Moving on from diegetic music for a while, it was time to look at employing non-diegetic music.

I’ve been trying to contact a band manager of a friend of mine for a while, yet am not getting a response about using their music, so I had to locate royalty free music.

Looking for something that could be used to communicate sadness, I found this clip on Youtube, that was royalty free.

This does accurately reflect the simplistic and cliche approach to the experiments that I was going for, so I decided to use it in my experiments.

 

Now it was time to begin the experiment, where I would be playing non-diegetic music against the base clip I created in experiment 1, and seeing it there was an obvious emotional difference.

 

I began by locating the sequence I had created in experiment 1, that I will be using for a while to test non-diegetic music. I am happy with this clip as I mentioned, yet in the future I do plan to replace the opening back shot with a much better framed and lit shot that I captured in the reshoots.

Before I began adding the non-diegetic music, I thought it’d be a good idea to reflect on the emotional intensity of the clip without music. Whilst I do think it is obvious that there is a sad emotional tone to the scene, it does come off as a little awkward, so it would be interesting to see the difference that non-diegetic music makes.

I began by adding the royalty free Youtube track to the clip. At this point I decided that the emotional “drop” or “climax” of the piano (that’s definitely not what it’s called but you get the point) comes in far too late. By this, I mean I instead wanted this climax to occur after the conversation has finished, I don’t know why, I just had an instinct.

Therefore, I decided to change it so that the climax occurred just after the dialogue finished. this definitely improved the clip, yet it was just a little too fast for me.

So, I decided to slow down the pace to 75%, which worked a lot better. Suddenly, the scene seemed so much more powerful.

Now that the clip was completed, it was time to export it and reflect on the difference. The clip is linked below:

Looking back on this clip and comparing it to experiment 1, I think there is a much clearer emotional difference. The music just allows the scene to be so much more exaggerated and dramatic, in fact it even makes the emotional reactions of Matt and Max in the conclusion appear exaggerated when compared to how it looked without music. In terms of measuring the emotional intensity, this experiment has definitely been a success. However, the music is far too loud compared to the dialogue, appearing incredibly unprofessional, so I do need to work on equalizing volume better in further experiments.