Global Soundtracks: An Ethnomusicological Approach to Film Music
Audio in games: presence and music structure
Kristine Jørgensen carried out empirical research with gamers who played both with and without sound, assessing how important audio is and what function it serves. Not surprisingly, the degree of importance depends heavily on the type of game — a dance or music title would be severely impacted without audio. More fascinating was her discovery that participants lost their sense of presence in the game world when the sound was gone.
Game music and reductive theory
In the closing chapter, Peter Schultz links the abilities players develop in music games such as Less Talk More Rokk to reductive music theories like the one developed by Heinrich Schenker. While different games present different challenges, Schultz argues that the inclusion of multiple difficulty levels not only keeps players engaged and challenged but also helps them grasp musical structures by confronting distinct layers of the composition one step at a time.
Game audio requires interactivity
The volume as a whole, framed by Collins with a helpful introduction and lists of recommended reading and websites, draws together contributors from very different backgrounds and approaches. The common thread running throughout is that computer game sound has special demands — it tends toward interactivity, non-linearity, and adaptivity. A fixed, pre-recorded music track must yield to something whose outcome and path are open-ended, a musical and audio process shaped by the player and the game narrative. This raises interesting ethnomusicological questions. Jørgensen’s ethnographic study of gamers is one way to investigate the subject; Carlsson’s work on communities of music programmers offers another. This collection does a fine job of capturing current developments and opens up numerous disciplinary and interdisciplinary avenues.
A new ethnomusicology of film music
Mark Slobin’s edited volume Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Film Music brings together a wide range of contributors to examine film scoring practices from around the world. Organized into three parts, the book opens with an exploration of the expanding American cinematic sphere, continues with studies of music and musicians in nine distinct local cinema systems, and concludes with a comparative analysis of sound effects and affective patterns seen repeatedly across world cinemas.
What sets Global Soundtracks apart from other works on music and moving images is Slobin’s ethnomusicological framing. Rather than the usual biographical or musicological analysis, he proposes that every film is ethnographic and every soundtrack behaves as an ethnomusicologist. The filmmaker acts as an ethnographer by inventing an unfamiliar imaginary community, revisiting an established genre setting, or crafting a recognizable contemporary scenario. Meanwhile, the film composer creates a sonic foundation that supports a coherent society, using conventional auditory markers to interpret cultural and social content, thus lending authenticity and unity to the setting and the story. These elements together build a musical ethnography.
In a preface titled Preview to Forthcoming Attractions, Slobin outlines the history of global film scoring, starting with the 1927 The Jazz Singer, usually recognized as the first talkie. He then surveys how film music has been applied across different cinema sectors: Hollywood mainstream, US subcultural films, and national cinemas of major players like Mexico, India, and Russia, as well as lesser-known regions such as Bhutan and Martinique. He closes with a look at today’s global cinema aimed at transnational, multi-sited audiences.
American worlds and beyond
Part One examines Hollywood and its surroundings. It begins with Max Steiner, one of the studio system’s most celebrated composers, tracing how his orchestral scores established a dominant Central European classical sensibility that reshaped film music internationally. Slobin then moves outside predictability and supposed monologism of the Steiner Superculture by looking at early subcultural film practices — underfunded and often overlooked African American race films, Yiddish films from the 1910s, plus more recent Puerto Rican and Native American works — and how their counter-narratives radically reworked mainstream stereotypes.
Part Two assembles case studies conducted by various scholars. Booth examines how orchestral film scoring was developed and professionalized in Old Bollywood cinema from around 1940 to 1990. Adamu contributes a fascinating look at how Hindi film, especially its song-and-dance sequences, has influenced the overwhelmingly Islamic Hausa videofilm market in northern Nigeria. Tuohy’s chapter on Chinese reflexive cinema offers a contrasting approach: instead of reinventing local music through an imported aesthetic, Chinese filmmakers treat indigenous music as an essential plot element, with musicians as main characters. By building narratives that reference older films, these directors aim to present viewers with a logically structured soundscape that mirrors society as it is or could be imagined. Tuohy suggests that through such films we can approach the cultural understanding of film through the filmic understanding of culture.
Cinema moments and memorable scores
After the first four chapters of Part Two, which deal with film music and genre, the next five studies focus on individual films, specific scores, and notable movie musicians. Sumarsam offers analysis of the 1979 Indonesian historical film Nopember 1828, examining how gamelan and Javanese singing serve as markers of ethnic identity and heighten emotion — a distinctly local turn that comments on Javanese reactions to Dutch colonialism. Miller centers on Angelitos Negros, a Mexican musical from around 1950, showing how its depiction of racial otherness and Black identity, carried by a heavily orchestrated, nostalgic theme song based on Afro-Cuban and Afro-Caribbean popular idioms, creates intense identification and belonging. She links the film’s lasting appeal in Latin America and the Latino diaspora to the same mechanism used by contemporary telenovela soaps — a musical melodrama that touches a resonant chord in the history of inclusion and exclusion of Blacks in the cultural and political composition of the region. Stokes then explores the lasting memory of Egyptian crooner and film star Abd al-Halim Hafiz against the backdrop of Egyptian film music from the 1940s onward.
Comparative knots and figures
In the final section, Slobin proposes a framework for comparative analysis of global cinema systems by identifying narrative knots and figures that recur across time and space. One knot is the appearance of the gramophone in films to signal power and the onset of modernity. A much broader category, the rhetorical figure, includes pervasive patterns like using Western classical music to indicate class relations or employing singing children to build tension between innocence and danger.
A sprawling but coherent anthology. Global Soundtracks is engaging and accessible, offering both thorough research and widely differing interpretations of the subject. Its contribution to developing fresh analytical perspectives within the broader conversation about music and moving images deserves recognition. Although it leans heavily toward production rather than audience reception — focusing largely on how soundtracks are created and controlled in relation to the film narrative — it stands as one of the first anthologies to forge a truly ethnomusicological framework. As such, it will undoubtedly spur further investigation into this fascinating, still relatively under-studied field.