Music and Emotional Manipulation

Music has a tremendous power to guide emotional responses of the audience. This is of course one of the biggest reasons why music is used at all in film. In fact many of the iconic emotional moments in popular movies wouldn't be as iconic without the music.

A great example is this video which shows the Throne Room Sequence of STAR WARS without music:

https://youtu.be/Tj-GZJhfBmI?t=28 

And here's the same scene with music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yixG8pfncOs 

It is clearly obvious that much of the celebratory and festive emotional response is caused by the similarly noble music. Music has an incredibly strong power in this regards.

But as the saying goes: "With great power comes great responsibility."

Of course this strength can and has been misused. A century worth of political propaganda movies has shown how music can strongly guide how an audience perceives a certain imagery.

But without going as far as propaganda, emotional manipulation is a very sensitive matter that any film composer should be very aware of. 

As long as we stay in a strictly fictional world like with Star Wars, a certain degree of manipulation might even be desirable to sell the exotic world to the audience and the only response some members of the audience might have is that they feel manipulated and therefore dislike the movie or the music. But in general, in such scenarios the audience is more open to being guided emotionally without feeling manipulated. The modern "fairy tale" approach allows for quite some emotional "guidance".

But as soon as the topic touches on more real things, the approach to emotional manipulation needs to be very sensitive. Particularly documentaries can suffer greatly from emotionally manipulative music but also dramas or historical movies might be sensitive.

Critical situations are always scenes where you're trying emphasize on an emotion that is not "sufficiently" transported by the images or where you decide to steer emotions into one direction where alternative directions might be possible. The decision however always needs to be made individually. If an earnerst emotion is shown on screen and this emotional response is unquestionable, the music might help a bit to heighten the impact even in such sensitive genres. 

In general the more real something is the more sensitive or morally problematic it becomes in regards of emotional manipulation.

The essence here for any film composer is to develop a high degree of sensitivity of what might be tolerable or even neccessary and what might be pushing things too far. 

Again, eveybody has a personal threshhold of what they accept but in general in recent years, the audience has become quite aware about situations where they are being manipulated and an unfortunate choice of music can backfire on the movie and its makers quite heavily.

In an ideal world, a director might prevent you anyway from going overboard with emotional manipulation but some lesser experienced filmmakers might not have a clear understanding of the impact such choices can make on the movie. 

A whole other story are filmmakers who encourage you to manipulate in order to transport questionable opinions or morally compromised views on things. In such cases, everybody needs to decide on their own whether they want to be involved in such a thing. But this touches on a different subject which every composer struggles with from time to time which is what they are ethically willing to do for music.

In any way, be aware of this power and develop a proper self consciousness whether things are pushing emotionally too far.