The Absence and Intensification of Musical Influence on the Perception of Time - Text 1
Sometimes a filmmaker will want to limit as much as possible any lack of synchronicity in the viewer’s attention to the music. The use of drones to film some sequence shots in films today,[1] with their smooth time, has a limited or quite neutral effect on our temporal perception of a film.
The case of the furnace scene in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017), whose music was composed by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch, is relevant, because the composers employ the Shepard-Risset glissando (an electro-acoustic technique for creating the illusion of a never-ending glissando, in this case descending). Without rhythmic mooring (no beat or rhythm, unlike the Shepard scale alone), a depressive tempo takes shape in the music which is enough to give an organic quality to what is nevertheless fundamentally static, in smooth time. It is only with the contribution of new dramaturgical elements (the discovery of the horse figurine) that the music once again assumes a more narrative role.
