Music in Video: 5 Best Practices [Infographic]

Music in videos is a bit like oxygen in your lungs. You rarely notice it. But without it, things just aren’t quite the same.

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We’ve looked before at how you can use music to great effect in advertising. And today, we’re going to explore a few ways filmmakers put music to work.

Specifically, we’ll cover the five use cases Aaron Copland, an accomplished American composer, wrote about in his essay simply titled Film Music.

5 Ways to Use Music in Video

In his article, Copland suggests music in videos can help:

1. Present a more convincing portrayal of time and space. Pick a music genre that fits your story’s time or setting. This will help suspend disbelief, making your film more compelling. (Think about the type of music you might hear in a western compared to the soundtrack of a horror flick.)
2. Represent unspoken thoughts of characters or unseen implications of a situation. The anxiety-inducing buildup before an attack in Jaws, the unsettling Darth Vader march each time the villain appears — in these cases, music acts as a cue that something bad is coming. Similarly, music can effectively communicate what a character might be thinking but not saying (e.g., the classic “womp womp” trumpet sound after a bad joke).
3. Simply fill the background. Sometimes a scene can just feel a little empty. To avoid this, filmmakers often fill gaps in dialog and similar situations with neutral music. This type of music generally isn’t intended to be noticed.
4. Create a sense of continuity. Music can help connect a series of scenes. Consider the montage, which strings together several seemingly unrelated scenes with a single song.
5. Build and ultimately end a scene, grand finale-style. Virtually every movie ends with an epic score. This music helps provide films with a sense of closure and finality. And, to quote Copland, “I never saw or heard of a picture that ended in silence.”

Here are those five use cases for music in video in a nice, shareable infographic:

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<p><a href=”https://musicformakers.com/music-in-film/”><img src=”https://musicformakers.com/wp-content/uploads/using-music-in-film.png” alt=”Aaron Copland’s 5 Ways to Use Music in Movies” width=”800px” border=”0″ /></a><br>Source: <a href=”https://musicformakers.com/”>Music for Makers</a></p><br /> <p>

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