The relationship between music and images in French non-fiction TV programs.

From a media inherited practice to an autonomous one (1949-2015)

Resum

Since the beginning of TV program production
in France, pre-existing music has been
used more and more frequently in the
background of news programs, magazines,
or reality shows. Though music in fiction TV
programs has been a matter of academic
interest since the late 70’s (Tagg, 1979; Frith,
2002 and Coates, 2007), non-fiction
programs have enjoyed but little attention
from the academic world. In a context of
socio-cultural and socio-economic change
for music and television for 60 years, this
article discusses the following questionings:
How has the relationship between images
and music on TV evolved since 1949? Was it
built upon media-inherited techniques or did
television media make up their own practices?
A statistical analysis has been performed
on 140 TV programs broadcast between
1949 and 2015 and a music/image classification
has been used to test close to 2000
extracts from preexisting music tracks. Built
upon Roger Bowman (1949) and Ron
Rodman’s (2010) proposals on music in
fiction TV programs, this classification
allows us to adopt a perspective drawing
from socio-economic and semiotic approaches.
Three time-periods have been
identifies : 1950-1980: inherited music
integration ; 1980-2000: editorial music
integration ; 2000-2015: hyper-contextualized
music integration. At first, music was
thus used much in the way it had been in
other media (space-time contextualization,
leitmotiv…). Then, from the 80’s onwards, it
started to reflect the editorial policy of the
channels, especially the French music
channel, M6. Finally, since the 2000’s, even
though these aspects remain valid, we have
observed the emergence of “hyper-contextualization”
processes, where verbatim use
of lyrics has become common practice.