This audiovisual essay accompanies my BA Thesis for the Media and Culture programme at the University of Amsterdam.

Abstract:
American Beauty’s (Mendez 1999) film scores by Thomas Newman sonically signify the movie’s deeper meaning to our senses. The audience can experience the ‘beauty of the world’ as the music builds a bridge between, image, sound and a ‘spiritual awakening’ that drives the film’s plot. This paper analyses how Newman’s scores for American Beauty influence our phenomenological experience of the film while also transcending it. Thereby contributing to a new, more independently comprehensive treatise of scores within film studies. This includes considering the sensorial perception and interpretation of melody and rhythm as language. Now more than ever, people communicate through audio-visual means. Thus, analysing the workings of this non-verbal language in sound-image dynamics becomes increasingly relevant. As film speaks to our senses, cinematic communication also takes place within the medium itself, between sonic and aesthetic elements. Vivian Sobchack (1992) considers film as both, a sensorial object and sensing subject, her semiotic phenomenology allows an analysis of the ‘lived body experience’ in Newman’s scores. Additionally, Michel Chion’s (1994) reduced mode of listening and approach to sound analysis, will be used to perform audio-visual experiments with Newman’s scores and scenes from American Beauty. Altogether, this has led to the production of an audio-visual essay that lays bare the continuous dialogue between our eyes and ears, as well as sonic and aesthetic elements within the film, illustrating how Newman’s soundtracks establish a sensorial experience of the movie’s deeper layer of feeling.