- Pitzer College Honors Thesis, B.A. Media Studies and Music magna cum laude
Not So Marvelous Anymore: Diluted Film Scoring Practices Create
a Murky Soundscape in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Click here for oral presentation, sheet music transcriptions, and audio files
Summary
This thesis analyzes musical scores in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which consists of 23 films. Their narratives are intertwined and were planned far in advance. However, the scores are not and are so disparate they contradict each other. According to the Wagnerian operatic tradition that inspired composers during the Golden Age of Hollywood, a character should be known by a single musical theme that remains consistent both within a single work and across multiple works. The thesis then examines the technological innovations and compositional practices throughout multiple eras of Hollywood to uncover how we ended up where we are today.
The analysis of the MCU and the eras of Hollywood is based on a theoretical construct that includes cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s concept of the unique and authentic aura, which cannot be mechanically reproduced; composer-scholar Murray Schafer’s pioneering idea of soundscape, or the immersive sonic environment; and theories of how music functions to immerse a viewer into the diegesis or internal narrative of a film as expressed by French critic and experimental composer Michel Chion, film theorist Claudia Gorbman, and sound and music scholar-activist Anahid Kassabian. The immersive powers once wielded by the music of film have ceded to visual effects and their accompanying sound effects. They have muddled the soundscape of the blockbuster franchise and thus deafened the viewer to the inconsistencies across Marvel’s scores.
The scores of the MCU seldom break new ground due to what I call the malpractice of temp-music scoring, where during the editing process pre-existing music generally from another film score acts as a placeholder for the newly composed soundtrack to come. Finally, the megalith Walt Disney Company, which owns Marvel Entertainment, suffers a high rate of turnover, which leads to constantly changing director/composer duos for MCU films, a multiplicity that discourages musical unity in scoring.
- Claremont McKenna College Horror Theory
The Uncanny Potential of Soundtracks
Summary
The frightening nature of the horror genre owes itself, in large part, to innovative uses of sound. In the silent film era, the film score set tone of a scene, and as such all sound effects were either practical or came from musical instruments. After sound and image where successfully synchronized in 1927, filmmakers realized the potential of sound to aid in the establishment of moods within scenes. While films made during the early days of synchronized sound suffered from awkward sonic environments among debates about sonic realism and narrative realism, these imperfect soundscapes found their efficacy within the horror genre.
This paper analyzes how certain films of the horror genre utilized sound in new ways to unsettle the viewer, whether through acoustic environments that seem somewhat off, the disembodiment of the voice, and the breaking of past conventions of film sound. Horror has transitioned between the realms of the blockbuster and the B-movie. But unlike other films, those of the horror genre brought with them to the box office forefront the result of a lengthy experimentation with film sound, rather than conforming to the sonic conventions that Classical Hollywood established.
Though sonic environments of early sound films were awkward and uncomfortable, their unintentional awkwardness found a use in horror films of the period. Horror films produced in the first golden age of the genre owe much of their efficacy and eerie nature to their awkward sonic environments. While this was an unintentional result, horror filmmakers of the New Hollywood would implement sound to intentionally unsettle their viewers.