Some say music is a universal language that transcends all cultural barriers. Film is one of the few media that have combined music with imagery to create truly powerful experiences for viewers of all cultures around the world. The attention-grabbing power of sound effects, the extremes of emotion and insight added by musical underscoring, and the new cinematic media that have come about through the advent of music and sounds effects make it clear that music—along with sound effects—has made significant contributions to the development of cinema.
Sound effects alone have made significant contributions to the development of cinema through Foley effects, through spoken dialogue, and through their combined application in films. The advent of sound allowed for the use of Foley effects such as footsteps and the movement of characters’ clothing, and this added weight and realism to cinema in a way hitherto impossible to achieve. Spoken dialogue expanded the number and kinds of stories that could be told on the screen, making cinema a medium capable of being more specific with its details for audiences. Both Foley effects and spoken dialogue, combined with canned sound effects, began to shift the nature of cinema as the industry continued to grow and shape culture and audiences’ perception of the world.
Combined with and separate from sound effects, music itself in the form of film scoring has made significant contributions to the development of cinema through subtle underscoring to speed up or slow down scenes, through revealing insight and internal emotion for characters and events, and by adding excitement to the action. The movie King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, made use of all of these techniques to achieve a kind of mood unprecedented at the time of its 1933 premiere. Subtle underscoring allowed the storytellers to create a sometimes eerie mood and sometimes a romantic and warm atmosphere. Through musical scoring, the underlying motivations and affections of the main love interests were made clear to audiences long before the characters themselves understood how they felt, standing on the deck of the ship speaking softly to each other late at night. Finally, the beating drums and tribal music added to the epic nature of the struggle between man and nature and intensified the action scenes, bringing Kong to life. Musical scoring has added greater life into cinema than could have been achievable without an original sound track.
Music along with sound effects has made significant contributions to the development of cinema in that it has allowed for the advent of features that rely heavily on sound such as musicals, cartoons (both hand-drawn and computer-generated), and music videos. Musicals rely heavily upon music; they are built upon it and cannot survive without its presence and have the same meaning. Cartoons and computer-generated films are not real and therefore produce no sound on their own. Visual effects such as cartoons and computer-generated films require sound so that the audience will be able to suspend disbelief, so that the images they are watching seem to breathe and have weight. Music videos, like musicals, cannot exist and have the same meaning without music and sound effects. The audio aspect of the medium affects almost every other technical and artistic aspect of the film making process for music videos: the cutting of the film itself is arranged so as to coincide with the rhythm of the music being played. Musicals, cartoons, and music videos owe their very existence, development, and survival to the contributions made by music and sound effects to cinema.
The attention-grabbing power of sound effects, the extremes of emotion and insight added by musical underscoring, and the new cinematic media that have come about through the advent of music and sounds effects make it clear that music—along with sound effects—has made significant contributions to the development of cinema. Perhaps music is one of the main reasons that film has become one of the most universal media for people of all cultures around the world. Even beyond its influence on film, music has always been a wonderful mystery and definitely deserves a place alongside mathematics as being a universal language that transcends all cultural barriers to unite humanity in a way no other medium can.