Taryn Hardman Music 1010 10/27/2012

Music in films and marketing

It is well known that music has an emotional effect on people. This fact has been utilized through the centuries by Playwrights, Poets, Composers, and Researchers. Plays were the precursors to movies in many aspects, but none so much as with the incorporation of instruments to elicit an emotional response from the audience. For example, drums at a slow or medium tempo can provoke a sense of urgency or fear. Playwrights would use instruments with a lower pitch at a faster tempo to help the audience see a scene conveying urgency, importance, dire circumstance or a sense of haste. Playwrights figured out that if you added music to a scene, you could enhance it. Playing the same scene without the music could still be enjoyable, just to a much, much lesser extent, and the emotion of it might be lost on the audience. Especially in todays society, some of the most famous and talked about songs are the ones that are able to convey a sense of emotion and allow the listener to see what the song is trying to stimulate. Film producers have jumped on that revelation, having taken cues especially from the Silent Film Era, wherein music was the scene. It was the emotion. Often in silent films, the music and the acting were both exaggerated. The acting had to be exaggerated to properly communicate the situation as voices couldnt be used, and the music had to be exaggerated to match the acting. Pianos were the most widely used instruments in silent films, most of the time, pianos were used to play jaunty tunes for comedic effect. As the music in silent films was always live, they were the first instrument to start playing, with a pianist on set. Even

small town and neighborhood movie houses had a pianist who would play music live along with the show. By 1910, big city theaters had organists or live ensembles to play in the theater to the movie. By then, even some of the organs could produce sounds resembling other instruments, and could be used to create sound effects such as thunder or galloping horses. Silent films had long sheets for the music being composed, which included lengthy and detailed notes about effects and moods to watch for, and if an organist playing live in a theater had an organ capable of making sound effects, those effects would be played in that theater. Silent films were the most lucrative business for musicians at the time, and thats where most musicians found work. Unfortunately, with the Great Depression, came an uprising of talkies and put a lot of musicians out of the job. In the 1930s, with talkies more and more on the rise, music was still being incorporated into films, no longer being compiled music, but original scores. The first film to have a completely original score was King Kong. In the 1940s, composers were building upon the experimentation set forth in the 30s of using a score to enhance the characters and the plot, instead of merely as reinforcement. In the 1950s, Jazz was becoming more popularized, and opened up new possibilities in films; where before, jazz had only been used in animated films and musicals, it had never before been used in the mainstream genre of films in the 1930s and 40s. The use of jazz served more than one purpose, one being that it made the films more contemporary, and it also made orchestration less expensive.

In the 1960s, jazz was still being used to score films, the use of which led to the first movie to use a rock soundtrack, Insert Title Here. The 1970s didnt see much improvement in the scoring department, instead, it was spent perfecting the experimentations headed by the previous decades. Synthesized music had been experimented with in the 60s and 70s, becoming more and more compact and portable, but also still expensive and not widely used in films because of their price and size. But by the 1980s, Synthesizers were self-sustaining, portable, and affordable, and the use of them in films launched a musical revolution. As Synthesizers are capable of producing and mimicking many sounds, other instruments as well as non-musical sounds, composers and musicians were now able to produce more sounds with less effort and less instruments. One instrumentalist could theoretically perform the entire score for a film. The now widespread use of synthesizers also allowed for pop and contemporary rock songs to be used in films, which helped launch the industry forward, and by the 1990s, synthesizers were used less and less for their musical mimicry, and more for their ability to mimic other sounds such as animals, cars, fire engines, etc. Violins are widely used in film to elicit fear from the audience. Violins are more versatile that they seem; they can be plucked, sawed, drumsticks can be beat against them, hands can be beat against them, virtually anything a creative composer can think of can be done to a violin. And any instrument, for that matter. Music can also be used to help the audience understand a character better. For instance, in one of my most favorite film scores, the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes. Hans Zimmer got very creative with this score, stating that he wanted the

audience to get a small glimpse of what was going on inside Sherlocks head. Parts of the score can be described as plucky and discordant, and this was Zimmers plan for the music. As the character of Sherlock is incredibly intelligent, but socially inept for the most part, and intelligent even to the point of potential awkwardness inside his own head, Zimmer wanted the audience to feel that chaos beyond what was actually shown on screen. He wanted the audience to feel the same disharmony within the character, the same painful discomfit that the character experiences, and so he reflected that in the instruments chosen to score the film. Zimmer also enlisted the help of his friend Diego Stocco, a genius instrumentalist. Stocco is an experimental instrumentalist and created a monstrosity he fondly named the Experibass. The Experibass is a double bass to which he attached Violin and Viola necks, and used a cacophony of tools, [including a fork, drumstick, large spoon and drum kick,] against to create different sounds. This instrument was one of the key elements in creating the score for Sherlock Holms. And while music is imperative to making a good and memorable film, Music has also been an attention-grabbing tool in marketing as well. Music is used most prominently in TV commercials to brand products. Some of the best examples of this are the Budweiser and Ipod commercials. The older ipod commercials featured silhouettes of people dancing to music. The commercial was saying Hey, this is our product, this is what you can do with it, and this is what youll look like while youre using our product. The commercials would have upbeat, popular songs that the people featured in the commercial could dance

energetically to. Those commercials were branded by the memorable dancing and solidly colored backgrounds as well as the music used in them. As for the Budweiser commercials, their newer strategy is obviously aimed more toward men. The newer commercials often feature a handsome younger man with a classically dashing mustache walking through a sea of people at a high society party full of people dressed to the nines that looks to be taking place during the 1930s. Theres usually a big band playing a modern jazzy or virtually unknown indie song made to sound like it was from a previous decade, and the man will usually have a Budweiser beer with one of the members of the band. The use of the music and the message it conveys in these commercials is that if their target audience were to drink their product, they would become classy and high society, be surrounded by beautiful people and fun, as well as be thought of as a god. The message in these commercials would not come across as such without the music they chose to play in it. And as such, with many of these commercials, it acts as reverse marketing as well. The song gets recognized, people decide they like it, so they look it up and find it on YouTube. They favorite it, recommend it to friends, and the song gets more attention, as does the commercial itself because people will initially associate the song with the commercial it was featured in.

Resources
Information about Diego Stocco http://www.behance.net/gallery/Experibass/312989 published September 4th, 2009 Information on music in films http://www.twyman-whitney.com/film/essentials/musichistory.html Silent Films http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_film Published March 31st 2009