Film Music
Ordinary harmony teaching only half works here. In a song or a classical piece harmony is a system of tension and resolution, and cadences shape the form. In film that is a problem: a cadence says this is finished, and the scene is not.
- no cadences
- time is fixed
- colour over function
In which styles
- Film music
- Game music
- Trailers
- Television
In short
So film harmony reaches for devices that colour without closing: chromatic mediants, modal loops, pedal points and ostinati. Each of them can sustain a mood indefinitely and none of them announces an ending, which is exactly what a scene that continues requires.
Atmospheric and suspended. The music has to hold a state rather than tell its own story, because the story is on screen.
How the style works
This is also the one style where the music does not own its time. The film exists first, the timings are fixed, and the music has to fit them. There is no characteristic tempo range, and that absence is the point.
Where you run into this
- A cue that never resolves because the scene never stops
- A theme that returns in a new key at the emotional turn
- Two major chords a third apart doing the work of a whole key change
What you leave out
Masking the dialogue. Speech intelligibility sits roughly between three hundred hertz and three kilohertz, and anything dense in that range fights the voice. In that fight the music always loses: the mix engineer turns it down.