The emotional impact of John Williams’ scores in Steven Spielberg’s films

Abstract

This research study outlines and explores the significant effect that film music, or lack thereof, could potentially have on the emotional states of the viewing audience. The main hypothesis was aimed at finding out whether this really was the case, and if the participants preferred the given clips accompanied by the score or otherwise. A total of 75 participants who chose to answer my questionnaire were shown three excerpts taken from three different films produced by Steven Spielberg and scored by John Williams (Jurassic Park, Jaws, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial), with each of them being separately presented without the score, and with. The participants were subsequently asked to review their emotional states (on the basis of a Likert-type Scale) as per the ‘Brief Mood Introspection Scale’. Conclusively, the analysed results suggest that the presence of music in the clips had a relatively strong effect on most emotional adjectives, whilst at the same time also generally being preferred as when compared to its absence.