Digital storytelling combines the art of telling stories with a mixture of digital media, such as background music. The interplay between narrative, sound effects, and music is key to people’s perception of any form of storytelling. Background music has long been a critical aspect of storytelling, presenting itself in various settings, including films, restaurants, and museums (Kang et al., 2020). Background music and storytelling are often blended using appropriate computer software to reinforce a specific theme or topic. It plays an essential role in enhancing storytelling since it enhances student attention toward the story, influences the structure, reinforces the emotions that a story intends to exhibit, and persuades the audience to listen.
How Background music enhances storytelling in the classroom
In the classroom, background music enhances storytelling by increasing students’ attention toward the narrative, or what would otherwise be referred to as focused attention. Focused attention ideally implies the ability of learners to maintain attention to a task regardless of distractions. Moreover, a study by McKnight (2019) reveals that it was discovered that playing Mozart in the background improved students’ performance on spatial math problems, a phenomenon that came to be known as the Mozart effect. Consequently, to boost their children’s levels of intelligence, parents and educators started playing soft music in the background whenever the children were around.
Parents and teachers are responsible for their children’s academic development and achievement. To achieve this objective, the student’s lessons and activities must complement one another to provide the child with the best possible opportunity for academic success (Darling-Hammond et al., 2020). Consequently, as an element of education, background music enhances storytelling and learning by impacting the student’s attention toward the story.
Structural Role of Background Music
Background music plays a structural role in enhancing digital storytelling, marking the moves from one section of the story to the next. Right from the beginning of the story, background music can be used to define its orientation by conveying meaning (Hwang & Oh, 2020). It sets the scene in a specific time and place, thus, the audience can easily relate to the story. For instance, using folk music in the background of digital storytelling has demonstrated success in orientating storytelling, especially in Mexican, Chinese or African contexts (Barreto, 2021). Background music thus has a localized function that directly affects the audience’s perception and understanding of the story.
Apart from the orientation role, background music is used to signify a change in action as the background music intermittently tones down or stops to allow the storyteller’s voice to be heard with various clarity levels (Ellestrom, 2019). For instance, soft background music could change to a protest-like song to signify a state change that is more confounded with mysteries. Further, the background music could turn up towards the end of the story, which warns the audience that the story is coming to a climax and also connects them to the beginning.
Evaluative Role of Background Music
As an evaluative tool, background music in digital storytelling strongly influences emotion and behavior. Faster tempos with major keys tend to make people happy and upbeat, whereas slower tempos with minor keys might make them feel down and gloomy (Mercado, 2020; Labbe et al., 2021). Furthermore, dissonance persistently evokes unpleasant reactions, and when coupled with fast tempos, it may elicit feelings of uneasiness or anxiety (Wright et al., 2022).
The premise is that different types of emotions are triggered in the listener by the background music employed in digital storytelling and that these reactions are typically subconscious. Listeners’ attention is not just on the music. Although the cortical areas of their brains process the words and associate them with the visuals, the music engages the limbic system, which is responsible for feelings (Reybrouck, 2021; Chan et al., 2022). In this way, the music and sounds in the background can be considered to have an evaluative purpose since they might make the listener experience either more favorable or negative emotions concerning the events being described. In digital storytelling, music may have an evaluative role by activating emotions and eliciting favorable or negative sensations related to the ideas transmitted through contemporaneous words and visuals.
Persuasive Role of Background Music
Moreover, background music is a critical aspect of digital storytelling as it plays a persuasive role. Ideally, inherent in all narratives is the effort to convince the listener or reader that the time spent listening to or reading the story was worthwhile (LeBlanc-Haley, 2020). Also, every story’s point is to change how its listeners view the world. This persuading role is especially clear in the case of the digital storytelling promoted and published by non-profit organizations; such narratives are written with the express goal of altering viewers’ perspectives on a given topic, such as global warming or sexual discrimination (Arenberg & Lowrey, 2019; Psomadaki et al., 2019). Background music thus persuades individuals to listen to the story by creating a shadow perception of what a story constitutes or its characteristics to the audience.
Selecting Background Music in Digital Storytelling
Using background music for digital storytelling necessitates considering several factors that majorly align with the narrator’s objectives. Firstly, it is important to decide on the mood of the narrative section or the associated feelings (Mohamed Salama Eissa, 2019; Gursoy, 2021). Through developing such understanding, the next step would be to select a piece of background music that provides the same feelings identified in the given section of the narrative. Moreover, it is important to ensure that the background music and the words match and complement each other (Hung, 2019; Rong & Noor, 2019). Controlling the volume and tempo of the music is also essential concerning the narrator’s voice. The background music should not be too loud so that it distracts the listener.
Background music can help make digital storytelling more engaging and immersive (Rizvic et al., 2019). Consequently, it is essential to articulate the reasons for using a particular musical piece as a background to illustrate a particular moment. Particularly, dynamic music can be essential to emphasizing dramatic points in the story (Moradi & Chen, 2019). Another option for selecting existing musical pieces would be to compose own music. This gives one incredible control over how the music interacts with the story.
Conclusion
Generally, background music is essential to portraying meaning to a story and plays an essential role as a structural, attentional, evaluative, and persuasive tool. In digital storytelling, music in the background serves several purposes: it indicates shifts between the story’s segments, draws attention to the story’s most pivotal moments, and conveys an evaluative meaning that reveals the narrator’s and guides the listener’s attitude toward the events narrated. Furthermore, the music in the backdrop provides the mechanisms that might persuade the audience to shift their perspective. Therefore, it is essential to identify the roles one needs to fulfill with background music in digital storytelling and choose or develop the most appropriate background music piece.
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