Using YouTube for comparison exercises (update)

I wrote here about the utility of YouTube for elementary comparison exercises that draw on audiovisual analysis. Students can practice some basic skills very early in semester (as they read Hearing the Movies, chapter 1) while isolating that work from the complex narrative contexts of feature films. The pedagogical goal—making students aware of their learned viewing habits—is crucial to studying film music and sound productively.

Alas, much has happened since 2011, when that post was made. Specifically, three of the post's five video clips have been deleted from YouTube. Because of this unpredictability, I have rewritten the 2011 post here in generic form.

Task: describe different visual tracks as they relate to a single audio track (different performances of the same musical composition).

Goals: Make students aware of their learned viewing habits and provide early practice in describing sound in relation to image.

Justification: The format aids practice of some basic skills while isolating that work from the complex narrative contexts of feature films. The limits of the musical text make the sound track act as a control, against which to compare different collections of images. Tempo remains a variable in the audio track as well.

Procedure: Begin by playing a recording of the composition without any video track. Point out or discuss simple formal articulations, so that markers will be available to aid detailed analysis and discussion of the video examples.

Version no. 1: the static image.

These are of course very easy to construct. A portrait of the composer, an image of an appropriate ensemble, or reproduction of an LP or CD cover will do, all preferably with some black space surrounding the image. It is also not difficult to find videos like this on YouTube, undoubtedly because they require the least effort on the part of the person wanting to post a dub of a recording. 

Show without warning the class about the static image, as the goal is for students to be placed in the position where they pay attention to their attention. Once they guess that the image is probably not going to change, attention shifts away from it to the music. A point of discussion could be to relate the starkness of the background to the audiovisual sparseness of a video clip that is only music.

Version no. 2: a slide show of images.

Questions to consider: How are changes to a new image timed to the music track? Are music and image completely, partly, or not synchronized? What is the effect of any lack of synchronization @ important form articulations in the music? (If images had changed at those moments, the images would suddenly have seemed relatively "important", leading to speculation about reasons for that importance. Something similar happens when a slide is onscreen noticeably longer than others.) What kind of narrative content (or expectation for narrative continuity) is provoked by the slide show? (It is not important to come up with answers -- what is important is to notice the fact of imposing—or trying to impose—narrative continuity on the images.)

Version 3: a different slide show of images for comparison.

Here students should be free to consider questions of both intention and design and to evaluate. Is the second version better done, more effective, than the first, and if so, how is that achieved? Does either version show signs of a rhetorical goal (point of view that is being pushed)?

These are three of the five options I presented in the 2011 post; I discuss the other two here: link. Of course, the different tasks can be mixed and matched or selected as the needs of a class dictate. The three presented here "flip" the commutation test from Hearing the Movies, chapter 1, by making the music the same but changing the video track. This is undoubtedly a more primitive exercise than our study of different musics for the “temptation” scene in Psycho (pp. 30-33), but the ability to think of a specific piece (or passage) of music as the benchmark against which to examine changes in the image track is a skill that is routinely called on in more sophisticated analysis, as well.

Changes in the Tags (Labels)

I have revised the blog's "Chapter" tags.

If you look at the right-hand side of the screen, below "Blog Archive," you'll find our long list of "Tags." Some of them identify topics ("film form", "leitmotif", "home studio"), others name films discussed (Glory, Prisoner of Zenda), name people ("Victor Herbert", "Katharine Hepburn"), or name institutions, things, and places ("theaters", "cue sheets", "Kinetophone", "Berlin").

Early in the blog's history we used a tag called "pedagogy" to call attention to material particularly suitable for classroom use. That tag is still in the list, but I have rewritten another set, "Chapters," to pinpoint information by chapter. The "1e-" tags refer to the first edition; "2e-" tags refer to the second edition.

Note: I did not attempt to label the large number of posts containing a variety of documentary materials. These are concentrated in the period from July 2009 to March 2010; they are relevant mainly to Chapters 4 and 5 (early film sound and music practices; the transition period). The tags "early cinema," "exhibition," "music for the picture," "source material," and "talking pictures" are efficient ways to get at certain aspects of this material.

