Imagination is deeply intertwined with sensorial experience. One sensorial perception can prompt us to imagine a whole setting to go with it, and function as a catalyst for both simple and extremely complex cognitive processes (Berger, 2016). Sound can be a powerful tool to invite the audience to experience something that is not actually there, and because of this, it has been extensively used for world-building and character development within a range of animated and fantasy media. Music can signify imagery and/or establish a particular mood, as well as signal the presence of certain emotions, characters or objects without the need to explicitly introduce them to the scene. Furthermore, music can also provide what Marian Winter has described as a “commentary” (1941, 148) on what is happening onscreen, and help bring out irony, comedy or other forms of subtext or meaning. At the same time, sound is also very important in non-visual forms of media (from radio programmes to podcasts), as they rely heavily on music to set the tone of their discussions due to the lack of visual cues that exist in these formats. The opportunity to work as part of the King’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship (KURF) scheme for the Fantasy/Animation project presented me with the unusual and exciting question of ‘what does fantasy sound like’, and through that as a starting point, I was invited to explore the relationship between sound and imagination in both an academic and a more practical/creative manner. My role required me to research and reflect upon the scoring conventions of film and podcast jingle music: what they are, what they mean and how they help bring media to life. Furthermore, I had to apply the acquired knowledge to the composition of a short piece of music to function as a theme tune for the Fantasy/Animation podcast. This blog post will briefly go through some of the challenges of having to compose the music for the Fantasy/Animation podcast (both the intro piece of music, and composing the outro theme too), and explain the main ideas behind my creative process.

20th Century Fox Fanfare Theme.

Warner Brothers’ Studio Theme.

Walt Disney Studios Theme.

The interdisciplinary character of the Fantasy/Animation project meant that I had to incorporate elements from various traditions into a very short piece of music to meaningfully respond to the task. The often contrasting nature of musical conventions regarding fantasy film, animated media and podcast scoring resulted in conflicting musical material that was hard to combine organically, and this created the need to find creative ways to hint at the presence of all these traditions without compromising the simplicity and coherence of the theme tune. Due to this, I decided to reference the podcast’s two main areas of discussion by combining the instrumentation typically associated with fantasy film scoring (strings and woodwind) with the mechanical-sounding keyboards that have historically been linked to early animated films. These associations date back to silent-film era animated pictures, where there would often be a pianist performing live at the movie theatre to accompany the action, as well as in the Golden Era of Hollywood, where the standard was for studios to have an orchestra dedicated to recording the soundtrack for their movies (see Winter, 1941; Reay, 2004). The objective of my own arrangement was to make the music subtly reference the two focal points of the podcast (fantasy and animation) in a way that was general enough that it could work as an opening to the different kinds of topics and discussions within each episode.

One of the main objectives behind this project, therefore, was to create a piece of music that functioned as mood-setting (with the main feeling represent through the music being that of “excitement’), but that also had enough iconicity to be associated with the podcast and work as a jingle in a similar way that a leitmotif would operate within an animated film or even a larger piece of music. It also had to be able to set the tone for an academic discussion podcast. I tried to achieve this by including some elements of Hollywood-style cinematic composition to the piece (brass instrumentation, strong cadence etc.) typically found in opening studio logos (see right), for they are broadly considered to be cultural codes for entertainment and work very well in the context of an introduction (Neumeyer, 1997). Additionally, I made an active effort to centre the melody around a very simple ascending 5th interval (one of the most consonant intervals in the Western musical tradition), for it has a grandiose character and is easy to recognise. I also tried to recreate the format of the podcast - which is fundamentally centred around relaxed conversation and exchange of ideas - by organising the music around a very simple melodic idea, which could then be passed around the different instruments (from strings and woodwind to brass). This was meant to create the illusion of dialogue, thus giving a sonic nod towards the formal structure of the podcast and making it easier for the music to transition organically into the actual episode.

Once it was finalised, I next took the intro music and used it as a blueprint to write the outro. I had to take into consideration the differences that these two little pieces of music had to have in terms of function and duration. For the closing music, I aimed for a more delicate beginning that could ease the transition out of the discussion, as well as a more subtle cadence which could be faded out at the end. Overall, the outro was meant to give a nod to the same thematic idea from the intro music in a different context: instead of the previous energy and excitement, this time the music tries to emulate the feeling of ‘waking up’ from a fantasy.

Altogether, the experience of trying to translate concepts from the world of film into music was challenging but very enriching and, although it feels exaggerated to try to justify every aspect of a 30-second musical piece, I can say I learned a lot from the experience of trying to incorporate academic research into my creative process. Trying to decipher all the complex ways in which cultural and cinematic codes manifest themselves through music will take a lot longer than a month, so I look forward to seeing how this project continues to find creative ways to answer the question of what fantasy could sound like in an animated context, and I thank Dr Christopher Holliday and Dr Alex Sergeant for the opportunity to be a part of the process.

**Article published: November 12, 2021**

References

Berger, Christopher C. 2016. Where Imagination Meets Sensation: Mental Imagery, Perception, and Multisensory Integration. Stockholm: Karolinska Institutet, available at: https://openarchive.ki.se/xmlui/handle/10616/45157.

Brittan, Francesca. 2017. Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Halfyard, Janet K., 2012. The Music of Fantasy Cinema (Genre, Music, and Sound Series). Sheffield: Equinox Publishing.

Neumeyer, David. 1997. “Source Music, Background Music, Fantasy and Reality in Early Sound Film.” College Music Symposium 37: 13-20

Reay, Pauline. 2004. Music in Film: soundtracks and synergy. New York: Wallflower.

Winter, Marian Hannah. 1941. “The Function of Music in Sound Film.” The Musical Quarterly 27, no. 2: 146-164.

Biography

Francisca Naranjo is a BMus student at King’s College London. Her areas of study are both composition and piano performance, and she plans on specialising in composition for the screen in the future.