IESS Music · Y7 · The Label
Session 5 · v.38 · The Sync Department opens
Today's call sheet
BY THE END you can explain how music creates meaning in film and games: leitmotif, tension, silence.
1975 · John Williams plays two notes on a piano
Spielberg laughed. He thought it was a joke.
The oldest trick in film music
It is called a leitmotif. Hear it and you know who just walked in, before you see them.
The Sync Department toolbox
Four switches. Every film and game score you have ever heard is these four, flipped.
Games have a problem films do not
A film score knows exactly when the monster appears. A game score has no idea what you will do next, and it must not get annoying after the fortieth loop.
Water. Move. Come back in your team of two or three.
The experiment
One clip, played three times, with three different pieces of music. In your team, write down what the scene is about each time. One sentence per play.
Do not talk between the plays. Write first, argue after.
The reveal
The music was the meaning. It always was.
And the opposite trick
Why does taking the music away work? What does silence tell your body that a soundtrack cannot?
I play it. You move like whoever it belongs to.
Your commission · teams of 2 or 3
Keyboards, voice, whatever is in reach. Do not tell anyone which card you got.
Studio time
Stuck? Start on one note and change ONE thing: go lower, go slower, go minor. That is already a motif.
Last five minutes: practise it until you can play it twice the same way.
Showcase
Play it twice. We guess. Then you tell us what was on the card, and we say what made it work.
The history chapter closes
The fields. The church. Chess Records. Sedgwick Avenue. Everything from S2 to S4.
Next session · v.39 · Chart School
Beethoven went deaf, and kept composing anyway. How?