YouTube analysis-comparison exercise

The sheer volume of items posted to YouTube makes it easy to construct elementary comparison exercises that draw on audiovisual analysis. The point of the exercise is to give students practice very early in semester (as they read HtM Ch. 1) but isolate the work from the complex narrative contexts of feature films and from the students' learned viewing habits for films.

The task is to describe different visual tracks as they relate to a single audio track. I chose performances of a musical composition because they're easy to find on YouTube and often are relatively stable there (that is, not taken down), but more so because the limits of the musical text allow us to treat the sound track more or less as a control, against which we can more easily compare different collections of images, still and moving. Tempo remains a variable in the audio track as well, of course, but we will minimize that by looking first at three visualizations of the same recorded musical performance.

The composition is "Morgenstimmung" (Morning Mood), the first movement in Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46. The design is simple: A - A' (expanded) - A'' (as coda or ending section). Here are the corresponding moments in musical notation (piano reduction only).



Timings for the three sections in the performance by the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan are included at the top of the next example, which charts the principal harmonic changes through the movement. (The image is a thumbnail -- click on it to see the original.)


Version no. 1: link.  [Link is broken; checked on 3-08-2024.]  One might think of this as a "control" since the image track is static, nothing but a title card. In fact, however, this is in some ways the most difficult version to study because the students must be able to pay attention to their attention, so to speak. Once they guess that the image is probably not going to change, attention shifts away from it to the music, in a radical version of what Claudia Gorbman calls the "pure cultural musical code," that is, music as performance. A clever student who refuses the let the image track go entirely may relate the starkness of the black background to the audiovisual sparseness of a video that is only music.

Version no. 2: link.  [Link is broken; checked on 3-08-2024.] The same recording (played twice!) with a slide show of images. Questions to consider: how are changes to a new image timed to the music track? (Generally, they avoid synchronization -- images change shortly before the downbeat of a new bar. Exceptions @ about 2:40.) What is the effect of the lack of synchronization @ important form articulations in the music? (If images had changed at those moments, the images would suddenly have seemed relatively "important", leading to speculation about reasons for that importance. Something similar happens in a couple cases where the slide is onscreen noticeably longer than the others.) What kind of narrative content (or expectation for narrative continuity) is provoked by the slide show? (The obvious one would be the minimal narrative of dawn in many different locales -- but here again there are a few exceptions, slides that obviously depict mid-day. One might also ask whether chronological continuity is important -- one slide of a darkened tree and a pre-dawn planet seems out of place. In the case of narrative, it is not important to come up with answers -- what is important is to notice the fact of imposing (or trying to impose) narrative continuity on the images.) The ending of the first playthrough is obviously clumsy in the image track (the photo of Grieg appears twice in short order and then the slide show starts up a third time a few seconds before the piece ends). 

Version 3: link.  [Link checked on 3-08-2024.]An upgrade to the slide show that makes a very good comparison for no. 2. Here the poster is playing with simple effects applied to a video of a fire in a fireplace. Because the editing is plainly done by someone (no. 2's slide show could have been an app on autopilot), the questions of intention and design arise more seriously. (If students know about it, a discussion of the associations brought up by the context of the YouTube "Kaminfeuer" trope could be interesting -- here again, it's not the information that is important but the realization of the power of these external associations to shape or guide the viewing -- very much like genre expectations in feature films.)

Version no. 4: link.  [Link checked on 3-08-2024.]Not Karajan. By comparison with no. 2, both performance and slide show seem frenetic.

Version no. 5: link.  [Link is broken; checked on 3-08-2024.] Here is what Gorbman really meant by the "pure" code in feature films: a filmed performance of the piece by an orchestra. The camera is static. Compare to this performance that has multiple cameras and was edited: link.

Classroom resources

A pointer to our "Classroom Resources" page on the main HtM website: Syllabi and other materials.

Here's the syllabus for Jim's large section general course based on HtM: UGS303, fall 2010.

Here's a link to David's summer course for which HtM was the textbook: MUS 337, ss 2009.

We're happy to add links to syllabi for courses using HtM. Please send links or write to us (see "Contact us" under Contributors).

