Eight ways of listening: analysing John Williams’s *Jaws* score

Introduction

Film music is frequently described as something that enhances the visuals. Yet this familiar idea tends to obscure the real complexity of how music functions in cinema. For one thing, music does not possess a single, fixed meaning that can simply be added to images. For another, the audiovisual experience operates on multiple levels. To address this, the following discussion proposes eight different but complementary ways of listening to music. These approaches draw on ecological theories of perception, which argue that we hear referential things in music. The argument is tested by examining scholarly interpretations of John Williams’s score for the opening scene of Jaws (1975). Beyond this, the essay suggests a three-level model for film-music analysis in which music as an expressive device, the fictional world as a dramatic space, and types of audience engagement are treated as separate yet interacting dimensions of the cinematic experience.

In film-studies circles, music is often viewed as one of many tools directors use to bring stories to life before a cinema audience. Roy M. Prendergast, echoing Aaron Copland, notes that film music can create “a more convincing atmosphere of time and place” or express “the unspoken thoughts of a character.” Music may not only add emotion; it is, in the words of Claudia Gorbman, “a signifier of emotion itself.” Noël Carroll, too, has written that music can “modify” the way we perceive a scene. Put simply, theorists often assume that music adds something to the visuals. Michel Chion speaks of “added value” from sound effects and music, which gives the false impression that meaning originates in the image.

In a straightforward sense this is correct: adding music (or sound effects) certainly changes how we receive a film. But that truism conceals deeper complexities. First, any piece of music contains many potential meanings—listening repeatedly never exhausts what can be heard. Since music lacks a single fixed meaning, the phrase “music adds meaning to the visuals” becomes less clear than it first appears.

To address this, I will discuss musical perception in some detail and propose a series of ways we can listen to, or hear things in, music. This line of thought, which holds that we hear referential matters in music, aligns with recent “ecological perception” theories advanced by Eric F. Clarke—an approach that treats Ludwig van Beethoven and Jimi Hendrix equally and applies across musical styles. Second, I argue that music does not add to a film’s meaning in only one fashion. Instead, music functions as an expressive device that blends into the overall film experience, but it does so on several perceptual levels simultaneously. My sole example will be John Williams’s music for the opening of Jaws (1975), though any piece from any genre could serve the same conceptual argument. Several scholars have already analysed this cue; my aim is not to produce a new interpretation but to show how those existing analyses represent different yet coherent ways of hearing the same music.

In pursuit of a framework for analysing film music—in Jaws or elsewhere—I will suggest three principal levels of description that can specify how music makes sense in more detail. These levels allow greater analytical complexity than simple notions of “adding” meaning. The three levels are: the music itself, the fictional world, and the ways audiences are invited to engage with characters and situations.

What does music mean? Music, reference, and emotion

From a film scholar’s perspective, the question of musical meaning has long been contested, with contrasting positions from new musicology, music philosophy, music psychology, and ecological perception. The difficulty arises because music seems non‑referential; it does not refer to specific things the way most other art forms do. In figurative painting, for instance, we can recognise specific objects within a pattern of colour and form. The representation is not inherent in the image, but certain properties (intended by the artist) are likely to be perceived in a particular way, such as people on a beach. An artist may choose to work non‑figuratively, making it impossible to discern identifiable objects. Yet in most paintings, both the how (style and technique) and the what (subject matter) are part of what we perceive and relate to.

Music is much less suited to such specific reference. Eduard Hanslick described music’s content as “tonally moving forms.” For him, what we hear is structured sound without reference to anything beyond musical form. This view implies that the more music tries to be referential (imitating a car horn or a cry), the less musical it becomes. Genuine musical appreciation therefore involves perceiving musical events. What about expressing or eliciting emotions? Hanslick admitted that music can overwhelm us emotionally, but such feelings, in Nicholas Cook’s summary of Hanslick’s position, are simply not the “proper subject‑matter for aesthetics.”

This sounds more like normative aesthetics than a description of how most people actually experience music. I might hear sadness in the music, or feel excitement or sudden happiness while listening. Many people have powerful emotional experiences listening to music, and experimental work in music psychology backs up those intuitions: emotions are integral to our musical experience.

