![]() ![]() Speech works intrinsically with music in many film scenes, such as in the pivotal scene in which King George VI declares war on Germany in an international radio broadcast in The King's Speech, against the backdrop of an excerpt from the second movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. However, the focus on the isolated music track in the majority of studies in this area has inadvertently led to the neglect of other audio channels, namely dialogue and sound effects – and lack of insight into how music, dialogue, and sound effects intertwine to create the psychological effects that they do. ![]() Disentangling the elements was a necessary step in the early investigations in this area, as researchers faced the challenges of working with complex and dynamic stimuli (i.e., music and moving images). One of the limitations of the existing body of research on film music is that most studies have treated music as an isolated track. Despite the broad interest that this topic stirs up, and the growing number of tools (such as customized computer software, eye-tracking, various biometric measures, brain-imaging, MEG) that have been applied to this area of study, there is still much to discover about our responses to the auditory elements of the film experience. Almost two more decades passed before the publication of the first book devoted to experimental studies on the role of music within the larger scope of media, The Psychology of Music in Multimedia (2013), for which I served as one of the editors (along with Cohen, Lipscomb, and Kendall). Motivating this collection of articles was the central question: 'What does film music contribute to the perception of film?' (Cohen, 1994, p. One notable landmark was an issue of Psychomusicology journal published in 1994, the first special issue devoted to empirical studies of film music, guest edited by Annabel Cohen. However, investigations of the role of music and other elements of the soundtrack on viewers' perception of film have accumulated relatively slowly. ![]() Indeed, research on how people respond to simultaneously-presented auditory and visual stimuli was conducted in the first psychology laboratory established in 1879 by Wilhelm Wundt, often recognized as the father of experimental psychology. Studies employing simple audiovisual stimuli (such as flashing lights and clicks or bell strikes) have been conducted since the early days of psychological research. This commentary will consider the potential contributions of this study for the empirical study of film music, within the broader context of the state of the art of film music research, and future directions for investigations in this area. These were the key features of Kock and Louven's study that most caught my attention and serve as focal points for the present discussion. Especially notable was their inclusion of several audio conditions: no audio, music only, sound effects only, or full sound design (which consisted of music and sound effects). A total of 240 media production and technology students served as participants, and indicated their responses on an iPad touchscreen, using software that was co-developed by one of the authors. Two types of films were included in their study: an animatic film (computer-generated, with dialogue and sound track added later) and a live-action film (shot on a movie set with simultaneous dialogue and sound recording). IN an innovative exploratory study, Kock and Louven (this issue) examined the effects of film sound on viewers' perceived immersion and suspense while watching original films of under 2 minutes in length.
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