Computer-generated imagery, better remembered as CGI, has radically changed the movie industry. Anything can now be made to look extremely real on screen, and we are left marvelling at the cleverness involved as well as the computer programming and power that lie behind this mastery of illusions.
But at the same time, have you noticed how, despite all the effort done to put us into a visual trance that takes us into another reality, moviemakers still cannot do without background music?
Despite all the work put into creating visual realism, background music – which of course is not a natural part of whatever event that is unfolding on screen, but an insertion that should be intrusive but isn’t – is profusely and profoundly used. Neither they nor the audience/spectator can do without it. [Note here that I could not say audience alone, or spectator alone, because visual stimulation does not happen without audial accompaniment, and vice versa. They have to be harmonised.]
What does that tell us about our relationship to music?
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