Music, Sound, and The Moving Image 

About: Music, Sound, and The Moving Image is an academic journal published by Liverpool University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Popular music & Musical. It has an ISSN identifier of 1753-0768. Over the lifetime, 205 publications have been published receiving 1012 citations. The journal is also known as: MSMI.

Corporeality, Musical Heartbeats, and Cinematic Emotion

Abstract: Music's relationship with emotion has been the subject of numerous philosophical and psychophysiological studies in recent years. The question of whether music merely expresses or actively arouses emotion in its listeners, however, gains added complexities when considered in the context of film. What is going on, for example, when we believe ourselves to be afraid in the cinema; and how does the presence of a musical heartbeat contribute to this feeling?In this article I answer those questions, firstly by invoking the notion of 'perceptual realism' and questioning a number of comfortable givens in film music theory (including the nondiegetic status of music), and secondly by proposing a 'heartbeat hypothesis' that combines empirical and philosophical approaches to musical emotion with theories of cinematic fiction. This hypothesis suggests that heartbeats are effective at helping us experience 'fictional fear' precisely because the real-world emotion of fear is fundamentally about the body; that there is ...

Musical Wallpaper?: Towards an Appreciation of Non-narrating Music in Film

Abstract: In this article, I suggest that the narratological model of film music offered by Claudia Gorbman's seminal work Unheard Melodies (1987) becomes problematic when we consider more closely a distinction made by narratologist Gerard Genette between narrating and narrative - between the signifier and the narrating act that produces it. Arguing that most music encountered in film 'unscrolls' (to use a term offered by Carolyn Abbate [1991]) as part of a narrative rather than constituting a narrating act, I highlight older conceptions of film music that may be in line for a reappraisal, namely those offered by Stravinsky (Dahl 2010) and Copland (1949). Though not always complimentary about the music's aesthetic value, they offer us the possibility of an alternative perspective - one that encourages us to think of film music's expressive qualities and its ability to shape environments from within the narrative, rather than considering it the external bearer of the narrating act itself. I explore this new-old notion using a scene from Hugo Friedhofer's score to The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946).

A Pop Music Progression in Recent Popular Movies and Movie Trailers

Abstract: A harmonic progression of four chords, ubiquitous in popular music from the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, also occurs in many popular movies and movie trailers from the same time period. This progression has become associated with heroic characters, events, and honours in these movies, and associated with a hero-centred climax in the narratives of the movies advertised in these trailers. Intersections among music theory, network theory, and film theory offer one rationale for this association in the form of a homology, in which the musical structure of the chord progression, and the narrative structure with which the progression is associated, each centrally situates a fundamental opposition.

Spaces, Gaps, and Levels: From the Diegetic to the Aesthetic in Film Theory

Abstract: Adopting an aesthetic perspective, as distinct from a strictly narratological one, this article centres on the represented reality of a film that the concept of diegesis in its various formulations posits. In particular, it addresses this reality's experience by viewers, its figurative location, and its relation to other aspects of a narrative film work, as well as the so-called real world. Although concurring with some significant criticisms of the diegetic/nondiegetic framework, it also calls for preserving aspects of what some theorists argue constitutes the semiotic and experiential character of diegesis. Including, for example, the existence of a distinct referential (denotational) level of a film, and the sort of variable gap between what is within and without the world of characters and narrative events (and fluid ‘border crossings’ between the two) that is suggested by Robynn Stilwell. These views are taken up into a different model, a topological one, which entails conceiving both fictional repre...

Inside/Outside the Klein Bottle: Music in Narrative Film, Intrusive and Integral

Abstract: Music does not narrate, since it lacks one of the minimal constituents of a narrating act: it does not produce perception of deictically shifted action, taking place in a space-time different from that of communication It can, however, functioning alongside other components of narrative, contribute strongly to the establishment of narrativity, that property of discourse by virtue of which it can be both story and presentation of story at the same time Narrativity is so constituted that the traditional distinction between story told and that story's telling cannot be sustained in analysis; the form of the Klein bottle serves as a means of envisaging the continuity of these two discursive functions Tropings of discourse that establish narrativity may be classified as metaleptic and cognitively dissonant, respectively infractions of the storyworld-communication world boundary and infractions of representational encoding In narrative film as it has developed, music contributes in relatively straightforwar