ABSTRACT
Introduction Music in film has the primary functions of conveying emotions and providing lenses through which the audience may understand the inner thoughts of the characters or the overarching themes of the film. Film music also allows spectators to imagine, and identify with, the context of the narrative which may be remote from the audience’s everyday life (Green 2010, 82-6). Film music is usually categorised into diegetic music (music that is part of the narrative world of the film and is “heard” by the characters) and non-diegetic music (music that is heard only by the audience) (Ramsey 2002, 314; Brown 1994, 67). This chapter examines the diegetic and non-diegetic popular music used in the soundtracks of a range of Singaporean films from the 1990s to 2011. Collectively, these soundtracks represent Singaporean filmmakers’ attempts at seeking the voices and identities of Singaporeans, as they negotiate tensions between the English-speaking, Mandarinspeaking and dialect-speaking segments of the ethnic Chinese community in Singapore.
