ABSTRACT
Film music harmoniously synchronizes with other cinematic dimensions to evoke physiological and psychological states in the audience that provide insight into characters’ behaviors and film narratives. This chapter delves into embodied cognition and draws from Gibson’s notion of affordances and the concept of entrainment to explore how the material characteristics of music elicit specific responses from listeners. It traces the origins of music’s affordances to our phenomenological experiences in the physical world and examines how music, through its meter and tonality, operates in concert with other cinematic dimensions to facilitate the audience’s embodiment of a film character’s physical actions and psychological states. The chapter also presents a more speculative argument by contemplating how film music’s affordances introduce an associative layer of meaning connected to audience members’ cultural practices and values.
