by Sianne Suicide

Created on: December 29, 2006   Last Updated: April 01, 2007

As both music and film sequences are structured in time according to the viewers' perception, there is a strong link between the two when played together. A viewer has two perceptual modes whilst watching film and listening to music, real time or ontological applies to where the viewer/listener perceives each note or movement, and psychological time in which the composition/film is perceived more subjectively and the viewer takes what they see/hear as a whole. Music is a structuring in time, and film music is especially good a giving the viewer a sense of time passing, although upon watching a film, the music becomes part of the background and somewhat dissolves into the whole viewing entity. The sense of time can alter depending on whether the viewer is watching the film, or listening to the music. The Russian director Andrey Tarkovsky used a phrase rhythmic pressure' in describing how characters in films can seamlessly move through large spaces of time and although it has a close relationship with the music in a film, different people can perceive the passing of time differently. He strived to:

Create my own, distinctive flow of time, and convey in the shot a sense of its movement from lazy and soporific to stormy and swift and to one person it will seem one way, to another, another. (Tarvkovsky 1986:114)

In the film Requiem for a Dream (Momentum 2000) directed by Darren Aronofsky, the passage of time could certainly be perceived differently to the music. In the spring' chapter of the film, we see fast edited visuals with fast moving characters giving us a sense that time is passing quickly, but the music, composed by Clint Mansell, is moving slowly with a slow beat and slowly building strings, which also gives us a sense of a slower pace, maybe telling us that the time actually did pass slower that it seemed. On its own, the spring piece of music for Requiem is full of slow tempos and slowly progressing strings, but the sounds that make up the drumbeats are also Diegetic sounds in terms of the film. Each of the sounds in the musical score of the film appear as sounds used a sound effects, ambient sound and sound effects, although they seamlessly fit into the music as a single composition.

As well as musical score, there are other elements of film sound design that are incorporated to make up a complete component of the film. There are Diegetic sounds, which is best described as hear-what-you-see sounds, if a telephone rings you see the phone, if you see a car

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>