Film as text – music & soundtrack
Here are a couple of things I tried last week when teaching the importance and the role played by music in films. What I first intended on doing was showing different scenes in the film where the music plays an important part. The problem with this approach is that the students can also use their knowledge of the film, as well as the character’s reactions to gauge the purpose of the music in the scene. I then hit upon the idea of using the cd soundtrack from the film which would isolate the music itself, eliminating the vision as well as the character’s voices. As the cd is difficult to acquire, I decided to go to amazon.com and use the samples of selected tracks from the soundtrack. The students then had to decide what the filmmaker was trying to achieve with each piece of music and the characteristics of the music.
Another activity I thought could work was getting different examples of recognisable music which are trying to elicit the same emotion in viewers. Then get the students to identify the similarities between each piece.
If other people have further ideas about teaching the music in films, I’d love to hear them.
