Muzing New Hoods Summary

“Muzing New Hoods” is an article by Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. that discusses how music affects the way an audience experiences the characters, locations, and the plots of movies, specifically movies about African Americans (Ramsey 309). The films that are analyzed in this article are Do the Right Thing which is directed by Spike Lee and Love Jones which is directed by Theodore Witcher. I believe the most significant aspect of “Muzing New Hoods” is the analysis of how musical scores affect an audience’s reaction to movies, most importantly African American movies. According to Guthrie Ramsey’s article; “…music works to enhance the storyworld of the film; it deepens the audience’s experience of the narrative and adds continuity to the film’s scene by scene progression…” (Ramsey 312). Music in films is mostly divided into two categories.

The second type is music or songs that already exist before the film was made, this is also known as nondiegetic music (Ramset 312, 314). These two types of music are used very specifically and carefully within films in order to create emotions or experiences in the audience. The use of music to inflict emotion and experience is made possible “…because of their unconscious familiarity to filmgoers. They have become naturalized through constant repetition.” This technique has been used since the 1930s (Ramsey 313). This affects my understanding of cinema because I now know the different types of music used in these films and why they are used. The different types of music are used in order to create different reactions in the audiences. I now understand that the reason using music to influence the audience works because it has been done for almost 100 years (Ramsey