Year of the Rat Music Project

Did you know that when you go to the theater to watch a movie, half of the time is spent staring at a black screen? For each frame of the film the shutter closes twice, meaning no light is being projected towards the screen. Fortunately our brains have a nifty mechanism we refer to as closure that allows us to watch a movie as if it were a steady stream of images. Here’s another nifty example of closure-

Do you see the big “A”? That’s closure. A computer wouldn’t be able to recognize anything except a group of individual “A”’s. This is why you have to punch in random letters and numbers to prove you’re human when setting up a new account online.

Similarly, sound works with moving images to create closure. The sounds you hear when watching a video often have no connection with what you are seeing, but your brain syncs them up. Most of the time it works, sometimes not so much, like when you notice someone lip syncing. This is part of the reason air guitaring is so funny.

What is a song’s role in a soundscape?

Music that we are expected to understand is internalized within the world we’re seeing, i.e. music that is “playing” on the radio in the background in the scene, or perhaps by a band-

In internalized music there are currently two broad categories used in the language of film, music that conforms to our expectations and music that breaks our expectations, normally for humor. For example, in the Back to the Future clip, we’re supposed to suspend our disbelief and except Michael J. Fox playing “Johnny B. Goode.” He’s strumming the guitar and has his lips to the microphone when (most) of the words we’re hearing are being sung. Internalized music that breaks our expectations is when the music is different from what we’d expect based on what we’re seeing.

Perhaps the most perfect example of this (if there is such a thing) comes to us from “Duck Amuck.” Watch for the part when Daffy is dressed as a cowboy singer.

A more common version of this technique is, of course, the music video.

We could talk about the closure of sound and moving images all day but I’m completely and totally unqualified to talk about that. So instead I’ve decided to focus on the current uses of music in narrative film.

I say current uses because film language, just like verbal language, is constantly evolving. And I started this post talking about closure because I realized while thinking about this that a lot of how we can understand music and film’s interaction comes from how we connect the two. For example, when I was a kid I distinctly remember being amazed when Michael J. Fox picked up the guitar and belted out “Johnny B. Goode,” and I expect most adults who watched the film felt the same way. Watching that clip now it seems a dated, the fact that it’s obviously not Michael J. Fox’s voice and that his strumming doesn’t match up with the guitar stands out in a way it didn’t before. This could just be because I was a kid when I first watched this, but I suspect it is more because of increasing sophistication in film language which has created more discerning closure.

More to come in Part 2