Scene Analysis Assignment

For the assignment, I require the students to select at least two scenes and the scenes must total at least six minutes of film.

They begin by making a complete shot list and sound track description for the scene. For each shot, I ask them to provide:

• A time code for each shot.


• A shot description, which should include the characters in (or object of) the shot, the framing (LS, MS, CU, etc.), any significant camera movements, and any image transition other than a cut (dissolve, wipe, etc.). A brief description of the action can also sometimes be useful.


• A complete transcription of the dialogue in the shot.


• A listing and description of the sound effects. (In an action sequence from recent films, it is unlikely that the list will be completely exhaustive, but try to be as complete as possible.)
• A listing and description of the music.


• General remarks, which contain more detailed comments about aspects of the sound track, including interactions among the components and how they interact with the images/narrative.

Filling out the form requires making at least four passes through the scene, attending on each pass to one element:

1. Time code and shot description
2. Dialogue
3. Sound effects
4. Music

.
Here is what the scene analysis blank looks like:

I distribute the blanks as an Excel file. I also give them some exemplars, which are provided as jpgs below. After the students have filled out their forms for the scenes, I will ask them to write a short paper based on these analyses.

The first examplar is the terrace scene from Rebecca.


(We analyze this scene using musical notation in HtM, pp. 218-21.)

* * * * *

The second is the main title and Trinity in a jam, from The Matrix:




We analyze this sequence from The Matrix on pp. 223-24 of HtM, albeit in much less detail. Note the large number of shots (and short average shot length) in this sequence. Also this is a very busy sound track, and at times it is difficult to know whether a particular event belongs to the sound effects track or the music track. A version of the script is located here. (Correction: HtM refers to the agents collectively as Mr. Smiths; according to both IMDB and the script, however, the other two agents in this scene are named Mr. Brown and Mr. Jones.)

* * * * *

The third example consists of two scenes from 42nd Street.



Neither of these dialogue scenes has music. The number of sound effects is also quite low.

Week 8 Lectures

This week's lectures focused on scene analysis. The text has three chapters given over to scene analysis: Chapters 6, 7 and 9 [1st edition; in the 2d edition this material is spread over three of the historical chapters: 6, 7, and 10]. Besides giving the students an overview of the scene types, I also wanted this week's lectures to help prepare students for making scene analyses of their own, as this is the task for their second paper.

I began by following the divisions of the chapters and then formalizing some implicit subdivisions of scene types:



(NB: "Supradiegetic" is a term Rick Altman uses in The American Film Musical to describe the characteristic performance situation in a film musical, where the singing is diegetic but the accompaniment is rendered, usually after an audio dissolve from diegetic piano, by a nondiegetic orchestra. The performance is thus partially diegetic and partially nondiegetic and for Altman is representative of the idealized realm of romance.)

I then sorted the scenes according to how they deployed the sound track.



We then looked at a number of examples.

For main titles: Meet Me in St. Louis, Broadway Melody, 42nd Street, and The Apartment. I actually ran each of these examples well into the first scene so we could talk about how the main title dovetails with the establishing sequence and how the establishing sequence serves to set up the first scene. Music runs right through the establishment sequence of Meet Me in St. Louis and covers all of the opening dialogue scene in the kitchen until Agnes begins to sing, when it shifts to accompanying the song. After opening with a brief bit of the title song, Broadway Melody continues "Give My Regards to Broadway" over an establishing shot of the city; the music ends for an exterior shot of the music store, where we hear snatches of music coming from the store; with the cut into the store, we hear a cacophony of diegetic musical sound. The scene will eventually end with a performance of "Broadway Melody." 42nd Street, like Meet Me in St. Louis follows the classic two-theme title music, the title song opening the credits, with a shift to "You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me" when the credits turn to the actors. The music returns to the title song for the beginning of the establishing sequence, creating a three-part ternary structure (ABA') for the titles and establishing sequence considered together. As is often the case, the first extended dialogue scene, here between Abner and Dorothy, does not have music. Finally, the titles for The Apartment use a single theme. The establishment sequence, which integrated into a prologue with voiceover commentary, has new music, a march that contrasts with the lush romantic quality of the main title theme proper. The music continues until it is displaced by diegetic music coming out of Bud's apartment, just before the voiceover itself ends, marking the conclusion of the prologue.

