Have you ever noticed how ridiculous music videos look if you watch them with the TV on mute? It’s incredible how powerful music can be in shaping and colouring our emotions and perception. This link between how we experience the world and the music that moves us is well documented and profitably exploited in the soundtracks of today’s films.

Soundtracks began as a musical score played live by a musician in the movie theatres. Due to the inability to synchronise recorded dialogue, early movies had no soundtrack, hence ‘silent movies’ existed. However, then as today, it was recognised that it would be extremely odd for a large roomful of people to sit watching a flickering screen in silence. Music was also seen as necessary to provide atmosphere and emotional clues so that the audience was immersed in the experience. To maximise the coherence of the whole experience the music scores were often played whilst actors recorded their scenes. In the 1920s, those Hollywood layabouts finally got their acts together (geddit?...’acts’) and soon silent movies were a thing of the past.

Movies are and were big business and have completely permeated modern culture and society and there is an increasingly symbiotic relationship between all of the elements of a film and the film itself, particularly in the case of the soundtrack. Songs produced by big ticket artists are created alongside movies and are part of the package. I remember the song by Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger and Josie Scott for the title track on Spiderman getting catapulted up the charts even as the movie itself was propelled along by the song’s airplay on radio and the playlisting of its music video.

Predictably the advertising world caught on to the phenomenon and since the 1980s the ad moguls have been serving up increasingly well-tuned musical accompaniment to their advertising, culminating with the famous (and infamous) Pepsi ad featuring Michael Jackson. Since then, advertisements have started to feature musical artists as a matter of course, dipping into contemporary music to ramp up the attractiveness of the products featured. This is not necessarily a bad thing, I discovered Jose Gonzales through the Sony Bravia ad in 2006.

Lately, South African musos have been capitalising on the commercial linkages between movies and music. The Parlotones were a moderately successful South African band whose single ‘Beautiful’ was used in a Fuji Film ad in Ireland and were promptly launched onto the world’s stage. And the internationally acclaimed SA film ‘Tsotsi’ brought the limelight and recognition to Zola, the South African kwaito artist who performed most of the songs and also acted in the film.