't that character. To elevate the realism of what we see on screen, music is used to tell us how that character feels and how we should be feeling for them. 

In advertisement "Hidden Persuaders" are often used to make us (the consumer) believe that we need that product and we must feel a certain way about that product to make us want to buy it. This is the same idea in film music. We are to believe in what we see on screen and buy into the feelings that the character is feeling. It isn't just enough to see that the character is scared of the dark, a cleverly composed piece of music can suddenly put us in the characters shoes and remind us that we have felt that feeling and we can feel it with them, we share the experience with the fictional character that we see before us. 

In the film "Amelie" (2001) music is used to capture Amelie's moods in a more effective way than the dialogue can put across. The psychological thought behind this being that it is "more emotively evocative as music goes directly to the brains emotional structure (the limbic system) bypassing cortically based cognitive mediation" and the acknowledgement of perception. In relation to this psychologist Rudolph Arnheim argues that "brains are hard-wired to associate certain sounds with certain moods" 

Music can subconsciously speak to the audience in a way that the reality of the visual or underpinning silence is unable to. Yes we can see the feeling of desperate despair or of all out rage but it is music that allows us to connect with that feeling and allows us to feel what the character is feeling especially when it may not be directly obvious. 

Murch (Chion, 1994) talks of a phenomenon that he calls Conceptual Resonance between image and sound, where the sound makes us see the image differently and then this new image makes us hear the sound differently, which in turn makes us see something else in the image and so on. 

As previously stated if an on screen character is crying, our perception of how they feel will be sadness. It is music however that makes us feel what they are feeling, it allows us to feel the characters mood, thoughts and feelings without having to see the character crying, we can feel their inner struggle through the delicately composed music depicting that character. This is why I believe I can change an audiences perception of a character over time through the use of music, the music heightens the reality of what we see, it is not just a companion to a visual but is the heart of the visual.