We next compared the opening of the 1933 version of King Kong with that of the 2005 version, noting that the recent version is much, much shorter. We then also compared the final scene and end credits of these two films, so we could see how long end credits are today and how short they were in the studio era. (In fact, due to time, we did not watch all of the end credits of the 2005 version, but we watched enough of it to get the point.)

We then watched the Ländler scene from Sound of Music as an example of a performance scene before turning to two examples of montage: the montage sequence of Blood as pirate from Captain Blood and "I Wasn't Born to Follow" from Easy Rider. I then presented two action scenes: the opening of Captain Blood and the theft of the sword, from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Finally, we watched some dialogue scenes: the terrace scene from Rebecca and the opening scene between Abner and Dorothy from 42nd Street.

Week 7 Lectures

I'm a little late getting this up. This week we jumped to Chapter 8*, "Film Style and the Sound Track," and looked at style topics and leitmotifs. I do this so I can cover all of the scene types at once. Because I need space to prepare the practicum assignment, where I have students create a sound track for a short film, I have to condense the text to fit it into a basic schedule of one week per chapter. I make the adjustment primarily in week 8, which I use to cover chapters 6, 7 and 9. I will have more comments about this particular compromise in my next pedagogical post dealing with Week 8 lectures.     *[In the 2d edition, the material of chapter 8 is in chapter 4, with the exception of "Love" themes and the scene analysis from Rebecca, which are in chapter 7.]

Chapter 8 deals with leitmotifs and style topics. Both draw on the overt signifying capacities of music, with leitmotifs forming relationships that are intrinsic only to a particular work, whereas style topics apply to those relationships that transcend the particular work and are properties of style in general. In terms of signification, the meaning of a leitmotif attaches primarily to characters, places, objects and ideas of the work (or film), whereas the meaning of a style topic is not determined by the particular work, but the signifying field of style generally construed. This means that style topics can be lifted from one work and transplanted to another without affecting their signifying properties (battle music in one work continues to signify battle music in another), though it is important to recognize that this says nothing about whether the particular battle music is a good expression of its type or whether it will seem appropriate in the new context on other grounds. It just means the signification transcends the work in which it is embedded. The issue can get somewhat confusing, however, in that leitmotifs are often also instances of style topics: the heroine will be represented by a "love theme," the solider by a military march—and it is the recurrence of a particular theme and its relationship to the unfolding story that determines whether a particular usage of a style topic is also a leitmotif.

I begin my discussion with style topics, noting that music has many conventional figures. I then suggest four categories—primitive, storm, funeral, and grotesque—and play appropriate examples from Zamecnik's Sam Fox Moving Picture Music and have students do a matching exercise to show how effectively these categories still signify for us. We then examined the issue of stereotyping through style topics, looking first at the "Indian" style topic and then the Arabian or, as it was known in the early part of the century, "Oriental" topic. For the Indian topic we looked not only at the example from the Zamecnik collection (the opening of which is reproduced in HtM, p. 207) but also its very crude form in Stagecoach (see image on right), where cuts from the stage coach to the Indian's preparing to attack are underscored by abrupt musical shifts. For an excellent overview of the issues involved with this style topic, see Michael Pisani's Imagining Native America in Music (2006).

