Pustaka Ilmiah Universitas Padjadjaran

Abstrak

Effects Of Underscoring On Cinema Sequences

Music can have strong effects on the perceiver in a variety of everyday domains. One of these domains is music in film. Film music, that flourished during the era of the silent film from1900-1930 (Anderson, 1988; Marks, 1979), can alter the spirit of a scene substantially. It is an accepted fact that music strongly contributes to the drama of a film or video production (Taylor1994/1996). The notion of the influence of music on interpretation coincided with recent work in the psychology of film music. According to Prendergast (1991), musical underscoring is by far the most effective cinematic tool with which one can intensify the drama in a scene. Empirical findings have confirmed that the addition of musical underscoring to a film can result in significant changes in physiological arousal (Thayer & Levenson, 1983). Taylor (1994/1996), however, noted that the research in this area is yet minimal, especially for empirical research. The integrative theoretical advancement in the field engages very different approaches and disciplines, ranging from hermeneutics-semiotics (with a methodological focus on introspective interpretation and comparative phenomenology) to musicologically-grounded analysis, to psychoacoustics and empirical cognitive psychology (see Vitouch, 2001).