Yet Peter Kivy has made a sophisticated, somewhat paradoxical argument that supports Hanslick’s “music alone” stance. Kivy says we both hear emotions and feel emotions—but the emotions we feel are not the ones we hear, and there is no relation between them. For Kivy, our emotional responses hinge on being surprised by a musical development, feeling excited by a harmonic progression, or admiring the craft of a piece. In short, the object of the emotion is music itself. We do not react because music is sad; we react because of what music makes out of sadness. Whatever the criticisms of Kivy’s pure‑music position, it forces a crucial distinction: the emotional quality we hear in music and the emotional experience it sparks need not match. It is less obvious—and indeed counterintuitive—that they have nothing to do with each other. In any event, the split between recognised emotions and felt emotions will matter for how we later conceptualise film music and emotion.

Things to be heard in music

Nicholas Cook describes “music alone” as “an aesthetician’s (and music theorist’s) fiction; the real thing unites itself promiscuously with any other media that are available.” In practice, music is nearly always experienced in multimedia contexts that help shape meaning. Lawrence Kramer likewise stresses multimedia forms and argues that music is always embedded in larger cultural contexts: “Music nearly always has potential meaning in an intersubjective or cultural sense, even if it rarely has meaning in a simple enunciatory sense.”

Eric F. Clarke has recently proposed an ecological approach, drawing on J.J. Gibson. Gibson held that humans are attuned to their environment; the environment provides certain affordances, and we pick up information directly by recognising invariant features. Clarke extends this to music listening: we attune to kinds of music (genre, style) and recognise invariant features that allow us to grasp musical meaning. According to Clarke, listeners directly pick up “a variety of environmental attributes, ranging from the spatial location and physical source of musical sounds, to their structural function and cultural and ideological value.” In this view, stylistic details and ideology are not separate stages in a cognitive processing scheme; they are different representational matters that we hear in music immediately.

The discussion so far has given significant space to the link between music and emotion because the emotions have seemed, in academic debate, a way to solve problems of musical meaning over a long period. Clarke’s direct‑recognition account, along with Kramer and Cook’s emphasis on cultural and multimedia embeddings, broadens the idea of musical meaning and reference considerably. Below I propose a list of things we can actually hear in music—what Clarke calls “ways of listening”—that I find especially relevant for film music. This list is not exhaustive; it simply suggests a range of ways we can hear things in music so we can better discuss how film music operates.

1. Hearing music as sound events. Music is sound first. It seems plausible that a connection exists between how we perceive everyday sounds and how we perceive music, because the same biological equipment handles basic audio processing. Even though music can develop our listening abilities, it cannot override built‑in perceptual mechanisms. A sudden crescendo can be heard as an increase in intensity, much like sounds approaching the listener. A sudden cymbal crash would, outside a musical context, shift our attention. Music can also create pauses, new beginnings, instrumentation changes, or melodic shifts. Music always activates basic, automatic attention mechanisms.
2. Hearing other music in the music, or intertextual listening. A piece may quote another through direct citation or pastiche. This intertextual mode relates the current piece to an earlier one—music can effectively “depict” another musical work. Intertextual associations also flourish around genres, styles, and basic forms. Salsa, waltz, or blues will activate our previous experience with those types, generating a field of expectations that forms a mental playing ground for the piece at hand.
3. Contextual listening. We can hear contextual elements in music when we know what kind of situation that music normally belongs to. This usually depends on intertextual listening; we identify the music or its style and attach meaning to it. Tonality, vocal style, or specific instruments might suggest “Arabic” associations or evoke Scottish connotations with bagpipes. Music can imply ethnicity, geographical place, social group, and culture. Such meanings are neither idiosyncratic nor purely personal; they are culturally embedded, largely shared understandings that musical analysis has to account for.
4. Hearing emotions. We may recognise joy, anxiety, or emotional attitudes such as playfulness in music. A piece can convey a stable mood like sadness or melancholy, or express changing emotional states that Dan Stern called “vitality affects” and Antonio Damasio called “background emotions”—dynamic qualities tied to how people move, speak, and do things. In Gibson and Clarke’s framework, these dynamic qualities count as invariants we can recognise in both music and human behaviour.
5. Structural listening. Musically trained listeners may attend to harmonic progressions, repetition, variation, and other structural patterns, often not on first hearing. This kind of listening requires formal training and belongs to a specific cultural practice (typically Western education). It most closely matches Kivy’s ideal: a fully “musical” listener. The associated emotions are usually evaluative—surprise or admiration for the composition itself.
6. Hearing upcoming events, or prospective listening. This is how most people engage in an everyday sort of structural listening. As they listen moment by moment, they anticipate changes or repetitions. Popular music relies heavily on repeated elements with slight variations, which many listeners can foresee and enjoy. Classical film scores commonly use tension and release, making listeners expect a harmonic return or the reappearance of a motif. In other words, we hear a sense of temporal direction, of musical “thingness over before it happens,” in the music.
7. Free, associative listening (hearing whatever comes to mind). This is the spontaneous, imaginative, somewhat personal way most people experience music—yet it is difficult to analyse in general terms. It means any representational spectacle the listener can dream up while music plays.
8. Hearing things in a specific multimedia context. Much music is placed within and consumed inside multimedia works—film, television, opera—as Nicholas Cook emphasises. In these cases what we hear is given a specific referential anchor; the music becomes about something in a more concrete way. Still, all the other modes of listening remain active, rather than disappearing, when music is embedded this way. This finally brings us back to film music and the question of how music “adds” to the visuals.

