Gamelan and Semiotics

I’ve been thinking lots about the semiotics of sound and music, particularly regarding gamelan. Semiotics is essentially the idea saying that music often represents something that it doesn’t inherently represent. It sounds more complicated than it is, because a few examples show quite clearly how this can be. Usually music is an index for some other thing – it has an association with a country (such as bagpipes), class (a trumpet call may represent royalty), or, as is the case in film, an emotion (high strings represent fear).

Film especially relies on semiotic coding to make you feel a particular way as you watch. Film scoring is built on these codes of meaning that subtly work on you throughout the film. A big brass line represents the hero. A soft cello represents the love interest. Instruments have particular associations with emotional meaning in film. This is also true for gamelan. You may not have noticed it in film scores, but gamelan is often used in many of the big soundtracks of the modern day. For example, it’s been in Breaking Bad, Marvel’s Echo, Avatar (both James Cameron’s and the Nickelodeon cartoon), The Hobbit, Squid Game, and others.

What does gamelan represent in these scores? Typically it is used to convey a sense of fear, because it sounds exotic and unfamiliar to the composers (and likely the audience). It seems audiences are afraid of what they don’t know. It can also be used during scenes of violence and action, due to Balinese gamelan’s fast tempo. This is of course wildly different to what gamelan is an index of in Bali, where it is used in ceremonies and theatre shows. Of course, in Bali gamelan can also represent fear and anger. But it is also used beyond this, to also be the instrument of the hero. This is sorely lacking in the way non-Indonesian composers use it.

One film I saw recently, Akira, did a much better job with its semiotic coding of gamelan than any other non-Indonesian film I’ve seen. Akira is set in a Tokyo decades after a nuclear bomb detonation, and focuses on a boy, Tetsuo, who becomes mutated. Gamelan and Balinese kecak chanting are present almost from the very opening of the movie, in the initial action sequences. What Akira does well is to go beyond this — gamelan is also used heavily in the flashback scenes to Tetsuo’s childhood, in scenes that fundamentally explore friendship and brotherhood. Akira uses the traditional semiotic coding of gamelan to introduce it to the audience in a way they would know; but then uses the gamelan as it would any Western instrument in the rest of the score. That is a better way of working with the instrument, and challenges the traditional semiotic coding of gamelan in the film score.

More analysis to come? Watch this space.

Current Project Progress

Lots of progress on the Composition Portfolio this week! All that remains are the edits and tidying up (and hopefully a few performances). Now my attention turns to the rest of the thesis, which I hope to also increase by about 15% each month from here on out.

PhD thesis: 40%

Composition Portfolio: 80%

Question of the Week

This week’s question is: “What’s something you understand differently now than you did five years ago?”

Five years ago I was about halfway through my Honours thesis on composition and gamelan, and little did I know but we were about to enter the worst lockdown of the pandemic in Canberra. I understand gamelan a lot better now than I did five years ago, which is generally how spending time learning something goes. But I also reflect on those lockdowns, and the impact of them on music. For me, it highlights now that music is primarily a social thing, not as much about art or performers. To make music we need to engage with other human beings. It is about the social side of playing, talking, and experiencing. And maybe that’s why AI struggles so much with it.