> After all, most films don't need recognizable motifs, they just need music to tell us how to feel

Not trying to pick a fight with you - I agree with your comment overall, but this is a culturally learned thing, very specific to Western movies and TV-series, and it is actually mildly infuriating to me. It is one thing to complement the emotions present in a scene, but being told what to feel is basically a cheap way to try to patch up bad storytelling.

Worse, it can totally backfire: for the dub of Castle in the Sky, the original composer had to fill in a ton of quiet scenes with music because (IIRC) Disney was worried about the audience feeling awkward about not being told what to feel. They also added background chatter, and worst of all: filled in scenes that were quiet on purpose with all of these things. While the orchestral score sounds great in and of itself, in most scenes all that added audio ruined the mood of the original.

However, I can't deny that what you state is what the audience expects, and that it "works", so sadly you're still right.

I think music is just a tool -- it can be used badly or it can be used well.

Different media are able to show different things -- novels show interior thoughts, plays need to focus mainly on dialog, and movies/TV are largely driven by images.

Particularly, movies and TV have a huge challenge in communicating the interior thoughts of characters -- this is one of the first things you learn in screenwriting, when a particular story might be more appropriate as a novel instead.

But one of the tools which can communicate a character's state of mind is through music. At best, I think it's what you mean when you say complementary -- e.g. a character has to act confident but you need to know that inside they're nervous. But of course it can be a crutch for bad acting too -- if the actor is supposed to be communicating nervousness but isn't, so the music does it for them.

> But of course it can be a crutch for bad acting too -- if the actor is supposed to be communicating nervousness but isn't, so the music does it for them.

Ironically, animation seems to be a worse offender than regular movies. And sometimes the story itself simply isn't good to begin with, and does not give any decent justification for being emotionally invested in the main characters.

In that vein, I recommend this video about the Marvel Universe music and the general use of "temp music". It touches a lot of the points you mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vfqkvwW2fs

Different viewers are different. You want to experience a story when you see a movie, but other people want to be emotionally numbed. Still others want to be reassured they know how they’re supposed to feel about things.

Funny enough, that difference in needs when deciding what to watch (if anything at all) has turned out to be one of the best indicators for whether or not to keep dating someone for me.

This reminds me of how blown away I was when I first played Super Mario 64 (1996), and the music dynamically changed based on whether you were underwater (adding in some strings and a few other details).

Actually, now that I mention it, Nintendo did the same thing in Super Mario World (1990), just simply adding in some congas to the currently playing track when you jump on Yoshi.

They've taken it to a whole new level in their more recent games, harmonizing the sound effects to the background music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5-YDxH6It8

For me a similar moment of revelation came when I first heard LucasArts’ iMUSE dynamic music engine in action: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMUSE

Makes sense that Nintendo would nail a similar effect. If there's one thing they're masters of, it's distilling an experience down to it's essential elements.

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head with your description.

Just regarding your comment about music students, please feel free to get in touch with us if you are interested in writing music for Filmstro. send an email to [email protected]

Music has a very important role in a movie - if you cut that out and replace it with generic music you'd be left with films with great acting that feel muted and listless. I'm not sure you quite understand how much work goes into a score and how much the director's, among others, views and desires affect that score.

On the other hand, movie trailers can benefit a lot from this. Of course for trailers you'd need a "creepy 5-year-old singing" slider and a "BWAAAAAAAAAA" slider...

It really reminds me of the dynamic music used in Doom (2016).

In fact my favorite game, Rez, has a central conceit that is much closer to this. The heart of Rez is a 32-channel MIDI engine which continuously plays the game's background music; however, which channels are "active" is controlled by a bitmask that varies depending on which phase of the level you're in, allowing for a constantly shifting sohndscape. Then, additional music that arises from game events is mixed on top of that.

Yeah you don't have to use machine learning for this type of site there are so many aspiring musicians on the web with home studios good old fashioned crowd sourcing will generally give you a better result than machine learning for this kind of site.