Designing Music for Emotion: A Practical Guide for Film and Media Composers and Enthusiasts

I would describe the book as a wonderful thesaurus of musical techniques to elicit the ultimate emotional responses to creating or listening to music”
Jay Chattaway (EMI award winning Hollywood composer, "Star Trek TV Series", "Maniac")

Designing Music for Emotion guides aspiring film and media composers in creating music that evokes emotions such as happiness, sadness, love, anxiety, suspense, mystery, fear, triumph, awe, and frisson. Additionally, it aims to deepen music enthusiasts’ understanding of how music elicits these emotional responses. While professional composers often rely on intuition refined through imitation and extensive trial and error, this book delves into applying evolutionary, associative, and psychological principles to define systematic approaches for composing emotional music.

Over the past three years, Carlos Amador has researched systematic approaches to distil the emotional impact of film music. His work aims to help composers evoke various emotions while maintaining their unique voice. This book presents a wealth of techniques and includes over 65 music reductions with free audio links (plus a 42-song Spotify playlist), These methods have been refined through research on Carlos's compositions for Eyes of Love and the Sintel rescore (full orchestral scores are part of the book series). Supported by survey data, it demonstrates the effectiveness of these methods in evoking targeted emotions, providing practical tools for creating emotionally impactful music.

Learn the principles and technique to:

• Elicit emotions of happiness, sadness, love, anger, fear, suspense, mystery, anxiety, awe, wonder, frisson, triumph and many many more…
• Design musical emotional contours for your stories and films.
• Trigger biological emotional responses through music.
• Learn the associative meaning of scales & harmony, metaphors and anaphones.
• Craft memorable melodies and leitmotifs as well as powerful ostinatos.
• Elicit emotions through psychological principles.
• Master the go-to Hollywood musical idiom: pantriadic chromaticism.
• Explore the emotional impact of texture, orchestration and instrumentation.
• The efficacy of these techniques is backed up by a large-scale survey.

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