From Indians we next move to the Oriental topic, which I trace a little more extensively. The Oriental topic has a particularly long and rich history, due to a number of factors: the importance of Biblical stories to European culture; the proximity and perceived threat of Islamic culture from the Middle Ages through to the First World War; and European imperialism are three of the most significant. The signification of the Oriental topic is also broad and slippery: it was used to indicate Arabs, Turks, and Persians, but also North Africa and the Middle East in general, Jews, Moors and even Hindus and India. This broad signification was at least in part due to the fact that the primary representation was simply "other" and "primitive," which is one reason why the music could occasionally be interchangeable with other "others," such as Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese or Japanese, especially if the signification was primarily in terms of primitive and barbaric. As examples, we looked at the "Oriental Music" from the Zamecnik collection, then turned to the Blue Parrot music from Casablanca (a transcription is given in HtM, p. 206) and to three examples from Lawrence of Arabia (HtM, p. 208). The third example from Lawrence is particularly worth noting because it records a call to prayer; its seeming authentic quality can disguise a representational character that is every bit as stereotyping as the clearly composed "Oriental exotic" topic of the main theme associated with Lawrence. (I mention in passing that The Hurt Locker also makes extensive use of calls to prayer—though never as overtly as this instance in Lawrence—for much the same purpose. I will probably incorporate The Hurt Locker into a future version of this lecture.) I then turn to the opening of Black Hawk Down, where the apparently indigenous music is combined with orchestral underscore to paint a rather traditional musical representation of Somalia as other, as a dangerous and exotic place. (This example is briefly mentioned in HtM, p. 206.) Senegalese singer Baaba Maal provides the vocals, indicating again the wide signifying capabilities of style topics of the Other—as Senegal is on the opposite coast of Africa from Somalia. More could and probably should be said on this point with respect to globalization, the failures of imperialism, pan-African identity, its relation to Islam and the civil war in Somalia—all of which is to say that the signification of this scoring decision is complicated and subtle even if it is ultimately rather traditional in function. For general issues of exoticism in music, Jonathan Bellman's collection The Exotic in Western Music and Ralph Locke's Musical Exoticism serve as useful entries into the field.

In order to emphasize that diegetic status and appropriateness for the setting neither remove music from being a style topic nor diminish the signifying capacities of the music, I play the Christmas party scene from Die Hard, where a small diegetic orchestra plays a Brandenburg Concerto as background. Here, as we note in our discussion of the scene in HtM, p. 204, the music serves most obviously as a marker of class, an important thematic concern of the film. On some of the issues of the music to Die Hard, see Robynn Stilwell, "'I Just Put a Drone Under Him...': Collage and Subversion in the Score of 'Die Hard,'" Music and Letters 78.4 (1997): 551-580.

For explaining the leitmotif, I focused on two films: Captain Blood and Fellowship of the Ring. For Captain Blood we looked at how the three themes (transcribed in HtM, p. 198) become associated with Peter Blood and signify different aspects of his character. For Fellowship of the Ring, we focused on the prologue and the precise nature of the signification of the theme that arrives with the title. In fact besides for the title card, it shows up three times in the prologue: when Isildur cuts the Ring from Sauron's finger; when Isildur loses the Ring, and when Bilbo finds it. The point is that the theme is not here associated with the Ring per se but with its passing from one character to another (and indeed Howard Shore refers to the theme as "The History of the Ring"). Moreover because the theme has these broader associations it can also serve as an effective means of audiovisual phrasing: through the appearance of the theme, the music helps divide the prologue into epochs: a long opening segment concerning the history of the forging; a very brief second segment on Isildur, a longer third segment about Gollum, and a brief coda when Bilbo takes over the Ring. Each of these "audiovisual phrases" except Gollum's is initiated with a sync point of the theme with the Ring, and in general it is the way the leitmotif establishes such sync points that makes it such an effective tool for film composers.

Week 6 Lectures

This week we covered Chapter 5, Music in Film Form.*  Because it deals with relatively large spans of time, the content for this chapter is a bit more challenging to present during lecture—especially if your class is organized, as is mine, without a required screening of full films. I compromised a bit and watched the first 50 minutes or so of Casablanca, so we could discuss some of these issues of large-scale organization of film and music.

[*update: 2-23-18: The basic material of the first edition Chapter 5 that is covered here is in Chapter 6, pp. 187 ff. Because of the chronological sequence adopted for the second edition, the film examples are from around 1930. In the second edition, the establishing sequence for Meet Me in St. Louis is discussed in Chapter 7, pp. 254-55.]

I began this week's lectures talking about the differences in runtime segmentation between music and film. I followed the text in presenting the hierarchical divisions of music (motive, phrase, period, section, movement) and film (shot, scene, sequence, act). For music we then looked at the chorus of "Meet Me in St, Louis, Louis" in terms of 32-bar song form. (The sheet music itself is available here.)



