One of the most underestimated aspects of music is the concept of time. This is an absolutely essential topic for any kind of music but together with visual media it has a special meaning.
If we’re only considering music for the musics sake then the time has to do with the harmonic rhythm, melodic content and the accompaniment. Let’s brake this down: the harmonic rhythm provides the structure of the piece, the melody gives it the recognizable content, and the accompaniment the feel. This creates three levels of timing: the broad rhythm of the piece created by the harmonic movement, the recognizable rhythm created by the melody and the micro-timing that lies within the accompaniment. This micro-timing is why some musicians are considered superb while others are just good. We are taking milliseconds here and how that makes us feel.
When we’re watching a film, we generally don’t want to be thinking about the music, the music is supposed to create a backdrop for the film, create the setting, provide an atmosphere that wouldn’t exist solely through the pictures. Mainly that has to do with the fact that our hearing is an often underestimated part of the film experience. Sound is what really draws us into another world. We don’t have to focus on sound, we can hear several very different aural concepts at the same time and recognize all of them while seeing is much more limited and forces us to shift or focus back and forth if we are supposed to see several things simultaneously.
Because sound is so inescapable the music can either help or contradict a scene without the audience really having to pay close attention, it just sort of happens.
Pacing
When working with visual media directors will often choose fast paced music for fast paced images or for images that are a little slow and need the feeling of speeding up. Personally I don’t think this is the right way of looking at it.
If a scene is slow, let it be slow, if it feels boring, edit it down, break it up or otherwise use your imagination to make it feel the way you want, but don’t expect the music to magically just fix a boring scene. It won’t. Slapping “Paint it Black” by the Rolling Stones over a scene of a teenager depressed in his room will not do anything for your film except get the viewer to appreciate the genius of the Rolling Stones. But that doesn’t make the scene necessarily better.
This is a problem that a lot of films by young filmmakers have: they use songs, because it’s the everyday language and it is what they are used to hearing. But does it really lift the film or does it merely speed up the impression of the film?
This is where time is so important: if you can manage to give your viewer “a good time” (sic!) then the timing of the music will greatly be determined by the actual content of the scene rather than the speed.
Creating Demo Tracks
Because of the above it is so difficult to create demo tracks that are meaningful to a director because you’re constantly trying to create tracks that work by themselves, but they follow the inherit “restrictions” of music: symmetrie and harmonic rhythm, but a beautifully crafted piece does not necessarily mean that it will work for the picture. It may on the contrary take away by sounding “cheesy”.
Ah the difficulties of creation!