Associationism and musical soundtrack phenomena

Abstract

It is often assumed that musical soundtracks influence the interpretation of film. Film music theorists further assume that such musical influences depend on the combination of meanings derived from musical and film material. The present article suggests that these assumptions about film music fall within an associationist tradition and translate into testable hypotheses about mental function. This view is supported first by a discussion of the reliance of musical meaning on experience and then by a review of three recent experiments which investigate the influence of music on film meaning. Experiment 1 uses simple musical and visual materials and measures one affective meaning at a time. Experiment 2 uses slightly more complex materials and measures multiple scales of affective meaning employing the semantic differential technique. Experiment 3 uses realistic complex materials and measures both affective and denotative meaning. In all studies, the direct influence of musical meaning on film meaning was often observed. To accommodate the data, it is proposed that musical and film information independently activate associations of both affect and denotation and that meaning at any point in time is the resultant of the total associations generated. This foundation provides a basis for examining further assumptions and hypotheses about the functions of film music, thus revealing facts about film music necessary for future cognitive modelling.