Picture this. You’re watching a movie and just before a
heart warming scene plays out on screen, you can hear soft melodic music in the
background that increases in volume as the emotions rise. Suddenly there is a
fight scene and the music becomes sharper and louder while the actors on screen
fight to the sounds of the music being played almost like a Bollywood dance
sequence.
It’s not just the movies that make use of background music
to highlight the on screen action. TV serials, documentaries and even short TV
advertisements use music to pass on the emotions of the scene to the viewers. A
horror movie would never be the same without the music that rises in volume and
intensity as the tension on screen increases and then stops just before the
scare scene and screaming begins. Some of my friends watch horror movies with
the sound off because it makes it less scary.
None of us could ever imagine a Charlie Chaplin movie without the quirky
piano music or a Tom and Jerry cartoon without the background music.
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But it wasn’t always so. Movies were first made without
soundtracks. No dialogues, no songs, no background music.. nothing. The
dialogues used to be shown on screen in between scenes in white letters against
a black background. It was the era of silent movies. Although, the projectors
that they used weren’t so silent. They were noisy and there weren’t any
soundproof booths between the projectors and the audience, causing quite a
disturbance for the viewers.
To combat this noise pollution, the theatre owners used to
have musicians play music in the movie halls to drown out the sound of the
projectors. It wasn’t long before some movie makers realised that they could us
this to their advantage to make their movies more dramatic. Soon, along with
the film reel, a music score sheet was sent with proper timing and movie scene
cue points so that the musicians at the movie hall could play along with the
movie on screen and background music, or film score as it is now called, came to
be born. My grandfather, Pedro Fernandes, started off as one such movie hall
musician way back in the 1920s, playing film score at the movie halls in Goa
and Malaysia before returning to Goa to start his own orchestra and music
store.
Technological advances later on made it possible for movie
makers to add sound directly to the film reel, starting a whole new industry of
composers, recording artists, studios, film orchestras and playback singers.
Film score is a booming industry employing millions of people
around the world with its own category at the Oscars, yet you never see these
people except as film credits which roll while you’re leaving the theatre.
While most film score goes by unnoticed or forgotten by the end of the movie,
some tunes remain with the viewers, like the tunes from ‘Mission Impossible’,
‘Star Wars’, etc. Hindi TV serials would never be able to make so many episodes
without the extensive use of the sounds of thunder and other effects while the
camera changes focus from one actor to the other and back again with different
facial expressions until a full 10 minutes go by without anything actually
happening on screen. With that thought,
I sign off as the sounds of ‘My heart will go on’ from the movie ‘Titanic’ play
in the back of my head.
