music + face = emotions

this cognitive daily article details an experiment designed to measure the affect music has on interpreting the emotion of an actor in a film. four different types of music (happy, sad, scary, angry), were played before and after the image of a neutral expression on an actor's face.

the results are interesting, especially that "angry" music didn't seem to have any definitive affect at all, even as an indicator of anger. either the music picked didn't accurately represent the emotion or (more likely), there isn't a universal musical interpretation for it. this doesn't surprise me. i'm a musician and a student of film scores, but i'd have a hard time describing a musical device that represented anger. does the 'psycho' score represent norman's anger or his victim's fear?

however the most interesting statement to me didn't pertain to the experiment. it was this anecdote at the beginning of the article describing how influential music in films has become (emphasis mine):

Music is such an important aspect of film that when a group of students was asked to rate the emotions evoked by music in six film excerpts, only a third of them noticed that all the film clips had no music. This was on a multiple choice test, where the first choice was "No music was played."

that means a full two-thirds of the watchers at least once didn't notice the absence of a score. they remembered the scene with music. or at least couldn't remember it not being there.

before you laugh, do you remember the music underscoring the storm plane crash sequence or the entire stranded-on-a-deserted-island sequence of 'cast away'? you shouldn't. because there wasn't any (per imdb):

Alan Silvestri wrote 24 minutes of score (including over seven minutes for the final credits) for a 143-minute film. Aside from the Russian chorus and the Elvis song from the beginning, there is not one single note of written musical score in the film until Noland leaves the island (1 hour and 43 minutes into the movie). Only then does the musical score come in: an oboe, piano and strings are all that Silvestri uses. Every musical cue is a variation on the same melody, which is heard in full at the end.

flickr photo by user: *christopher*