The Film Sound Track

Catalog description

Throughout recorded history, music has been an important part of human dramatic expression in ways that transcend mere spoken words and visual imagery. For more than a century of the motion picture art, music has played an integral, yet often unnoticed, role in defining the filmgoing experience. The main objective of this course is for students to develop skills in analyzing the sound track of a film, music's role in the sound track, and the relation of non-diegetic sound to image (especially relating to music) on small-scale and large-scale (narrative) levels. The course develops critical listening and viewing skills, but it also offers a particular extension of film history scholarship, one that focuses on the three nodal points in the history of film sound: the introduction of sound, the introduction of stereo, and the introduction of digital sound. We will explore the ways in which each of these technological advances affects the structural realtionships that occur among three relatively autonomous components of the soundtrack--dialogue, music and sound-effects--with particular focus on non-diegetic music.