“you sorta listen with your eyes”: How audiences talk about film music

What might investigation of audience responses to films reveal about the role that music plays in responses, understandings, and evaluations? Peter Larsen’s excellent Film Music (2005) examines the “paradox” that audiences sense the importance of music to their experience of films-but often can’t recall it. While Larsen’s critical remarks are sharp and apposite, his discussion is limited by a tendency to talk of “the audience” in the singular. That actual audience research doesn’t figure in his account is not surprising, given how little such research has yet been done. This chapter draws on materials from a major audience research project to help formulate provisional findings and proposals for future research. What these suggest is that audiences use “music” (only sometimes distinguished from other sound-sources) for a range of purposes, from emotional heightening to cueing of understanding, knowledge of narrative developments to more complex determinations of cultural appropriateness.