Unsettling Melodies: a Cognitive Approach to Incongruent Film Music

• Authors: Steven Willemsen , Miklós Kiss
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Incongruent film music is a soundtrack, either diegetic or nondiegetic, which expresses qualities that stand in contrast to the emotions evoked by the events seen. The present article aims at covering two interconnected areas; the first is comprised of a critical recapitulation of available theoretical accounts of incongruent film music, whilst the second part of the paper offers an alternative, embodied-cognitive explanation of the audio-visual conflict which arises from this particular type of incongruence. Rather than regarding it as a phenomenon that works through disrupting conventions, we stress a perceptual-cognitive reason behind incongruence’s emotional strangeness.

Keywords

EN

film music; affective congruence; polarization; incongruence; cognitive-ecological theory

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 169-183

Dates

published

2013-11-01

online

2014-05-30

Contributors

author

Steven Willemsen

• The University of Groningen (the Netherlands)

author

Miklós Kiss

• The University of Groningen (the Netherlands)

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/ausfm-2014-0022