MH7 Midterm Terms Essay

Submitted By Juliet-Gause
Words: 5349
Pages: 22

Diegetic- (source music) sound/ music that can be heard by characters
Non-diegetic- (underscore) sound/ music that the characters don’t hear, but the audience can; Music in film is not always clearly one or the other
Onscreen sound- sound you see confirmed by motion onscreen
Offscreen sound- what you hear isn’t onscreen (seeing a family sitting inside and hearing rain)
ADR- (Automated or Additional Dialogue Replacement) Human sounds recorded after filming
Dubbing/looping- replacing or dubbing in sound/voice; culturally different ideas of if this is “fair"
Image track- In modern film, image track is not complete on its own
Sound track (3 parts): (1) Speech, (2) Sound effects, (3) Music; Sound and music adds value and transforms the image; Dialogue often goes in the foreground; Sound, speech, and music in the background are for presence and continuity
WarGames- Speech is initially in foreground (important information, emotion); Sound effects (typing very loud, screech of radios, people moving around); Music comes in and starts very low, then takes over; Snare drums (marching/ military band); Horns, trumpets (brass); Woodwinds (flutes, clarinets); Mimics the learning sequence of the computer; Music is given top priority when the computer speeds up
Spotting- meeting of composer and director to spot when music will come in and how to shape the scene
Choosing style or genre- Die Hard- different Christmas-themed music for the hero and villain; Beethoven 9th for villain and modern, more pop-y music for hero
Writing the drama; The Women- nail salon scene; music comes in when woman realizes she told her customer that her husband cheated on her—> Stinger: sudden burst of sound to punctuate moment of realization
Writing for subtext; Star Wars- “Star Wars Ep. IV” twin suns cue; music needs to clue you in; “big” music clues you into the significance of Skywalker and his force (when he’s looking at the two suns)
Hitting the action; Mickey-mousing; “Skeleton Dance”- scores that almost literally follow what’s on screen
Score against picture; Star Trek (2009)- music scored the emotion of what’s happening rather than the visual; Cross-cutting: edit takes you from one place to another, but it’s all happening at the same time (Kirk’s dad and mom)
Orchestration- art of choosing the array of instruments and musicians to score a film
Tonality- Organized series of pitches or notes in hierarchy; Can build chords from these; Usually a “home” pitch we want to go back to;
Consonance- harmonies/ chords are stable
Dissonance- unstable and uneasy; Vertigo uses dissonance and denies a resolution; Leads to tension and unresolved tonality
Richard Wagner- wrote the opera Tristan und Isolde; plots of thwarted desire
“Liebestod”- “love death”, song within Tristan and Isolde when Isolde sings over Tristan’s dead body and dies at the end (self-destruction); This reflects Judy dooming herself by transforming back into Madeleine for Scottie; Metaphor that love is unresolved (reflected in the music); Obsessive theme and Madeleine’s theme as he is waiting of her to appear; WE get a cadence here; it comes to a resolution; Scottie’s desire is finally fulfilled; Scottie’s obsession theme is playing, not Madeleine’s them
Laura Mulvey--“male gaze”- male gaze of the camera objectifying and examining a female
Arpeggio- broken chord played one note at a time- signify vertigo; Contrary motion: Scottie is terrified of falling but also wants to fall for Madeline; Vertigo Chord- bitonal (obsession and arpeggio tones) mise-en-scene- “Putting on stage”; usually used to describe the design aspects of a film; everything you can see in front of you that appears before the camera; actors and movements, makeup and gestures, lighting; how the scene looks; how information is conveyed to us; Ex: camera lingers for a long time on a messy apartment of the main character; you can discern that the character has a cluttered mind; cluttered apartment= cluttered mind; Eye is drawn to the