For a variety of reasons, terminology for 32-bar song form is not always consistent, with the repeated A sections sometimes called "verses" on the one hand, the B section called a "bridge" or "middle eight" on the other. Since "Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis," like most Tin Pan Alley-era songs, also includes a proper verse, calling the A sections "verses" easily leads to confusion. I therefore chose to label the opening two phrases as "phrase one (A)" and "phrase two (A')"; I labeled the final phrase as "recapitulation (A")"; and retained the term "bridge (B)" for the contrasting middle section. At subphrase level, I marked out "basic idea" units of two measures rather than motives proper; the varied rhythmic repetition of the second "Louis" (which in performance is sometimes transferred to the initial "Louis" as well) creates a distinct motive that recurs in every phrase of the chorus, including the bridge.

As I noted above, "Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis" has a proper verse that precedes the chorus, which makes the chorus a section of the full song.

In terms of film form, we looked at an early segment of the film, Meet Me in St. Louis, where the song is introduced by Agnes and then passed along to Grandpa and the older teens. Here is a shot list:

From Title Song Scene—Shot List

1. LS, Agnes and others in kitchen, tracks into hallway
   
   
   
   


2. LS, Climbing stairs
   
   
   
   
   


3. MLS, Grandpa in bathroom
   
   
   
   
   


4. LS, Agnes and Grandpa, tracks following Grandpa
   
   
   
   


5. MLS, Grandpa in bedroom, at end to window
   
   
   
   


6. ELS, Street from Grandpa’s window
   
   
   
   
   


7. LS, street level
   
   
   
   

We then lined up the shots with the musical articulations:

From Title Song Scene—Shot List and Music

1. Agnes sings (AA’ beginning of bridge)
2. Middle of bridge
3. Grandpa takes over (AA’)
4. Bridge and A”
5. AA and bridge (offscreen teens)
6. Recap (A”)
7. Stretched out cadence.

One of the parallels between music and film form we can see here is that the beginning of each chorus initiates a new space (Agnes into the hallway; Grandpa in the bathroom; Grandpa in his bedroom). In each case the shift to the bridge also brings pronounced movement: Agnes climbs the stairs; Grandpa in the hallway; the teens coming to the house in the carriage. Here we can say that the film form seems to be responding to the particularities of musical phrasing; this is fairly typical in musical sequences, especially in musicals. (A brief discussion of this segment can be found in HtM, pp. 167-68.)

* * *

The remainder of the lecture for the week was taken up with screening and discussion of roughly the first half of Casablanca. Here the emphasis was on issues of larger level audiovisual phrasing and the identification of structural sync points. In terms of the audiovisual phrasing I drew attention to the nondiegetic music (and voiceover) for the opening prologue; the exclusive use of diegetic music for the early scenes at Rick's; the diegetic musical reaction to Ilsa's initial appearance and the nondiegetic stinger when Rick first sees Ilsa (the crucial sync point in the first half of the film); the audio dissolves that bookend the flashback; and the emotional fluctuations in the music as it responds to the dialogue in the scene with Ilsa that follows the flashback. If I had time, I would have carefully compared the scene where Rick and Ilsa meet (discussed in the text on pp. 102-06) with the scene between Rick and Ilsa after the flashback in terms of audiovisual phrasing and the location of sync points; I haven't completed laying out my lectures for this week, so if I can find 20-30 minutes, I may well spend the beginning of Tuesday's lecture exploring this issue.

* * *

Finally, we ended the week with the second quiz. I tried something new. Besides having the students define and discuss terms, I gave them short transitions to identify using the terminology from Chapter 4. I chose four segments from (500) Days of Summer, each lasting roughly 30 seconds, and played them three times each. Although the students were quite apprehensive about the task—with copyright issues it is difficult to give students much practice since it takes class time—they actually performed quite well. I also had them write a short essay on the party scene from the same film. Here is the question:

This scene comes from near the end of (500) Days of Summer. After having broken up with Summer, Tom meets her at a wedding of a mutual acquaintance. They seem to hit it off again, and she invites him to a party. This is the party scene, which is accompanied throughout by Regina Spektor’s “Hero.” The lyrics to the song are attached.

