Resource #1

The first resource I have found that is useful is an academic journal article, "Film Music Influences How Viewers Relate to Movie Characters." The planned topic of my research is music's influence on the audience and how they see the movie. This article is about an experiment that wanted to find out if no music, thriller music, or melodramatic music would influence how the audience interpreted a character's ambiguous facial expression and how confident they were in knowing that character's state of mind. The results were not completely surprising. When the clip was accompanied by melodramatic music, the audience was more confident with knowing the character's state of mind, and described their facial expression with words like "love". Love was mentioned more often than fear when listening to melodramatic music, and in contrast "anger" was used more often than fear to describe the scene accompanied by thriller music. By being more confident in knowing the character, the audience more often than not empathizes and connects with the character, making the character more likeable. When the same clip was accompanied with thriller music, the audience was not confident with knowing the character's state of mind, causing them to not connect as often with the character and like them less. When comparing melodramatic and thriller music with no music, characters are more liked when listening to melodramatic music and least liked when listening to thriller music. Not only can music change the mood of the scene but also the mood of the audience and their feelings toward the character, and, as a whole, the movie.

This source is very reliable. Every step of the experiment is listed, along with citations of previous research that is pertinent to their study. The people who created the study made sure that there would be no bias or outliers, making each viewer view the same trigger clips and distracting clips in different order and asking the same questions in the same order. They also did a couple pre-tests to make sure that the music chosen was melodramatic and thriller, and that the scenes chosen to be "trigger" scenes had close ups on ambiguous facial expressions.

This research definitely gives my paper a scientific backbone to have proof that my topic of study is not only something based on my own and the opinions and findings of others, but that it was proven by facts. It helps me emphasize the fact that music can change an audience's feelings toward characters and change a scene completely. A scene can go from ominous to happy depending solely on the music. This source will be one which I will use as a basis for my further research into how music is used in melodrama and in turn how that is perceived by the audience.