The musical score of Bernard Hermann in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 movie thriller entitled ‘Psycho’ has turned into a monumental classic piece of scoring creativity. The murder scene in the shower room will definitely be copied by other film makers and each time one would hear the scoring used in the shower scene, it would always connote “murder” and all visual and affective connection related to death, fear and suspense. Noticeable is the musician’s departure from the usual custom of musical scoring back in his era.
His experimentation has enabled the film enter the prestigious halls of the cinematic film genre.Hermann dared to use strings alone for this scene. Highly limited, the timbre available for scoring needed to be timed well and executed precisely. Hermann needed ‘silence’ as music intro for the strings. It was only ‘silence’ and strings that helped Hermann support and enlarge the effect of the scene at hand.
He could have used wind instruments or other musical instruments that proved to be a more logical choice than strings that was always connotated with romance and love during that period. Critics have continually analyzed the composer’s motivations for this out of the box decision.In an interview given in 1971 Herrmann explained that he had used only strings for Psycho because he felt that he could complement the black-and-white photography of the film by creating a black-and-white sound. Can such a thing exist in music? It can when we remember that the string choir of the modern symphony orchestra, the largest body within that ensemble, may have only one basic tone-color, but it also enjoys certain other advantages not possessed by the other instrumental families when isolated from their normal symphonic context. (Palmer, 1975) Strings compared to other musical instruments can span the longest effective choice of notes.Their dynamic range is unmatched by other musical instruments.
String can carry and hold one timbre or one color and when the strings stop, an automatic ‘no color – no timbre’ is achieved therefore it effectively mimics the ‘black and white’ photography characteristic of the film itself. Compositions under this tenet will definitely give the composer great materials to bring forth a variety of dramatic and emotional effects.One of the basic elements of music is called color, or timbre (pronounced "TAM-ber"). Color includes all the aspects of a sound that do not have anything to do with how high or low it is, how loud or soft, or how long or short. In other words, if a flute plays a note, and then an oboe plays the same note, for the same length of time, at the same loudness, you can still easily tell the two notes apart, because a flute sounds different from an oboe.
This difference is the color of the sound. Timbre is caused by the fact that each note from a musical instrument is made up of more than one sound wave.These sets of sound waves, called harmonics, are basically the same for every instrument. Small differences in the balance of these waves - how many you can hear, and how loud they are compared to each other - create the many different musical colors. The harmonics at the beginning of each note - the attack - are especially important for timbre, so it is actually easier to identify instruments that are playing short notes with strong articulations than it is to identify instruments playing long, smooth notes. (Jones, 2006)The musical score remains intense especially during the shower scene.
One would hear the water and silence. Then when the killer comes in, the audience will hear the strings and silence, the water which symbolize life fades away. The strings prove versatile in its use for musical scoring. It has almost been casted to be on cue for love and romance. But because of Hermann’s innovations, the string was able to show the breadthe of its abilities that could reach emotions that bring out fear.The strings in Psycho has an exact synthetic, piercing quality due to the use of a high pitched note.
The piercing effect helps the film maker drive the fear of being stabbed into the minds and feelings of his audience. The use of the strings were so powerful that one could almost hear shrieking shouts of animals. The film Exoricist in the seventies had to record sounds in the slaughter houses just to produce ghastly terror. But in Psycho, the strings and silence were enough elements to cause fear and panick and feel the coldness of death.
The strings were also able to produce the sound of steel which visually in the movie was brought in by the single butcher knife element. This piece of genius work has made the film into a timeless classic piece of art. Documentors noted that Hitchcock wanted to produce this film without musical scores but he was most unsatisfied when the movie came out and so he needed to get Hermann to try to make it a little bit better without putting too much music to disrupt the entire film.But clearly, the scoring upstaged the entire film so much so that other film makers now know that making a horror flick or a terrorizing scene is more effective with sounds. Audiences would spontaneously cover their ears when watching a horror or terror film climaxing towards the murder scene with all blood and gore. Watching a suspense thriller without sounds does not produce the same effect as watching it with sounds effects.
To date, silence in film has attained its own ranks. Silence precedes tone, pitch and is needed for well defined articulation.No beat defines a beat. No color defines color just as white defines black. The movie was remade with Vince Vaun acting as Norman Bates. The remade film was adapted into the colored screen and somehow, some elements that was effective in the original black and white film was not there.
The use of strings against the black and white murder scene was the one that’s most effective. The musical scoring would always guide film makers in ensuring integration of film elements into the expected effects a film would require from his audiences.
