The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television

by Kevin Donnelly

This book is a major new study - dealing with notions of film music as a device that desires to control its audience, using a most powerful thing: emotion. The author emphasises the manipulative and ephemeral character of film music dealing not only with traditional orchestral film music, but also looks at film music's colonisation of television, and discusses pop music in relation to films, and the historical dimensions to ability to possess audiences that have so many important cultural and aesthetic effects. It challenges the dominant but limited conception of film music as restricted to film by looking at its use in television and influence in the world of pop music and the traditional restriction of analysis to 'valued' film music, either from 'name' composers' or from the 'golden era' of Classical Hollywood. Focusing on areas as diverse as horror, pop music in film, ethnic signposting, television drama and the soundtrack without a film- this is an original study which expands the range of writing on the subject.

Genres: Music

192 pages, Paperback

First published September 26, 2005

About the author

Kevin Donnelly is an Australian educator, author and commentator. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University and the director of the Education Standards Institute.

Reviews

[Mentai · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive survey and enjoyable read. Section on television sound and music is especially worthwhile.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book discusses the role and use of music in film and television. Donnelly explores a few different ideas about his topic, including the ways music is used to manage and manipulate the emotional reactions of the audience, the increasing use and influence of pop music, and music's presence as another element of a film. Unfortunately, the discussion of all these different things does make the book lack unity. The most interesting of Donnelly's ideas is the concept of film music as a kind of specter or ghost that haunts the visuals and narrative, bringing the other and the otherworldly into play. I really liked the chapters on horror music and the music in The Shining, not least because this is where Donnelly most fully and convincingly explores this concept. Donnelly's exploration of the growing use of pop music in film was also interesting, if not quite as fleshed out as I would like. I especially would have liked more discussion of the interaction between this development and commercial concerns.

[Frances Wilde · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just finished reading this for the second time, for my thesis. In the introduction, Donnelly acknowledges the lack of musical precision/ music theory knowledge and narrows down his approach to being that of sound in the context of cinema. However, the lack of musical theory research did irk me at times.
The chapter on "accented" soundtrack is particularly interesting. Some really good examples used throughout. I'm still just desiring that extra bit of detail though.