How Your Views Are Manipulated by Sound
Thoughts on Music in Documentaries and Videos
You are watching a documentary. You know it is a good program that is well-respected and praised for its objectivity. It features precise statistics that are accurately explained, invites the best specialists to provide their insights, and uses pictures and videos to illustrate the points.
What's more, thanks to the video you will be able to gain an objective view of a complex topic. It will even give you ideas for resources to help you expand your knowledge. That is usually what you look for in good content.
However, you missed something. You overlooked the subtle music and sounds that contribute to creating a specific atmosphere in your inner and outer spaces at given moments. Documentaries and videos are complex pieces of content. When addressing specific topics, the vast majority of them accompany your journey into knowledge with melodies or music that are rather easy to notice.
Some impact your heartbeat, some your mood, and the most famous ones even put images in your mind that are not on the screen. Yet, how and why they do this is not always simple to figure that out. Visual content easily dominates our minds, while sound seems insignificant and sometimes nonexistent.
A documentary may be visually perfect or have great interviewees, but sometimes it is actually the melodies that are doing all the work. Melodies can influence you with their subtle yet constant presence. You are not necessarily watching a documentary that simply wants to give you a clear picture of a political, societal, or historical topic. More often than not, you are watching a subtle ideological vehicle.
Of course, producers and creators will explain that they just tried to make it more entertaining by adding music. And they are not wrong, it works. However, melodies and music have other effects as well. To make someone look like a rock star, they will add a touch of AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Guns N’ Roses, or Metallica. To evoke emotion, they will use poignant lyrics, evocative melodies, or sad, heartbreaking songs.
There are melodies for every sentiment. If songs are not suitable for a specific content, there is a huge and wonderful collection of classical music that can be added to make you feel a certain way.
As the proverb says, “The devil is in the details.”
Very good. Although it is well established in film theory that the soundtrack of a film is where most of the ideology happens, I enjoyed this. My view is that music is an emotional shortcut; documentary scores thread discontinuous interviews, supplying an 'unspoken' commentary that fills in the gaps and clarifies what might be ambiguous. Personally, I like Rick Altman's view: synchronised sound ventriloquises the image, making us credit the on-screen dummy for feelings and meanings whispered by an off-screen institution (see his "Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism.”). With that, I have two interesting questions for you:
1) Doane’s “effacement of work” and Gorbman’s principle of inaudibility argue the mix is built to hide itself; the spectator is meant not to notice the soundtrack’s construction. If concealment is structural, can “critical listening” ever be more than an academic ideal?
2) Apparatus and suture theory insist the image/sound dispositif produces subjectivity. Altman calls synchronised sound a ventriloquist act that persuades viewers of their own freedom while speaking for them. Where, in that scheme, could an independent listener stand? And as a follow-on, Altman notes the soundtrack can split and complicate the spectator, opening contradictions rather than papering them over. Does your view here allow for music that resists or destabilises the film’s overt line?
Look forward to your response!
-Andrew.
Have a counter thought, that really like, if things are done right, then God is in the details.