Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1518296
38 M PS E . O R G emotions and making them more approachable and endearing to the audience. In the film Gremlins (1984) at [0:18:17], we hear Gizmo make all sorts of endearing high- pitched vocalisations and even singing before we even see him. By the time Gizmo is de-acousmatized, his friendliness and innocence have already been established by the soundtrack, thus engaging the audience and skewing their emotional disposition toward the strange little creature through the use of pathos. As I have mentioned above, the human (or inhuman) voice can be a powerful tool of persuasion in films. Pathos through the music track. Pathos as a tool of persuasion correlates to how music is employed in films. Music can alter feelings through the establishment of moods as composer Franz Waxman observes; "The immediate establishment of a particular mood is one of the most important functions of motion picture music." (Buhler and Neumeyer, 2016). Depending on the genre, music is also widely used to set the tone of a scene or an entire film. Imbuing scenes with either lightheartedness or seriousness. It can also produce empathy or disdain toward specific characters, places, or situations. Buhler and Neumeyer point out that music "is especially good at two things; (a) adding emotional specificity and (b) influencing and organizing time." (Buhler and Neumeyer, 2016). A good example of music used to add emotional specificity can be found in Baraka (1992), a film where there is no dialogue and music is utilised throughout to cue the audience emotionally, as we go from wonder, to bewilderment, to empathy, to sorrow, to estrangement, to wonder again, and from there to mindfulness, atonement, and hope. There is a powerful scene at [0:51:34] where two donkeys are pulling a man on top of a heavy wagon. The scene has no music at first, and then we hear the F sharp minor (F#m) chord of Dead Can Dance's The Host of Seraphim's solemn synthesizer and moments later, Lisa Gerard's mournful voice charges the scene with sorrowfulness and what could only be described in logogenic terms as despair. In the last years, research has been explaining the reasons why music is such a powerful emotional agent. Van Der Zwaag et al. (2011) found for instance, that tempo affects arousal and tension. Fast tempo music generates higher arousal and tension than slow tempo music. Additionally, they demonstrated that minor mode music produced higher levels of arousal than major mode music. And Juslin and Väställ (2008) concluded that "music evokes emotions through mechanisms that are not unique to music." (Juslin and Väställ, 2008). And they presented six mechanisms through which music listening may induce emotions; (1) brain stem reflexes, (2) evaluative conditioning, (3) emotional contagion, (4) visual imagery, (5) episodic memory, and Frame from Nomadland (2020). Frame from Gremlins (1984).