Music Vocabulary
This main part of the music can travel in many directions and can also undergo transformations.
What is melody?
This term describes an author's reason for creating a particular creative work.
What is purpose?
This person writes the script for a given movie.
Who is the screenwriter?
Storytellers use this name for a main character, from whose perspective the audience sees the events of the story.
What is the protagonist?
This process changes music by ways such as augmentation, fragmentation, or modulation.
What is transformation?
This term describes any and all music that supports the main melody.
What is harmony?
These people are whom an author intends to be impacted by their work.
Who are the audience?
This person ensures that the process of filmmaking runs smoothly and on time.
Who is the producer?
Storytellers use this name for a character who stands as an obstacle in the way of the main character’s goals, or as a threat to common good.
Who is the antagonist?
These smallest units of music can be transformed in countless ways to form a bigger unit of music.
What are motives?
This word describes the many instruments and tone colors that a sound can be made of.
What is timbre?
Many movies are grouped into categories with these titles, which come with a set of expectations for what audiences will see and hear.
What are genres?
This word describes music that can be heard by the characters in the story, whether played live or through an in-universe recording.
What is diegetic music?
Average people in a story’s universe are referred to by this term. They often comment on the events of the story from the perspective of an outsider.
Who are the chorus?
This meaningful unit of music can represent a specific person, place, or idea, but it doesn't have to.
What is a theme?
Depending on the number of instruments playing, this part of music can be thin or thick.
What is texture?
This term describes the emotional impact that a musical, environmental, or storytelling choice has on its audience.
What is mood?
This style of music from the nineteenth century is one of the most popular styles used in film music, because of its lush harmonies and epic melodies.
What is Romanticism?
Many characters can be perceived as one of these categories based on similar traits, values, and/or motivations.
What is an archetype?
Sometimes, composers do this to an existing melody to call a certain association to mind in their new music.
What is sampling?
Music can be loud, or quiet, and can make changes in volume by adjusting this type of element.
What are dynamics?
These factors, which surround an author in real life, influence all of the choices that author makes.
What is context?
When access to the tools for movie-making began to grow in the late twentieth century, more people made movies for this reason – which stems from a word meaning “to love”.
What is amateurism?
Some characters in film are paired with these musical ideas that grow and change with them throughout their story.
What are leitmotifs?
This term describes harmony that is crunchy, unstable, or tense.
What is dissonance?