The use of music in TV shows and movies can be highly subjective. What one person considers to be an amazing choice of music which supports the narrative and mood perfectly may be perceived as ill conceived and unnecessary to someone else. With such a huge volume of content now being produced to meet the needs of the various broadcasters and streaming platforms, how do we ensure that music continues to do the job it should, enhancing the storytelling and taking the viewer on an emotional journey which is in keeping with the director’s intentions? Let’s consider various types of productions…

High End Dramas And Movies

Before we get into how not to use music, let’s first consider the numerous cases where it’s done exceptionally well. If we were to look for a general correlation between effective and ineffective use of music across a range of productions, we would no doubt observe that, in general, the higher the budget, the more likely we are to hear music which works harmoniously with the imagery, dialogue and overall narrative. Composers and music supervisors bring a very astute and integral perspective to the process, usually ensuring that the composition is ideally suited to the production, enhancing and improving the viewing experience. At the very high end of production, the best composers are in high demand, precisely due to the fact that they’re capable of working at an almost superhuman level to create compositions which are exactly tailored to the requirements of the production.

Corporate Video

Looking for a minute at the opposite end of the spectrum, corporate video production is where the biggest misuses of music often occur. When used carefully and selectively, music has a great place in the storytelling toolkit, but the constant plastering of wall-to-wall music becomes tedious very quickly. Typically, corporate video production tends to have lower budgets than most other kinds of video production. As such, people with less production experience are more likely to be involved in the process.

All too often, music is used throughout a video simply because it’s the easy option. If you have a sequence consisting of B Roll, rather than adding ambience and creating believable sounding sound design, it’s significantly easier just to cover it with music, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing with sound. Often, there won’t even be an audio post process in a corporate video production. It will be edited, music added, maybe a couple of sound effects thrown in here and there, and the whole thing is monitored through a pair of speakers, which they bought for $100 on Amazon, or worse still, through laptop speakers. The laziest option of all is to use one music track throughout a whole video lasting several minutes. A quick search of YouTube or Vimeo for corporate videos will reveal numerous examples of this type of production. What’s more, the selected music is often not appropriate to the pacing, theme or purpose of the video. Music should serve to enhance a production, making it significantly better than it would otherwise be. Poor or lazy music choices work counterintuitively against the intended purpose and greatly reduce the audience’s enjoyment of the production.

Low Budget TV

The next logical step for many people after working in corporate video production is to progress into TV. The problem is that bad practices often stick, and the same lazy approach to music can proliferate through low-budget TV shows. Should you ever choose to watch a spot of daytime TV (I advise against it), you will hear what I mean. Library music acting as filler, and quite often conflicting with the dialogue. As well as the mix itself, the issue is sometimes also the frequency content of the music. Too dense a piece of music does not lend itself to sitting under dialogue. If music must be used and chosen from a library, something which allows space for the dialogue to breathe can be a good choice. Music libraries often provide underscores, along with main versions of tracks. Cutting between the full version when no dialogue is present and the underscore when it is can make a huge difference in helping to ensure that the dialogue remains as intelligible as possible. Consider the fact that daytime TV viewers are more likely to be elderly and hard of hearing, and it’s easy to see why bad mixes and wrongly chosen music can lead to viewers having to switch the subtitles on. Of course, editing music requires time and a bit of skill, so sometimes the easy, quick option is the first choice for some producers and editors, to the great detriment of the overall production quality.

Mid Budget TV

Moving up the budget ladder to the middle tier, while not quite as common as in the corporate video or low-budget TV productions worlds, some bad practices still persist. Here, some music is composed and tailored specifically to the production, but a fairly high percentage of library music still finds its way in. At this level, it’s highly likely that there will be a proper audio dubbing process, but even a very good audio mix can’t get around the fact that incessantly and excessively used music still detracts from the viewing experience. Part of the reason why this still occurs, even at the mid-budget level, is time constraints. When something needs to be done to a very tight deadline, audio is, unfortunately, one of the things which seems to take a back seat. It’s almost an afterthought to some producers and there are occasions when very little time is given to audio post, meaning that it needs to be rushed. In order to expedite the pending audio mix, editors can fall into the trap of filling a program with music for the very reasons we outlined earlier; it’s easy, there’s less need for atmos and sound design, and it fills in a chunk of the audio with very little effort.

