{Sound & Film} Theory of Musical Multimedia by Nicholas Cook
Nicholas Cook, a British musicologist, believes that music has the same position of importance with other mediums. Music is a relatively autonomous system, by cooperating with other mediums, such as picture and text, in order to participate in the construction of cinematic effects (Cook, 2000). In Analysing Musical Multimedia, Cook presents a deep analysis of multimedia theory among music, motion pictures and words. He provides an example of music applied in Psycho (1960), to explain how music can work as an indirect discourse: the onscreen sound dissolves when the music remains and correspond to the motion pictures, the repetitive music rhythm presents protagonist’s thought of “seeking out” something. Cook believes that music, same as other “media” such as picture and text, is already playing a subsidiary role of expressing something, including characters’ feelings (Buhler, 2019).
In the chapter of “Multimedia as Metaphor”, Cook has directly explained the relationship between film music and the character personal development. He claims that “To see the music as expressing the characters’ inner thoughts is to naturalize the latter, to suggest that they have some kind of priority over the music.” (Cook, 2000, p. 86). Based on this significant quotation, 3 factors are effecting whether music can develop the psychological movement of film characters.
- Generalized Musical Expression
The music itself is difficult to define a specific meaning when it is isolated to listen, especially pure music. Cook explains his arguments with the writings of two philosophers: Stephen Davies and Peter Kivy. In Kivy words, only the composer and someone acquainted with him can understand the exact expressive meaning of the music (Cook, 2000). Thus, the audience cannot receive the exact meaning of the music or the composer’s intention only by listening. Because the composed music can also be empty of meaning, a specific meaning can be created by interacting with other mediums.
However, the music itself still “present the appearances of emotions” (Cook, 2000, p. 90). Musical elements such as instrumentation, rhythm, dynamic and tempo are the factors which affect the listeners. Through the orchestration or composed musical elements, the audience can still define the general emotions, such as happiness and sadness.
Realising the appearances of the expressed emotions is still important because it helps to build up a general concept of the music, in order to guess its complex emotion when interacting with the visual character.
2. Narrative
Besides editing and mise-en-scene, the narrative is the most fundamental factor to organize a film at a high level. A well-structured narrative can establish causality, time, and spectacle, at the same time, it allows the audience to believe that the characters in the story have thoughts and feelings (Buhler, 2019). As mentioned above, music could contain “no meaning”, or express simple emotions. If music needs to express a complex emotion such as love, sorrow and jealousy, it requires formal objects such as characters (Cook, 2000). Thus, film characters as the common agents of cause and effect in the narrative become a key factor to determine whether music can help to create their psychological movement.
Music relates to feeling. If the plot does not organize well, music becomes useless to convey or focalise character’s inner thought, since the audience does not understand the story and cannot “feel” it from the story.
3. Interaction between music and the motion picture
The “Metaphor Model” is a concept to explain a proper interaction between music and motion picture. To operate the logic of metaphor, music emerges its properties to the visual images and vice versa. By carrying out Sandra Marshall and Annabel Cohen’s “Congruence-Associationist” Model, Cook (2000) uses their theoretical model to support his argument: Music and visual images should share an “enabling similarity”. For instance, S.A. Mokin’s “Stepan Razin’s Appeal” is a painting, which selected to be the album cover of Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony. Both of them are the products of the 19th Century, and they evoke national sentiment (Cook, 2000). By enabling similarity, music absorbs meaning from the visual images, at the same time, it gives greater definition and structures the emotion to the film.
Yet, Cook also points out that the emergence of signification in multimedia should neither completely overlap nor totally diverge. Music and motion pictures should only interact reciprocally in a limited intersection in order to create a bond of empathy between audience and film characters. Thus, Cook (2000) claims that “Music serves as the supplementary role, underlining or projecting something that already exists” (p.86).
Reference
Cook, N. (2000). Analysing musical multimedia. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
Buhler, J. (2019). Theories of the soundtrack (Oxford music/media series).
ATTENTION: This article is edited from my past university Honours Project.
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