Mood Music: Studying the Impact of Background Music on Film

In this narrative historical review, we both summarize and critically evaluate the experimental literature that has emerged over the last century or so investigating the various ways in which the addition of music influences people's perception of, and response to, film. While 'sensation transference', whereby the mood of the background music carries over to influence the viewer's feeling about the film content, has often been documented, background music can also affect a viewer's visual attention, their interpretation, and their memory for whatever they happen to have seen. The use of sound in film (no matter whether its use is diegetic or non-diegetic - that is, part of the recounted story or not) is interesting inasmuch as simultaneously presented auditory and visual inputs do not necessarily have to be integrated perceptually for crossmodal effects to occur. The literature published to date highlights the multiple ways in which music affects people's perception of semantically meaningful film clips. Nevertheless, despite the emerging body of rigorous scientific research, the professional addition of music to film would still appear to be as much an art as a science. Furthermore, a number of potentially important questions remain unresolved, including the extent to which habituation, sensory overload, distraction, film type (i.e., fictional or informational), and/or context modulates the influence of background music. That said, this emerging body of empirical literature provides a number of relevant insights for those thinking more generally about sensory augmentation and multisensory experience design. Looking to the future, the principles uncovered in this work have growing relevance for emerging domains such as immersive media, virtual reality, multisensory marketing, and the design of adaptive audiovisual systems.