Hearing things in film music

Listening to music within a narrative film simplifies the earlier debate over reference and meaning. Fiction films tell stories about characters, their wishes, actions, and problems, and they provide a concrete context for the music to speak about. John Williams’s celebrated cue for Jaws makes this tangible. Analysis after analysis attributes a specific meaning to that cue—referentially binding it to the shark.

Claudia Gorbman describes the famous two-note chromatic ostinato heard from the opening scene onward as “the menacing ‘shark’ theme, heard even before the camera reveals the deadly shark closing in on the unsuspecting swimmers, gives the viewer advance knowledge of the narrative threat.” That description incorporates at least three of the hearing modes. First, the music happens before the shark appears, functioning as an independent sound event that grabs our attention. It tunes our nervous system to the fact that something new is occurring. Second, the description talks about hearing emotions: the notes are perceived as menacing. Third, this event and its menacing character get assigned a concrete reference: the shark.

Russell Lack uses an almost identical phrase, “the distinctively menacing cue signifying the approach of the shark,” and Anahid Kassabian writes that the motif “serves its purpose of signaling ‘menace’ from the first time it is heard.” The outcome of matching the musical motif with narrative action has, as Giorgio Biancorosso puts it, a “Pavlovian reflexivity” in the way the connection becomes automatic by the later attacks.

Other analysts stress the intertextual dimension. Timothy Scheurer argues that “The Great White’s music is a page ripped right out of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, echoing especially the vigorous polyrhythms of the ballet’s opening…that captured perfectly the primordial state of which the Great White is a part.” Scheurer picks out not only a stylistic ethos but also a reference to a specific piece—intertextual listening that combines prototype associations (“Stravinsky‑ness”) with a particular work. His direct linking of the polyrhythms to a “primordial state” is also contextual listening: he hears primitivism in the texture.

This multitude of readings—menace, primitivism, intertextual echo, narrative foreshadowing—makes plain that far from possessing one fixed meaning, Williams’s music offers a rich field for the listener, and each film theorist pulls out a different but valid way of hearing it.

Three levels of engagement with film music

These eight “ways of listening” remain largely about how a listener deals with music itself. When music joins the more complex audiovisual flow, we need to distinguish those ways of involvement. For exposition, lay out three dimensions of film experience suited for musical explanation:

• Descriptive sound machine elements provide an analytical view of local usage – music as sound built from acoustic happening along melodic leaps, phrase shapes, instrument timbre, layering measure sequences for listener affinity tools – these tools run most powerful when free sensory intuition releases new readings possible exclusively aware of underlying construction, which relates partly to items among numbers five and one laid previous.
• The story fictionalised dramatic arc horizon supplies abstract content – provided dramatic texture demands specification among fictive movie reality to which those patches assign sign figures, roughly attach items among listening sectors six though recent two among final through most allied proximity fixed plane building emotional tag or sensation of danger, race momentum symbolic what; these tie precisely in third description order demanding explanatory pairing.
• Design direction to involve spectator viewpoint with closeness, rejection chance mirror – fictogram steps blend functional align notion exact forms where bearer interprets via internal sense drives evaluative feeling base compared proposition overt participant ready sense right pull— each among dimensions drives explicit ways exposition cue works specific with side condition.

