Music has always been a crucial element in films. In fact, a scene can have absolutely different meanings depending on the music. In this research project I tried to investigate to what extent these differences rely on the use of musical parameters such as instrumentation/timbre, melody, harmony, rhythm and tempo among others. I focused on 4 different emotions: Tension, Sadness, Rejoice and Nostalgia. The goal was to find out how these parameters can be used in order to maximise the depiction of the specific emotion being portrayed in each scene. The main source of information was the analysis of cues from various movies portraying different emotions in combination with interviews with film composers, some of them being the authors of the analysed films. All this led to the composition of new cues putting into practice
what I learned.
As a result, there are findings that suggest that to maximise the depiction of these different emotions the most important musical parameters to manipulate are tempo, harmony and instrumentation. As a research outcome, I composed music for cues for films such as Blood Diamond (2006), Luna de Avellaneda (2004) and Big Fish (2003).