Note that the music is similar in form to “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis,” which we discussed in class; the large musical sections are marked in the margins. It is basically an AA’BA” song with the second BA” repeated in varied form. The first A” also repeats the lyrics of A’ whereas the final A” introduces new lyrics. The individual sections are longer than the standard 8 measures—this is common in popular music today—and each is divided into subsections (indicated by stanza breaks in the lyrics).

Write a paragraph describing the sound track of this clip paying particular attention to sync points and issues of audio visual phrasing. How is film form affected by the music in this scene? What lyrics stand out and how do these relate to the image and unfolding narrative situation? What role do the musical articulations (the beginning of sections) seem to play organizing the scene? Mention anything else you see as particularly significant or interesting in the sequence. Aim to be as complete as you can in describing the sounds and music.

Obviously, I provided a lyric sheet with musical sections indicated. I also played the sequence, which lasts a little over 3 minutes, three times. I found the students did pretty well on this question as well—although more than I would have liked had difficulty with the concept of the sync point. Nevertheless, most noticed that the beginning of the final (ironic) A section coincides with the close-up of Summer's engagement ring.

Chapter 2 Examples

Here's a list of the examples I used in class to illustrate chapter 2. I have two meetings a week, each for 75 minutes.

• Big Sleep—The introduction of Casino scene to illustrate footsteps. They increase in volume and then decrease as Bogart moves by camera. Crickets start out loud and decrease in volume, while the music from the casino starts out soft and increases in volume.


• The Matrix—beginning of the Lobby Shootout sequence. I played this up through the very beginning of shootout, so students can hear and comment on the change of music. Initially, a recurring metallic clank is synchronized with Neo's footdrops. As the sequence progresses, the clank is treated as music, and it begins to drift out of synchronization. In addition, a more naturalistic sounding footstep can be heard under the clank.


• Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse—The titles and opening sequence offer a good example of sound effects being treated musically, with an incessant, triple meter machine sound being used much like a silent film sound track. The titles open with highly dissonant music that prepare the machine noise for the sequence proper. The music is carried over into the scene briefly, where the machine noise seems to pick up the rhythm of the music. (This example is also discussed in chapter 3, pp. 67-68.)


• Shall We Dance—"Slap That Bass" begins with the metrical sound of the ship's engines, which the black engine room crew interprets musically, much to the amusement of Pete Peters aka Petrov (Fred Astaire), who soon joins in. Part of Astaire's extended solo dance sequence involves him tapping in counterpoint to various engine sounds. The opening of Love Me Tonight, which is a beautiful sequence of city sounds that come together as an extended prelude to "That's the Song of Paree," and the prison camp sequence from Captain Blood are two other excellent examples that explore the relationship of rhythm, meter, sound and music. (The sequences from Shall We Dance and Love Me Tonight are also discussed in chapter 3, p. 67.)


• Das Boot—The submarine crew attempts to evade a destroyer that is in pursuit. This sequence is good for illustrating the use of the crescendo on the sound track to build suspense. The destroyer passes over numerous times dropping depth charge, and each time we can hear the ship get gradually closer, generally culminating in the detonation of the depth charges.


• There's Something About Mary—I used the transition to the first date to illustrate the fade in and fade out. In both cases the fade is somewhat awkward, which is pedagogically useful because the relative clumsiness makes it easy for the students to recognize.


• Sleepless in Seattle—The introduction to the first botched meeting (discussed in chapter 1), where Annie talks to Becky on the phone, makes prominent use of a filter to give Becky's voice the impression of coming over the phone. For specifically musical timbre, I contrasted the difference between the sound of the solo trumpet (NB: it may actually be a bugle) in the opening of Glory to that of the orchestral trumpet section in theme to Star Wars.

Those examples, along with lectures on the various associated topics, took up the first meeting of the week.
* * *
The second meeting was devoted primarily to texture, with time reserved at the end of class for showing the two scene analyses (White, the Shooting; Atonement, Main Title and first sequence). After a quick review of the material from the first meeting of the week, I introduced and defined the various textures. I then showed the following clips as examples:

• Catch Me If You Can—I find the main title sequence to be an excellent example for illustrating all of the textures. It has extended passages using each texture except a-melodic.


