The heartbeat behind the screen: Composing emotion in film

How film scores shape our cinematic experience without a word

Story by Quincy Koch

Illustrations by Royce Alton

Published April 7, 2026

Folks settle in, the lights dim and conversations die off as everyone's focus is drawn to the silver screen in front of them. Before the story starts or a character has spoken, music sets the scene.

The music in movies, called the score, is a language understood across cultures, often without being taught. A swelling crescendo means something is coming. A lonely note on the piano reveals who will be left behind. A familiar melody returns like a repeated phrase, reminding us of what we’ve already felt and foreshadowing what’s ahead. We may not know the rules, but we are fluent all the same. 

Sometimes it starts grand and sweeping, pulling us into a love story and what will come next. Other times, it opens boldly, with a high-energy rhythm dropping us into an epic battle. Regardless of the film, music guides the experience. It warns and welcomes; it promises heartbreak, danger or triumph. 

“Film music should tell you what you're feeling before you recognize you're feeling it,” said Edmund Stone, the creator, producer and host of The Score, a nationally syndicated film music program that airs on All Classical Radio every weekend. 

Leitmotifs are short, recurring musical phrases associated with a particular person, place or idea. These are frequently used in film scores. “​​We don't invent a new piece of music, necessarily. We recapitulate the original theme,” Stone said. “When this is done, it has a tremendous effect.” 

Stone gave examples of famous film scores known far and wide by their recognizable themes. Movies like “Star Wars”, “Jaws” and “Lord of the Rings”, where you only need to hum a few notes before someone will likely join in and finish the melody. 

“It's a hidden language, but we get it right away,” Stone said. 

Barbara Higbie, a Grammy-nominated American composer and musician, played piano on the score of the 1984 film “I Do Mind Dying”. Alongside a violinist, the two musicians improvised themes and developed the music as they watched the film, which was recorded and became the film's soundtrack. 

For Higbie, the process of composing and determining what music would fit best in the film was comparable to the experiences of those on the screen. “I would think it's kind of similar to acting, where you're trying to find the emotional center of the character and go with that feeling,” she said. “It’s the same with the music; you try to find the emotional center of the scene and go from there.” 

The two musicians worked with the director in a spotting session, a process in which the production and post-production teams decide exactly where music and sound effects will begin and stop, and what emotional tone they should convey. It establishes and defines the musical map for the film. 

Throughout film history, music has been used to communicate emotion to the audience. Greg Youmans, an associate professor at Western Washington University who teaches in the Film and Media Studies program, discussed the shift from silent cinema to synchronized sound cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This was when audio recording technology was developed to sync the recorded dialogue with the actors' mouths moving on screen. Before this was developed, there would be live music played during showings of silent films.

"Often there'd be an organist at a local theater who’d play for all the screenings,” Youmans said. “So when a new film arrived, they’d improvise or perhaps have a simple cue sheet to go by, indicating to play exciting music when they see this shot, or romantic music when this scene begins."

While this practice of adjusting music on the spot died out with the advent of sync sound cinema, Youmans shared that today some touring orchestras will perform film scores live at showings of silent films. 

“I think it's great. I think it makes silent cinema come alive,” Youmans said. “It just changes everything to have the musicians in the room with you. It makes it a live medium instead of a recording. It makes it contemporary as much as it is historical.”

Despite the craft that goes into every score, they’re typically not filmgoers' main focus, and that’s intentional.

This is certainly true for James McVay, a musician, composer and author who spent 25 years in Los Angeles writing scores for movies and television shows. 

“I think the music should serve a purpose, whether it's big and in front or if it’s the underscore; it plays a part,” McVay said. “The underscore is important, but you don't want people to go, ‘Oh, listen to that underscore.’ It still has the same emotional impact; it's just not making a point of itself.” 

McVay said that in composing, you don't want to telegraph what's going to happen in the film with the music; you want it to support the other elements of the film. In addition to its versatility, McVay emphasized how impactful music can be to a scene. 

McVay credits “Silverado” as a film that uses music to transform an iconic opening scene from a simple shot of horses galloping across a prairie to one of adventure and anticipation. “I mean, that's the job as a composer,” McVay said. “To create that kind of emotional atmosphere.” 

Steven Sehman, an assistant professor of Audio Technology, Music and Society at Fairhaven College at Western, shared insights into how music theory is used in film scores to communicate to audiences. 

“There are structures in the music. There is tension and release,” Sehman said. “Ascending melodies, when things go up, that's often associated with energy, with victory, with success. With descending melodies, when things go down, oftentimes you have that sinking feeling, like dread or sadness.”

Whether it is a recurring theme associated with a specific character or the way an instrument is used across scores to represent an emotion, this repetition tells us something. 

“I think that's the broader cultural practice of film. Maybe X has nothing to do with Y, but if people do it enough, we associate it with that,” Sehman said. “There's a certain efficiency that needs to happen because music is an abstract form of communication.”

Whether communicating with the director or audience, composers have to be calculated and timely with their music. As a composer, McVay has worked on a variety of projects, including a number of television shows and movies as well as some feature films. Each of the film styles requires different elements of a composer. 

“Feature films take more time to really feel if the music is working with the cuts,” McVay said. “So you get to be more artistic with feature films and more formulaic with television movies and TV shows. Television movies are more of a working machine from beginning to end,” McVay said. He discussed the tight time constraints around composing for television movies, where the average turnaround for completing a score was two weeks.

Regardless of the film style or the composing deadline, the score ties everything together. 

“Music goes straight to the heart, straight to the emotional. It's the language of emotion,” McVay said. “Music is used in film and television to elicit emotional responses.” After being in the industry for more than two decades, McVay’s passion for creating and being involved with music has only grown. In addition to becoming an author, he continues to write and record his own music. 

“I'm 71. I go to bed at night, thinking about how I can wake up in the morning and play guitar, or mandolin or the piano,” he said. “Even now, all these many years later, that's all I want to do. It's a gift, and it's not lost on me.”