I sat in the Packard Lobby on a surprisingly\u00a0comfortable\u00a0blue couch that wasn’t really a couch because it lacked certain aspects of a couch such as arm-rests and a backrest, but I digress. \u00a0The reason I sat upon this not-a-couch was because we, the students, had been tasked to go and find a place to sit and record the sounds of our surroundings. \u00a0I looked to my left and noticed that my not-a-couch was covered in dog hair. \u00a0I was getting distracted, again. \u00a0I reeled my wandering eyes and thoughts in, and shut everything down except my ears– a dangerous move on the first\u00a0Monday\u00a0of a block.<\/p>\n
Silence wasn’t silence at all. \u00a0I heard the fans of the ventilation, the footsteps of humans walk up the stairs to my left, the cracking of the plexiglass tunnel across the room from me. \u00a0The cracking of the plexiglass as it heated under the rays of the sun reminded me of the first time I entered Packard this fall as a brand-new first-year student: It was dark, I was going to band, and I was 100% sure the glass was going to immediately shatter and fall on me after hearing it pop and crack for the first time. I remembered the emotions of my new-to-college-self: fear, trepidation, hope, excitement and above all, wonder.<\/p>\n
Curses! I was off topic again… Or was I? \u00a0I paused to think for a minute. \u00a0Was this what was supposed to happen? \u00a0Was I supposed to sit here and let the sounds trigger memories? \u00a0If the popping sound of plexiglass was enough to get me to lose myself in memory, what could music <\/em>do? \u00a0What does this have to do with music in film?!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It turns out that one cannot simply dive straight into the complex transformation of music as it passes through different media.<\/p>\n As a class, we started by reading some incredibly dense material entitled Emotions Expressed And Aroused by Music by Stephen Davies, which comes from the succinctly named The Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications which discusses how a non-sentient thing <\/em>(for lack of a better term) such as music can cause emotional reactions in listeners. \u00a0It was laborious reading, but the subject material fascinates <\/em>me. \u00a0I never appropriately wondered why I listened to songs that made me feel sad. \u00a0Why would I want to feel sad? How<\/em> does the music make me sad? \u00a0Would the song make me feel differently if I were to encounter it in a different context, such as in a movie?<\/p>\n Lo and behold, we discussed my final question today in class!<\/p>\n Last night we were tasked to listen to “Caught in the Middle With You<\/em>” by Stealers Wheel. \u00a0In case you are unfamiliar with the song, it was written in 1972 and is by my description “a song you can listen to whilst driving an old red pickup truck along a dirt road on a clear day in Iowa.”<\/p>\n But today, the song was in the movie\u00a0Reservoir\u00a0Dogs <\/em>and was not used in a carefree, “cruisin” application. \u00a0Instead the sing is played during a gruesome torture scene by Mr. Blond– a character in the movie– as he mutilated a cop with disturbing glee.<\/p>\n The image the song conjures in my head is no longer of a red truck, but that of a psychopath torturing a young cop. \u00a0The transformation of my interpretation of the song depending on its setting is extremely interesting, and I am interested to see where we go next.<\/p>\n Tomorrow, we are watching Fantasia. <\/em>Oh yeah, I’m excited.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bryan Harding<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I sat in the Packard Lobby on a surprisingly\u00a0comfortable\u00a0blue couch that wasn’t really a couch because it lacked certain aspects of a couch such as arm-rests and a backrest, but I digress. \u00a0The reason I sat upon this not-a-couch was because we, the students, had been tasked to go and find a place to sit … <\/p>\n