Music cognition and the cognitive psychology of film structure

Canadian Psychology, Nov 2002 by Annabel J Cohen

Lionel Landry. Approximately 15 years after Munsterberg's The Photoplay, an article by Lionel Landry (1927) appeared on the psychology of cinema in a French psychology journal. Landry makes no reference to Munsterberg's The Photoplay, perhaps because, separated by time and geography, he was unaware of it. Like Munsterberg, however, he believed that music is helpful in understanding film from a psychological viewpoint. He stated that not only can analogies be drawn between the two domains, but already there was much known about some aspects of music perception.4

Landry described analogies between film and music on four dimensions: velocity, simultaneity, continuity, and intensity. Velocity referred to temporal structure, in particular the acceleration and deceleration that both media could represent. The slowing down in music, referred to as rallentando, was compared to slow motion in film. The acceleration in music, referred to as strette, could be compared to speeded motion in film.

Simultaneity in music was represented by counterpoint, the juxtaposing of themes in different voices. Landry does not mention harmony as an expression of musical simultaneity, giving further reason to believe that he had not read Munsterberg. For Landry, the notion of simultaneity in film was more literally represented by the superposition of images, or by split screen techniques.

In discussing continuity in music and film, Landry gives the example of discontinuity created in music through repetition of themes in sonata form. A repetition creates a segment unto itself. In Landry's view, Beethoven overcame the problem of discontinuities by making his music almost completely continuous. Film continuity was created by astute handling of shots, the control of distance and the direction of focus.5 Finally, the notion of intensity in music and film provided an analogy of changes in amplitude of sound and brightness of light.

Arnheim. Following doctoral studies with Gestalt psychologists Wertheimer and Kohler, Rudolph Arnheim, who straddled the disciplines of psychology and aesthetics, wrote a series of essays on film (1933-1938/1957). Cradled in the original Gestalt movement, it was natural for him to refer to organizational principles that applied to different art forms and to both eye and ear. His attention to film as art was unique among the Gestalt psychologists although they studied apparent movement, the illusion upon which film depends, named the phi phenomena by Wertheimer (Murray, 1988, p. 284). Less an experimentalist than his teachers, Arnheim considered film at a more global level. He remarked on the resemblance of film to all the arts, including music. He compared the film director to the composer: "It is attractive to the eye to see the same scene first from within and then from without through the glass panel - a pleasure comparable, perhaps, with that experience when a composer presents a theme first in the major and then in the minor key" (p. 50). His essay on motion in film exploits musical terms (pp. 182-187): the "counterpoint of visual motion," "a musically articulate impressive theme of movement," "the great actor is distinguished by a simple, characteristic melody of movement all his own," "musical purity and beauty in the graceful leaps ... and the heavy stamping...." He claimed that increasing realism in film robbed it of its "melodic shape." He discusses montage (editing) using the musical concepts of crescendo and rhythm. Although Arnheim did not explore in depth the music-like aspects of film structure, he clearly appreciated the similarities of music and film structures.