Music in Multimedia: If Life Had a Soundtrack

I have been a big proponent over the years of not using (or adding) music to multimedia productions. I felt that by adding a soundtrack to "life" the integrity of the piece – the credibility of the journalist – was compromised and that the music added for effect or a quick fix was the same as reporters interjecting themselves as a source in a story. This of course isn't the case when music is a part of the ambient sound or the story itself.

My opinion is still relatively the same, but I am beginning to see where music can sometimes be used as a tool – like lens selection or lighting techniques – in a production. But there must be guidelines and in my opinion less is more.

Poynter’s Regina McCombs tackles this subject in her article “Music in Multimedia: Add Sparingly, Not as a Crutch.\”

Music has power, and within a multimedia story, it has the power to hide a lot of flaws: to make a story move faster, to set an emotional tone for a piece. "The problem is not that music doesn't work, it's that it works too well," said Al Tompkins, Poynter's broadcast and online group leader.

These are the main points McCombs hits on:

• In general, you should not add music to what you gathered from the scene.
• In the rare cases in which you add music, it should be used to enhance or further the narrative, not to compensate for incomplete reporting.
• All stories are not equal.
• Music is not a universal language.
• You must understand the craft of scoring music if you add it to your stories.

To further emphasize how adding music can change a story, she provides the story “Mom Goes to War,” which she photographed while working for The Star Tribune in Minneapolis with three different soundtracks. The first is natural sound, the second is a dramatic score “in a minor key,” and the third is a much more upbeat track.

It is worth watching the three different video productions to better understand how drastically music can affect our work.