Cinematic Sound, Identity, and Memory: Theorizing the Audience in Film Music Analysis
Organizer(s): Táhirih Motazedian (Vassar College)
Chair(s): Frank Lehman (Tufts University)
Traditionally, film music analysis has focused on how the score interacts with the visuals and the narrative to shape meaning. Yet musical meaning extends beyond these elements, emerging from the listener’s cognitive, embodied, and emotional engagement with the music. Film viewers do not exist in a vacuum—they bring embodied experiences, gender identities, personal histories with favorite film franchises, and shared connections with other fans, all within specific cultural and temporal contexts. While scholars have examined film music’s societal context and reception from a musicology perspective, analyses of film music have rarely foregrounded the lived experiences of viewers in shaping musical meaning. We argue that meaning arises not only from notes and images, but also from the identities, histories, and communal interactions of audiences. This session shifts the analytical model to integrate these perspectives—bringing the viewer out of the vacuum and into the analysis and assessment of musical meaning—by foregrounding the interplay between composers’ creative choices and audiences’ cultural positioning. While the first two papers theorize the audience via fan communities (examining how musical choices maximize nostalgia and how online communities discuss musical representations), our third paper theorizes the audience as a diverse group of individuals (each bringing a distinct perspective to the cinematic experience). Inherently interdisciplinary, our session collectively draws on research in fan studies, media industry studies, psychology, embodied cognition, musical semiotics, feminist studies, and critical race theory. By interlacing comparative historical inquiry with critical attention to gender, body, and cultural memory, this session proposes richer analytical frameworks that apply across genres, decades, and franchises. In this way, film music analysis can represent and reflect the collective memory of the audience. Rather than centering on canonical classics, this session also prioritizes contemporary popular films, reflecting how meaning evolves in real time through engagement with today’s franchises. By synthesizing interdisciplinary methodologies, this session challenges traditional film music analysis to acknowledge that soundtracks do not just underscore films—they underscore the lived experiences of the audiences who hear them.
Presentations of the Symposium
Rebooting a Film, Rebooting its Music, and the Nostalgia Factor
Táhirih Motazedian
Vassar College
Reboots have become a fixture in today’s film industry, and while scholars have lately examined the phenomenon of film reboots, no one has yet turned their attention to the sonic dimension. In my paper, I argue that a new musical strategy is starting to emerge in recent reboots—an approach based on maximizing nostalgia.
This song has enjoyed enormous cachet, to such a degree that the 2024 film reboot even incorporates the theme’s name into the film title (Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F), spotlighting this music as a star attraction. The reboot’s soundtrack unfolds as a layered performance, opening with subtle nods to the original theme, reworked in a developmental progression that gradually builds through the musical processes of cumulation (Burkholder 1995) and accumulation (Spicer 2004). This teleological ascent culminates during the final climactic car chase, with the full re-emergence of the theme in its original form—the moment long-awaited by fans of the original film. The (ac)cumulative buildup leading to this musical theme is cathartic, after the viewer has been waiting to hear it for the past ninety minutes (and the past forty years). For viewers who watched Beverly Hills Cop when it came out, this moment of musical catharsis can trigger memories and embodied experiences from watching the original film. In contrast to reboots that simply deploy the original theme in its unaltered form, this nuanced approach harnesses the audience’s cinematic memory to heighten anticipation and maximize the nostalgic payout.
Through detailed analysis and comparison of several reboots, my paper demonstrates how this musical strategy operates in modern reboots, how it diverges from earlier practices, and how nostalgia functions as the driving force behind new compositional choices.
In an era dominated by online fan communities and dynamic digital discourse, reboots are now crafted with an acute awareness of audience expectations. The film industry leans heavily into consumer desires to ensure financial success, and nostalgia has proven to be a safe strategy. This paper situates musical analysis of the recent nostalgia-fueled reboot approach within the broader societal framework, incorporating perspectives from cognition, psychology, cultural studies, and film industry economics.
