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- Audissino, Emilio, Senior Lecturer, 1981-
(author)
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The Agency of Music in Audiovisual Artefacts : A Gestalt-based Approach
- 2018
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In: 10th Conference of the International Musicological Society, Study Group ‘Music and Media’, University of Salamanca, Spain, 13-16 June 2018.
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- ‘Film/Music Analysis’ is the name I give to my proposal for an alternative approach to the study of music in films. By ‘film music analysis’ the general understanding – influenced by the musicological dominance in the film-music discipline – is that one is performing either a musicological study of the musical text (the score) or a musico-dramaturgic examination of a film’s music track. By this new label I wish to stress the inescapably interrelational nature of music and images in the audiovisual artefact. I foster an approach that be more film-studies oriented then musicological, and this can be achieved by tackling music as a cinematic device within a larger and interconnected system. My take is to adopt a Gestalt-based perspective, with music seen as one micro-configuration and visuals as another micro-configuration, the two fusing into an audiovisual macro-configuration. This Gestalt approach – being based on the fusion of the aural and visual factors into a whole – is not only useful to provide alternative analytical tools but is also helpful to supersede the long-standing visual bias that to some extent still plagues the Film Studies, which leads to think of music as something that is externally added to either reinforce or contradict what is already there in the visuals.Indeed, a common issue when discussing music and film is to adopt – whether consciously or not – a ‘separatist’ approach, one in which music and visuals are conceptualised as two distinct entities. Often, music is analysed as to its musical qualities, as if it were any other kind of ‘applied’ music, and visuals – in the aforementioned ‘visual bias’ – is treated as the most important, dominant element. A ‘non separatist’ approach should conceptualise the audiovisual product as a whole in which music and visuals have a potentially equal importance and agency. In arithmetical parlance, music and visuals are not two terms of an addition but two factors of a product. When music meets the visuals, it does not merely adds something to a meaning that is already there – as theorised by Noël Carroll in his ‘modifying music’ proposal – but a fusion happens between the two elements whose result is a new meaning that was not present in either of the separate elements, a multiplication in which the single factors change one another. As Gestalt Theory teaches, the whole is different from the sum of its parts.
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