ABSTRACT
Film music conveys messages that support, complement, or negate the visuals or the dialogue. When confronted with conflicting, ambiguous, or incompatible meanings between the music and other cinematic domains, audiences generally interpret those moments as instances of ‘irony’. This chapter, inspired by Rosch’s cognitive models of categorization, disentangles the notion of musical irony and concepts commonly linked to irony, including parody, satire, sarcasm, paradox, hyperbole, and the grotesque. Drawing on probabilistic models of categorization and the notion of second-order inferences, it constructs a framework for reevaluating our interpretations of incongruity in film. The chapter further explores how the human tendency for basic-level categorization influences cinematic experiences and proposes that new instances of incongruity in film prompt a recalibration of the categorization process and the construction of new categories.
