Film Soundtracks Shape Our Impressions Of A Character ’s Personality And Thoughts

By Emma Young If you sit down to watch TV or a film these holidays, you might want to pay a little extra attention to how the soundtrack makes you feel. We all know that background music influences the tone of a scene but what, exactly, soundtracks do to our understanding of a character has not been studied in detail. In a new paper, in Frontiers in Psychology, Alessandro Ansani at Roma Tre University, Italy, and colleagues report work aimed at filling in some of the gaps. The team recruited 118 online participants who each watched a video clip that was just under two minutes long. It showed a man slowly walking towards tall windows in the columned corridor of an old building. The seaside was visible through the windows, in the distance. As the researchers describe it, he “walks, looks outside, stops, and moves out of the frame.” At the same time, some of the participants heard the ambient sound that was recorded during the filming, while some heard an extract of “The Isle of the Dead” by Sergei Rachmaninov (a “dogged and anxious” orchestral piece), and the rest heard “Like Someone in Love” by Bill Evans (a “soft, melancholic” piano jazz solo). The participants then filled in questionnaires that asked about their perceptions of the man’s emotions, thoughts and personality, and how pleasant they thought the environment was . Compared with the other groups, those who’d heard the jazz reported feeling more empathy for the...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Media Music Social Source Type: blogs