Using those triple groups could systemise answering exactly moment actor picks on “leverage situation adding cue job power onward across barrier” backdoor casual readings single line linear link share behind.

These quotes point to two different levels. We may hear things in the music and we may hear things in the fiction. Noticing the shark motif emerging as a new event, recognizing its Stravinsky-like quality, detecting primitivism as a contextual reference, sensing a menacing character, and registering intensifying patterns are all simultaneous ways of hearing different aspects in the music. When such music accompanies a feature film, those hearings combined with other audiovisual elements shape our perception of a fictional world. The menacing qualities and build-up heard purely in musical terms allow us to recognize that something terrible is about to happen within the fiction. The film enables whatever we hear in the music to become part of the fictional reality. We cannot directly hear or see a shark about to attack the swimmer, yet music, visuals, editing, and sound effects together create this impression. As Levinson (1996) puts it, following Kendall Walton (1990), the music makes it fictionally true that an attack is imminent.

A distinction exists between what can be heard in the music or seen in the images and the kind of fictional reference audiences perceive during a film viewing. As Gorbman notes, the motif ‘gives the viewer advance knowledge of the narrative threat’. Having knowledge of a narrative threat moves beyond merely hearing things in the music; it involves acknowledging and accepting a dramatic situation within the fiction. What we hear in the music becomes part of what we know is true in the fictional world.

Nicholas Cook points to a reciprocal relationship between how we perceive pictures and music, exemplifying this with Bernard Herrmann’s music for Psycho (1960) during the driving scene before Marion stops at Bates Motel. In that scene, the music is ‘so to speak, “seeking out” and uncovering the turmoil in Marion’s mind, and thus transferring its own qualities to her […] The process works the other way round, too; heard in the context of the film sequence, the music acquires a specifically sinister quality that it does not have by itself’ (Cook, 1998, pp. 66-67).

This reciprocal effect may also apply to Jaws; our understanding of the fictional situation turns back on what we hear in the music when the motif becomes the shark itself (as Donnelly’s ‘it is its presence’ suggests). Giorgio Biancorosso emphasizes that the motif’s reference ‘is established only gradually, as the creature approaches its victim’ (Biancorosso, 2011, p. 309). Up to the attack, the ‘accelerating rhythmic subdivision of the two-note motive creates the dual effect, which cannot be conveyed by the visuals alone, of decreasing distance (between shark and victim) and mounting intention to attack. Synchronised with the upward-moving camera, the motive has become the locus of agency’ (Biancorosso, 2011, p. 313). Biancorosso describes several simultaneous phenomena. On one level, the increasing rhythmic intensity is something heard in the music: as Stravinsky, as primordial, as a build-up. On another level, this makes it fictionally true that the shark is drawing closer and intends to attack. Neither this hearing nor this seeing yields such knowledge on its own; the combination creates our perception of something terrifying approaching. Thus, our perception of the fiction is constituted, yet qualitatively different from music and visuals alone.

A third level: engaging experiences

This observation points to a third level of film audience responses to underscoring. Consider the ‘menacing’ quality of the two-note ostinato motif often noted in writings on John Williams’ music for Jaws. Hearing the motif as menacing does not necessarily mean the listener feels that menace personally. As Kivy argues, someone listening to John Williams’ music on her iPod may recognize ‘menacing’ as an expressive property of the music; she hears menace in the music. This does not imply she feels threatened herself, assuming she listens in safe conditions. Yet, running through a dark forest at night with this music on her iPod changes things — those expressive properties may musically animate the dark forest, making her believe something menacing lurks there. This false cognition could cause anxiety and fear. In that imagined scenario, the emotional properties heard in the music are perceived as being ‘in’ the environment. The point is that hearing something in the music (menace), believing something is the case in the world (a threat), and feeling something (fear) are three different but closely related phenomena.

These differences become more pronounced in the cinema, where vicarious experiences are involved. This brings us back to Jaws.

