“Musical suggestions”
The interface of a musical score, only images and words is absolutely necessary to complete the rhythm, the environment of a story. Music, a melody, just a pace suitable to accompany the images do not leave the audience bewildered and perhaps even annoyed. There are sounds appropriate to fill the images that scroll across the screen (city, country, river, forest, sea, animals), but not enough. Missing the other hand, the melody, the underlines, the emotion that only music can give.
The musical sounds to the movies are nothing more than feelings, that is internal to the sphere of psycho-physical human reactions to external stimuli produced by the encounter between images and sound. And they are carriers of cinematic vision. In a film full of action, leaps, and variations of plot twists, what we perceive as we had no music, would create a vacuum, a 'expectations, and if such failure is like nailing the film, its image a frame that at times we no longer recognize as his own. His absence may even get a little to alter the colors and the proportions. More deeply the emotions and the sense that the film aims to produce.
I could say better than the perception of the viewer, to flourish, it requires a background tone, a sort of carpet of sound where you can comfortably lay. Is to be moved, frightened for both. The ear, therefore, has its own requirements. The viewer is always looking at any story is going through a thread to which to refer a clue with which to organize the mass of sounds to which it is subjected. If this fails, you alter the balance and dial in the sound of unwanted noise prevails, indifferent to the ear when it comes to wound him. However, if such a reading is ensured, any increase in complexity, every invention, every failure of predictability become acceptable, rather they are an essential source of enrichment.
As he wrote years ago, Alberto Cavalcanti (a great film scholar lived at the turn of the nineteenth / twentieth century) "It seems that the film does not touch the sound intelligence, but speaks instead of something more profound and innate." Even today, after so many years and many movies, his words have a profound meaning for those who reflect on the meaning of cinema.
The sounds, in fact, belong to the same world of visual elements and can hardly interfere with the viewer's interest for them. The fact remains that the spectator during viewing is free to divest certain sounds of their natural substance so that it no longer refer to the physical universe from which it flows. The cinema is technical device. And music and image (which are a mix of technique and creativity) are dependent on each other relentlessly.
anno
41 n. 367
