Emotional Effect Music Can Have on a Film Essay

Emotional Effect Music Can Have on a Film - Essay Example According to the essay "Emotional Effect Music Can Have on a Film" findings, music in the film can have the effect of convincing the audience to believe the actions or the mood portrayed by the character as opposed to simply accepting the scene and the overall mood. For example, when a ballad is played repeatedly every time an actor is onscreen, the audience will ultimately connect the mood of the music to the character (Tan et al139). An example of this is the haunting song by David Raskin which was used repeatedly in the film Laura which resulted in the film acquiring a deeper feel owing to the perceived depth of the score. Music is used to direct the sympathy or empathy of the audience towards the characters that the director wants to depict as good of evil respectively, as such, in a film, the soundtrack played when the villain is onscreen is likely to be eerie and designed to evoke apprehension tension or fear (Juslin and Sloboda 371). Nevertheless, when the protagonist is onscr een, the music played will be evocative of hope and in action scenes when the antagonist is winning cheerful hopeful music such as the â€Å"eye of the tiger† which is considered by many to be the anthem of motivation in modern film. Used effectively as a synesthesia, music can create mood in which an audience will be subtly manipulated into associating a certain piece of music with a given mood, from a Gestalt perspective, one may even argue that some of the emotional evocations are innate,. Films such as Phycho 1960 and the more recent horror series Saw, (2005) use a variety of musical devices such as pitch, tone and melodic line to create a classical conditioning that succeeds in making the audience nervous and even scared, which is the purpose of creating a horror film in the first place. When a file plays music from which an audience can make a direct connection to the based on the retrospective themes covered by the music, it has the distinct effect of bringing past emotional experiences into the current viewing