Johnny Wingstedt

Narrative Music, Visuals and Meaning in Film

Narrative media music, music used for narrative purposes in multimedia such as film, television or computer games, is becoming one of the largest sources of musical experience in our daily lives. Though typically experienced on an unconscious and unreflected level, this kind of music actively contributes narrative meaning in multimodal interplay with image, speech and sound effects. Often, what we (think we) see is to a large degree determined by what we hear. Using Halliday’s (1978) metafunctions of communication as a starting point, two short film scenes (from Jaws and The Secret of My Success) are examined, with a focus on the intermodal relationships of music and image. The examples illustrate how musical and visual expressions combine to form multimodal statements where the whole is certainly different than the sum of the parts.

REMUPP: an interface for evaluation of relations between musical parameters and perceived properties

New media offers new roles, functions and challenges to music, calling for new methods and tools for music research. To meet these increasingly important challenges. REMUPP, a new software tool for the investigation of relations between music and perceived properties or characteristies, was designed. The ideas behind REMUPP and the technology used to realize it is deseribed. In order to test the sensitivity and validity of REMUPP. a simple experiment aimed to examine some properties of music was carried out. 38 subjects were listening to music and instructed to indicate their priority for different aspects of the music (musical parameters) while they actively controlled these aspects. The results show that REMUPP is able to bring out significant differences between the musical parameters, and that these differences correspond well with findings by others.