Museum of the Moving Image Assignment

During our tour of the Museum of the Moving Image, our guide spent the most time showing us an audio demo. There were two TV screens set up, allowing you to choose from a few classic movie clips. After you chose the scene (he chose  Hitchcock's "Vertigo") it gave you several choices for score. Providing the audience had never seen the movie, we were supposed to guess which one sounded better, and had the most continuity with the scene in question. He played each of them twice; some of them were too dramatic, others too subtle. We finally narrowed it down to two, which seemed like they could both fit. The scene was supposed to be suspenseful; the character was coming to some sort of realization during the course of it. Ultimately we narrowed it down to the correct one, because every time the camera would zoom in on something  you could hear a subtle "ping" to denote that it was important. The demo helped to illustrate how important audio is to moving image, and how choosing it is probably a very careful, tedious process. If the score or soundtrack is off, the whole mood of the scene, or entire movie can be ruined. The score can alter the entire experience of the film for the audience, both positively and negatively. This demo showed me that even the most subtle differences in sound can effect the work as a whole.