Music And Dialog Intelligibility

Another aspect of the overuse and misuse of music is the impact of music on dialog intelligibility. I reached out to Mike Thornton and asked him to share his thoughts on this…

“One of the biggest problems the overuse of music causes is a negative impact on dialog intelligibility. When researching my Understanding Loudness course, I discussed that looking at one 40-day period here in the UK, BBC TV received 100 complaints relating to loudness issues, of which 61 related to the background sound being too high, usually music, which is an issue of intelligibility.

61% of complaints about loudness were effectively complaints that the background sounds were too high, making the dialog, which is the key storytelling element, harder to understand. Unfortunately, this does pervade all sectors of the industry and is not helped by the fact that the producers and directors know the material and so do not perceive that there is a problem, so even if an audio professional raises it as an issue, there is often pushback to change the music/speech balance.

Another challenge is the issue of intelligibility and the ability for the consumer to separate the speech from the music deteriorates with age.” 

What Can Be Done About This?

Tackling this problem probably has no quick fix because, at the end of the day, it’s about education. Some of this can be traced back to film schools putting little to no emphasis on the importance of music and sound in video and TV production. Additionally, now that the constant use of music has become so widespread, many will deem it a perfectly acceptable practice in their own productions because that’s what everyone else is doing. 

As audio professionals, it’s partly down to us to help educate producers and editors on the importance of music and sound as a whole at every level of production. Last week I did a mix for a training video, and the producers wanted me to add sound effects to the stock footage which the video was made up of. The problem was that their chosen piece of music was so dense and compressed that it was almost impossible to get the majority of the SFX to sit with it. How can you expect a subtle office atmos to cut through against a pumping music track when there’s no space for it? It doesn’t work. I went back to them and described this problem, and we were able to find an underscore version of the track without a synth part. This worked well, and the sound effects filled in the soundtrack nicely, replacing and improving a large part of what was previously filling the mix.

When it comes to the area of intelligibility, Mike adds…

“Technology can provide some help with the use of Object-Based Audio and MPEG-H codecs. Object-based audio is not just about Dolby Atmos and DTS:X. It is possible to use object audio to deliver content to the end user where they can adjust the balance between content elements. You can read much more about this in my article Object Based Audio Can Do So Much More Than Just Dolby Atmos? We Explore. Since that article was published, this work has developed, and when I returned to the topic with my article TV Subtitle Usage Up To 80% - What Is Going Wrong With Dialogue Mixes? I returned to the use of objected-based audio to assist with dialog intelligibility and reported on an experiment which took a recent episode of  BBC One TV medical drama ‘Casualty’ and presented a version of it on the BBC website that includes a slider button in addition to the volume control. Keeping this additional slider on the right-hand side retains the standard audio mix. Moving the slider to the left progressively reduces background noise, including music, making the dialogue crisper.

As we showed in our article, Is This The Answer To TV Audio Critics? Object-Based Audio Case Studies Presented At The AES 146th Convention In Dublin, this technology can be built into consumer TVs, and as the BBC Casualty experiment shows, web-based and streaming services could easily build this into players hosted on smart TVs. Then, everyone, both normal and hearing impaired, could benefit from this excellent system.”

What Next?

To answer the question we posed at the start of this article, “Is music becoming clip art on TV?”. The simple answer is yes, especially where budgets are small and the audio is handled by people who are not trained or do not have an understanding of the issues. As we have highlighted, the solution is education.

As audio professionals, we have a responsibility to educate the current generation of editors, producers and directors, too.

Colleges, universities and specialist educational establishments like film schools have a significant responsibility to train the upcoming generations of editors, producers and directors already in the business on the correct use of sound in the storytelling process, as well as a clear understanding of how human hearing works. 

This needs to include an understanding of the correct use of music, including the use of underscore versions, which are designed to allow the key narrative elements like dialog and sound effects to be clearly audible. Also, to show how effective sound effects can be in enhancing the storytelling without the use of music. All of these would also help with the issue of dialog intelligibility, especially with older consumers. 

Poll

What do you think? How often do you come across inappropriate music on TV? Take this poll, and we’ll reveal the results next week.