• Patton—The opening speech shows speech used as monophony. Once Patton starts speaking, we hear no other sound, particularly no sound from the crowd, which had been reasonably prominent before Patton appeared. As a second example, I used the telephone conversation from Bleu discussed in the text.


• Star Wars: A New Hope IV—The opening sequence features a barrage of sound effects placed in sharp counterpoint to the music. I selected the initial portion of the boarding through Leia giving the plans to R2D2. In the first part the sound effects dominant, often completely drowning out the music, particularly in the 2-channel stereo mix that is available in my class room. The second part of the sequence (with Leia and R2), by contrast, foregrounds the music, with sound effects more distant. In addition, I also used the example of the overlapping dialogue by Radar and Colonel Blake from M*A*S*H and the opening prologue from Fellowship of the Ring, with Galadriel's overlapping Elvish and English, against the backdrop of the score.


• The example from Fellowship of the Ring also served as an effective introduction to the Melody and Accompaniment texture, as it shows how even thematically rich music can serve the function of accompaniment to the voice at the level of the sound track as a whole. I used the title sequence from The Magnificent Seven as a musical example of melody and accompaniment. Pretty much any broad theme could serve just as well. The opening sequence of Rashômon, discussed in the text, is particularly good for showing that a melody and accompaniment texture does not require the presence of music at all. Here rain serves as the accompaniment to the dialogue.


• For a-melodic texture, I used the prison camp scene from Captain Blood, which I had also used to illustrate the rhythm of the machine earlier in the week, the opening sequence from Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, and the beginning of the New York City sequence from Brigadoon, the latter two of which are discussed in the text.

First Week's Examples

I used the following examples for my first week of lectures, which were keyed to Ch. 1 of Hearing the Movies:  [Update 2 FEB 2018: location unchanged in the second edition]

I started with the scene from Catch Me If You Can (2002), discussed in the introduction to Part 1 (pp. 1-3) and again in Ch. 1 (pp. 7-8). I played the scene twice, with class discussion after each viewing. We then did a masking exercise, using the Second Botched Meeting sequence from Sleepless in Seattle, discussed on pp. 20-25. We first watched the sequence with no sound, and I had the students talk about what sort of sound they expected and why. We then watched the sequence with sound.

The second class—my class meets twice a week, 75 minutes for each class—we started with a masking exercise using the same scene from Sleepless, this time reversing the procedure, beginning by masking the image and then watching the sequence with image and sound. I led the class in discussion after each.

We then worked with part of the Waterloo Station sequence from The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), starting again with a masking exercise: first, no image (we did this twice); then, no sound track; then both together. In this case I divided the students into three groups and had the first group concentrate on the dialogue, the second group on the music, and the third on the effects. I instructed the first group to note the number and type of voices as well as tempo and dynamic of delivery; the second group to note the basic mood, tempo, dynamic and instrumentation for major points of change; and the third group to identify sound source or to describe sound as best as they could. I thought this example worked exceptionally well, and I would recommend the example.

The third example came from The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), discussed on pp. 11-12. Here, I had the students discuss the five types of music in the sequence and how they differed in narrative function: 1. the atmospheric music as Frodo awakens (this music also appears at the very beginning of the film over the New Line Cinema logo); 2. the "mythic" music accompanying Gandalf's flashback; 3. pastoral music accompanying the appearance of Sam; 4. enchanted vocal music for Rivendell; 5. pastoral music accompanying appearance of Bilbo.

The final example was simply a viewing of Boston Common Scene from Good Will Hunting (1997), pp. 25-30.

Quiz bank available

I have compiled a Quiz Bank that has been posted, as a Word file, on the "Classroom Resources" page of the HtM website: Classroom Resources. The file contains two versions each for six quizzes and one version of a seventh quiz geared to successive chapters in Hearing the Movies. Students during a summer-session course in 2009 were expected to memorize the glossary entries for selected terms for each quiz.

Study guides for each quiz list the terms taken from the Glossary and supply a small number of additional questions to answer or statements to explain. The guides are in the file Quiz_guides.doc.