1. From Silents to Sound
Music in Film
May term 2004
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2. Introduction
Claudia Gorbman traces the development of film music from its use in silent film through the development of the classical Hollywood film score.
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3. Four arguments that explain the inclusion of music in the film genre
Historical
Pragmatic
Aesthetic
Psychological and anthropological
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4. The Historical Argument
Association with melodrama
Physical context of early cinema
Music in other dramatic arts
The subject matter of film
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5. The pragmatic argument
Music drowned out the clatter of film machinery
Music was used on set during filming to help get the actors and actresses into character and to help them ignore the activity around them.
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6. The Aesthetic Argument
Music compensated for the lack of speech
Music restored a sense of spatial depth
Music provided rhythm that interacted with the pace of visual movement
Music helped to imbue the “dead” images with some of the life they lost in the process of mechanical reproduction
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7. The Psychological and Anthropological Argument
Music mediates against the ghostly nature of cinema
Music permitted a deeper psychic investment in the world of silent film
Music evoked the collective community
Music bound the audience together into a community of listener-participants
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8. Some General Considerations
The power to represent the human voice revolutionized cinema
The recorded human voice fleshed out the human body on screen
The recorded voice endowed the body with a “surplus of reality”
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9. Sound in Film develops
1926: Don Juan, first feature-length Vitaphone film—recorded musical soundtrack; no synchronous sound or dialogue
1927: The Jazz Singer included both a recorded musical soundtrack and synchronous sound
: part- and all-talkies are made while the industry invests huge $ in developing sound technology
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10. Sound Technology
Before all sound was direct, which required the actors to stay close to the microphone and limited the spatial dimensions that sound would later add, and because the camera had to stay in a booth, it limited photographic possibilities as well
Sound tech didn’t yet allow soundtrack editing
1931: background music during a talkie appears
1932: separate tracks for speech, music & effects are used
: fully diegetic sound film comes to stay, and with it a system of conventions is developed that becomes the backbone for the Classical Hollywood film score approach
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