In the opening scenes we may hear, among other things, menace in the music. Second, those qualities are understood as pertaining to something in the fiction — the shark. Musically, it both grants existence to the shark and colours our perception of it. Third, the menace does not threaten us as the audience but threatens a person within the fiction. So even if we vicariously feel that menacing quality through simulation, we are not part of that fictional world. As viewers, we know more than the characters; the menacing quality is thus situated within a complex web of character relations and audience concerns.

Noël Carroll describes this dynamic regarding the same scene. He writes:

> When the heroine is splashing about with abandon as, unbeknownst to her, a killer shark is zooming in for the kill, we feel concern for her. But that is not what she is feeling. She’s feeling delighted. That is, very often we have a different and, in fact, more information about what is going on in the fiction than do the protagonist, and consequently, what we feel is very different from what the character may be thought to feel. (Carroll, 1990, pp. 90-101)

The menace we hear in the music is not linked to how the character feels. Instead, it characterizes the antagonist and makes the audience fear for the young woman in the water. Consequently, hearing things in the music, perceiving what occurs in the fictional world, and the experience of engaging with a film narrative are three distinct but interrelated levels.

This suggests operating on three distinct levels:

1. Hearing things in music. Music does not depict concrete objects, yet we can hear meaningful aspects in it. Musical events tune our attention; music refers to or paraphrases other music, sometimes specific pieces; we hear various contexts within it. We also hear emotions and form future-oriented expectations. These ways of hearing generate musical meaning.

2. Hearing the fictional world in the music. This level concerns how what is heard in the music becomes integrated into the fictional world. We may know something that the music reveals, information hidden from the characters. In Jaws, the music directs our attention to upcoming events and characterizes them. An important distinction exists between what is heard in the music and what it makes true within the fiction.

3. Audience engagement and experiencing fiction with the help of music. A narrative comprises more than characters, actions, and events; it contains an implied viewpoint on what happens. In Jaws, we are meant to worry about the characters (other than the shark). Yet most of what we hear in the music connects to the antagonist.

Thus, there is no simple relationship between what we hear in the music, what is fictionally true, and the kind of narrative engagement the audience enacts. Analytic precision is gained by specifying the ways we hear things in music and how that hearing influences audience perception on different levels.

References

Anderson, L. (2004). Case Study 1: Sliding doors and Topless Women Talk about Their Lives. In: Inglis, Ian. (ed.), Popular Music and Film. London: Wallflower Press.

Biancorosso, G. (2011). The shark in the music. In: Music Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Brown, R.S. (1994). Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Carroll, N. (1988). Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Carroll, N. (1990). A Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart. London: Routledge.

Chion, M. (1994). Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press.

Clarke, E.F. (2011). Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cohen, A. (2005). How music influences the interpretation of film and video: Approaches from experimental psychology. In: Kendall, R.A., & Savage, R.W. (eds.), Selected reports in ethnomusicology: Perspectives in Systematic Musicology, 12.

Cohen, A. (2001). Music as a source of emotion in film. In: Juslin, P., & Sloboda, J. (eds.), Music and Emotion. Wesleyan University Press.

Cook, N. (1998). Analysing musical multimedia

Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Harcourt Brace & Company.

Darby & De Bois (1990). American Film Music: Major Composers, Techniques, Trends, 1915-1990. Jefferson: McFarland.

Donnelly, K.J. (2005). Demonic Possession: Horror Film Music. In: Donnelly, K.J. (ed.), The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television. London: BFI Publishing.

Gibson, J.J (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Gombrich, E.H. (1996 [1960]). Art & Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Phaidon.

Gorbman, C. (1987). Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. London: BFI.

Juslin & Sloboda (2001) (eds.). Music and Emotion: Theory and Research

Hanslick, E. (1975 [1854]). Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag Zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel.

Have, I. (2008). Background Music and Background Feelings: Background Music in Audiovisual Media. Journal of Music and Meaning, vol. .

Kalinak, K. (1992). Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

Kassabian, A. (2001). Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music. Routledge.

Kivy, P. (1990). Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience. London: Cornell University Press.

Kivy, P. (1993). The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kramer, L. (2001). Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lack, R. (1999): Twenty Four Frames Under: A Buried History of Film Music. London: Quartet Books.