Who is Scored to Save the World? Topics, Tropes, and Musical Representations of Superheroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2018-2024)
Janet Bourne
University of California, Santa Barbara
“It’s not usually the brown girls… who save the world,” remarks Pakistani-American Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) in Ms. Marvel (2022). Her comment underscores our society’s picture of superheroes: male, white, attractive, able-bodied, heterosexual (Cocca 2020). Historically, these superheroes have been scored with themes of major-march superhero topic (Halfyard 2013). For the first ten years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), every main character was a white man, and many—like Captain America—were scored with this topic. However, 2018 onward, more MCU movies/shows featured women and/or people of color (Axios 2022), including Black Panther, Captain Marvel, The Falcon, and Ms. Marvel. These superheroes do not fit the white/male/able-bodied/etc. cliché; so, how are they musically scored?
Using superheroines and superhero(ines) of color from the 2018-2024 MCU franchise as a case study, this paper examines how their musical representation engages intersectionality through a systematic analysis of recurring scoring techniques. Building on topic theory and thematic development, I argue that the topical “clothing” of musical themes can signify—even emphasize—different axes of characters’ socio-economic identities and power relations, specifically regarding race and gender. When topics are troped (unrelated topics brought together), they create emergent meanings representing intersections of these characters’ identities. Extending Hatten’s (2014) tropological dimensions to media, I show how composers employ what I call a tropological formula, blending conventional major-march topic with culturally or gender-coded musical topical markers to articulate race, gender, and/or ethnicity. Moreover, this paper considers the ways in which online fan communities actively interpret these scoring choices. Looking at comments/discussions on Reddit, YouTube, etc. (e.g., Wellman 2024) and drawing on media psychology (Dill 2013) and fan studies (Booth 2018), I situate my musical analysis in how this tropological formula influences how audiences recognize, contest, or reinforce/own these sonic representations, demonstrating how musical identity is not only constructed by composers but also negotiated by listeners. I close with a large-scale topical and thematic analysis of Falcon, Ms. Marvel, and The Marvels (2023). Topics and tropes shape and reflect evolving narratives within culturally (and commercially) influential franchises—sites of musical meaning where representation is both constructed and contested.
When a Song Becomes an Anthem, a Person Becomes a Crowd
Juan Chattah
University of Miami
Film music subtly shapes audience interpretation by engaging sensorimotor reflexes and conveying meaning that can support, contrast, or even negate other cinematic elements. However, analyzing this meaning remains elusive. Moving beyond structural or representational approaches, I adopt a cognitive semiotic perspective that integrates perceptual psychology, neurocognition, and symbolic interpretation. This approach positions film music as an active agent in storytelling, rather than a mere background element. Building upon Chattah’s (2024) ESMAMAPA framework (Empathy, Schemas, Metaphors, Affordances, Memory, Archetypes, Personal Associations), I incorporate Gestalt principles of auditory perception (Bregman 1994) and recent findings in music cognition and semiotics (Bourne 2024, Donnelly 2019, Huron & Margulis 2010, Kozak 2019, Patel 2017, Tan et al. 2017). As a case study, I analyze “The Hanging Tree” scene from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I.
In this scene, empathy (via the Mirror Neuron System) allows us to vicariously experience the protagonist’s emotions as she sings a haunting song. The CONTAINER and LINEARITY schemas aid in crafting musical metaphors that map the song’s expansion from an intimate utterance to a collective symbol. The duple meter’s affordances, which align well with symmetrical body movements related to locomotion, immerse us deeper into the heart of the rebellion unfolding onscreen, transforming us from onlookers into participants. Gestalt principles play a key role in organizing and categorizing musical information, allowing us to recognize and memorize the ‘Mockingjay’ leitmotif, turning it into a powerful auditory cue that resonates in our subconscious. The song’s style, structure, and delivery suggest the “blues,” “country,” “folk,” and “anthem” archetypical topoi, each contributing layers of sociocultural meaning. Ultimately, mapping a possible personal interpretative process through conceptual blending reveals how the protagonist singing “The Hanging Tree” evolves from a personal lament into a collective voice of defiance.
Viewed through a cognitive semiotic lens, film music operates not as passive underscoring but as an active agent in meaning-making. Far from mere accompaniment, it shapes perception through embodied engagement, forges deep cognitive and affective connections, and structures narrative experience, ultimately emerging as an integral force in cinematic storytelling.
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