The Role of Sound and Music in Modern Cinema Essay

The Role of just and Music in Modern Cinema - Essay ExampleThis paper discrubes the most important effect the coming of sound had on screenplays was that screenwriters were now able to use dialogue and give their characters a voice.To straighten out a conclusion a distinction can exactly be made regarding a directors specific stylistic and aesthetic choices within the respective crafts. And as the development of sound everyplace the decades has shown, the advent of new technologies, train theory and criticism, audiences and genre expectations, studio interests, marketing issues, casting, social movements, trends and fashions can all influence a directors reasoning behindhand the individual convention of a soundtrack. By exploring the historical development of sound in the movies, from a pianist visualising galloping horses to its first appearance in The Jazz Singer in 1927, to the masterfully executed saltation scene in Godards Band a parte, to Tarantinos post-modern usage o f popular song, it is clear that sound has developed into the equal partner of cinematography as the directors main storytelling tool. Pioneered over the decades by such versatile directors like Renoir, Godard, Hitchcock, Leone and Coppola, sound design and score have given characters a voice, locations an atmosphere, the narrative an unifying force and resulted in audiences not only being able to enjoy spell-bounding visuals, but also to appreciate a film with all its emotional, subconscious, realistic or surrealistic audio-aesthetic facets. To conclude, sound design and score cant be read as unrelated entities in a films soundtrack. Throughout the history of cinema, filmmakers have discovered that sound design and film melody are equally effective story telling tools.... The following examples show how sound has been used as a versatile and powerful storytelling tools in the movies. Sound can set up the mood for a film The opening scene of Le Mepris where shots of Brigitte Bardot s naked body are accompanied by a melancholic score that indicates that tragedy is looming. reflect a films theme The duelling banjo scene in Deliverance, where a hillbilly boy outplays a city-slicker, supports the films theme of socio-cultural differences between rude and urban America. be used as an editing tool to create rhythm The sex scene in Delicatessen where all activities in an flatcar building rhythmically adapt to the sound of coil springs under a couples bed. create suspense The aggressive string motif in Jaws indicates a cheat attack is imminent. reflect a character The light-hearted flute melody that introduces free-spirit Nobody at the beginning of My Name Is Nobody. place a film in a specific cultural and historical setting Ska, Northern Soul and 1980s pop songs make up the soundtrack of This Is England (2006) that is set in the English Skinhead scene of 1983. It has to be famous that aforementioned films are examples of how sound design and film medicinal drug (meaning both a score that is specifically composed for a film as comfortably as published music) are used as a storytelling tool. Indeed, it is hard to identify just one film that doesnt use sound design and music on its soundtrack. Hence, my argument in the following essay will be that sound design and film music dont exist separately but make up a movies aural landscape together, as they are both powerful audio storytelling tools in their own right. Furthermore, I will analyse the motivations behind individual directors different approaches towards