The effects of projected films on singers’ expressivity in choral performance.

Abstract

Sound synchronized with film has been influential in the delivery of filmic content since its development in 1927 with the production of The Jazz Singer (Wierzbicki, 2009; Zanuck & Crosland, 1927). Within the soundtrack, music has functionally and culturally contributed intrinsic value upon the spectator during the interpretation of a film (Tagg, 2006). As music cues can elicit particular emotions based on mode, tempo, or timbre, the cues' cultural significance in cinematic and real-world history could also contribute toward an interpretation when embedded within a film. The role of music in film and its various theories have been discussed at length and documented by both filmmakers (Hoover, 2009) and film music scholars (Brown, 1994; Burt, 1994; Gorbman, 1987). However, it has not been until recently that researchers have begun to explore this film music phenomenon more objectively through empirical research. These studies have focused primarily on the emotional (Bullerjahn & Guldenring, 1994; Tan, Spackman, & Wakefield, 2008), physiological (Thayer & Levenson, 1983), interpretive (Bolivar, Cohen, & Fentress, 1994), and cognitive (Boltz, 2004; Boltz, Schulkind, & Kantra, 1991) responses of the spectator.A central finding regarding the effect of music within film is that music can affect one's interpretation, perception, and response toward a film's narrative (Lipscomb & Kendall, 1994; Marshall & Cohen, 1988; Vitouch, 2001). Often, these responses can be influenced by internal and external relationships between film and music (Cohen, 2014). A deeper understanding of how the brain processes information from multiple sensory in order to formulate an interpretation from a film can be explored through Cohen's congruence-associationist model (CAM). Based on one kinesthetic (human motion), two visual (visual surface and text), and three aural (dialogue, sound effects, and music) channels, this multimodal system incorporates a bottom-up and top-down process to form a conscious filmic experience within a working narrative. Structural characteristics, independent of the other sensory channels, can correspond with one another in a similarly structured modality, causing an interactive relationship between two or more modalities in a temporal environment. This structural congruence process (internal) can provide focus to one modality (domain), often from the primacy of the visual modality, while matching structures from a second modality such as music. Temporal structures in music could come in the form of accents, strong and weak beats, or phrasing segments, whereas structures in film could include analysis of temporal patterns, motion, and segmentation (Cohen, 2010). When information from both channels perceptually correspond through accent alignment (Lipscomb, 2005) or crossmappings of auditory and spatiotemporal dimensions (Eitan & Granot, 2006), the relationship is known to be cross-modally congruent. For example, cross-modality congruency can be considered a match when the temporal structures of an ascending music scale with crescendo correspond with the structures of an enlarging visual projected on a screen (Iwamiya & Ozaki, 2004). When these channels perceptually differ, an incongruent relationship between the channels has occurred. Regardless, through the bottom-up processing, congruency is ultimately perceived in the working narrative.Subsequently, each modality can have meaning when experienced alone. This meaning can be derived from associations (external) and stored and retrieved in the long-term memory. Meaning in music can be derived from personal or cultural experiences. A piece of music could infer sadness, a particular time of year, a traditional ceremony, or a main motive heard earlier in a film representing a specific character. Through top-down processing, the combination of isolated meaning from each combined modality, such as visual and music, could alter an interpretation that would otherwise be different from meaning derived from a modality in isolation. …