Langer, S.K. (1942). Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Langer, S.K. (1953). Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Langkjær, B. (2000). Den lyttende tilskuer: Perception af lyd og musik i film. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.

Levinson, J. (1996). Film Music and Narrative Agency. In: Bordwell, D., & Carroll, N. (eds.), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Madison Press.

Levinson, J. (1997). Emotion in Response to Art: A Survey of the Terrain. In: Hjort, M., & Laver, S. (eds.), Emotion and the Arts

Messaris, P. (1994). Visual “Literacy”: Image, Mind, and Reality. Boulder: Westview Press.

Meyer, L.B. (1974). Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Prendergast, R.M. (1992). Film Music: A Neglected Art. New York: Norton.

Rickard, N.S. (2004). Intense emotional responses to music: a test of the physiological arousal hypothesis. Psychology of Music. Sage.

Scheurer, T. (2008). John Williams and film music since 1971. Popular Music and Society, vol. (1), 59-72.

Smith, J. (1996). Unheard Melodies? A Critique of Psychoanalytic Theories of Film Music. In: Bordwell, D., & Carroll, N. (eds.), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

Smith, J. (1999). Movie Music as Moving Music: Emotion, Cognition, and the Film Score. In: Plantinga, C., & Smith, G.M. (eds.), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion. London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Stern, D. S. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant. Basic Books.

Tagg, P. (1992). Towards a Sign Typology of Music. In: Dalmonte, R., & Baroni, M. (eds.), Secondo convegno europeo di analisi musicale (pp. 369-378). Trento: Università degli studi di Trento.

Tan, S.-L., Pfordresher, P., & Harré, R. (2010). The emotional power of music. In: Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance (pp. 261-280). New York: Psychology Press.

Walton, K. (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Winters, B. (2008). Corporeality, Musical Heartbeats, and Cinematic Emotion. In: Music, Sound and the Moving Image (vol. 2).

Notes

Noël Carroll (1988) and Paul Messaris (1994) have both argued that even though pictures are not like reality in all aspects, it is nevertheless easy to adapt our perceptual skills from everyday environments to pictorial perception. Despite what some scholars have made out of Gombrich (1996), perceiving pictures does not require the kind of effort it takes to learn a language. For a survey of the field and an in-depth argumentation about pictorial perception, see Messaris (1994).

Jerrold Levinson writes: ‘It seems undeniable that music has a certain power to induce sensations, feelings, and even moods by virtue of its basic musical properties, virtually without any interpretation or construal on the listener’s part’ (Levinson, 1997, p. 28). Also, empirical studies indicate a relation between the character of the music and the character of the emotions it evokes; see Rickard (2004) and Tan, Pfordresher and Harré (2010).

Susanne Langer claims a ‘logical’ similarity between music and forms of human feelings described as ‘forms of growth and of attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm, or subtle activation and dreamy lapses – not joy and sorrow perhaps, but the poignancy of either and both’ (Langer, 1953, p. 27). Also, Hanslick claimed that even though music cannot represent the content of the emotions, it can nevertheless represent their dynamic form (Hanslick, 1975, p. 26). Music cognitivists Dowling and Harwood agree that ‘Music represents the dynamic form of emotion, not the specific content,

Dowling and Harwood (1986, p. 206) note that both Langer and Helmholtz made this same point. Other theorists, including Leonard B. Meyer, have posited a causal connection between musical form and emotion. Meyer observes that chromatic passages generate ambiguity: “Such ambiguity creates suspense and uncertainty which, as we have seen, are powerful forces in the shaping of affective experience” (1953, p. 220). The discourse linking music and emotion therefore has deep roots in music theory, and it frequently appears in film-music scholarship as well—in the work of Claudia Gorbman (1987), Noël Carroll (1988), Jeff Smith (1999), Langkjær (2000), and Ben Winters (2008), among others.

Noël Carroll has argued that a film “supplies the kind of reference required to particularize the broad expressivity of the musical system” (1988, pp. 220–221). The same principle applies to lyrics in pop music, which can be understood as referring to a character within the fiction: “In a filmic context, lyrics often perform tasks such as ‘speaking’ for a character” (Anderson, 2004, p. 112). Parallel insights emerge from experimental research into how music shapes our perception of fictional agents, as in the work of Cohen (2001, 2005).