A curious thing happens about an hour into Rudolph Maté’s early 1950s Armageddon flick When Worlds Collide. We’re coming to the end of an emotional scene. As the character Tony (played by Peter Hansen) walks away from the camera, the strings rise up out of the soundtrack and a whistled counter melody enters. Tony turns back to face the camera – almost cheekily, as if winking to the audience – and in doing so confirms he was the whistler responsible for the tune.
It’s an odd moment because we are used to entering into a sort of silent contract with film-makers. We don’t tend to think that the music we hear comes from an orchestra just out of view, which the characters are aware of and listening along to as they engage in whatever action confronts them - although during the silent era some Hollywood studios actually did employ orchestras to play on set during shooting. We accept – without really thinking about it – that the score is somehow concerned with the film’s narrative without being a part of it. It’s outside the action, commenting on it, subtly guiding our emotional responses, like the narrator’s voice in a novel or the stage directions in a play. So when one of the characters starts whistling along it creates a slightly jarring effect.
A similar thing happens a little earlier in the same film. We hear a siren going off and, although we don’t actually see any emergency vehicles, there is a sense of panic: people running, explosions going off. So we have no problem connecting the sound with the action we see. But then the music comes in and seems to sweep the siren up with it. It’s not just that the music is in time with the siren’s beating: the strings are playing a sort of whirling melody; there are wailing slides in the brass. The sound becomes part of the musical score, indistinguishable from it. Finally, the music subsides and we hear the siren alone. Someone’s been injured and people are running to help. Again, though we see no ambulance arriving, we associate the sound with part of the action again. But for a moment it hovered in a strange realm of undecidability between the film’s inside and outside; between the locatable events and objects of the narrative and a musical score which colours and enhances them.
There are no sirens in Roger Corman's Day The World Ended, a similarly apocalyptic film from just a few years later. But a series of musical effects are clearly intended to be reminiscent of their sound: the wail of a theremin over the mushroom cloud images that open the film; the howling trumpet glissando that kicks off Pete Candoli’s ’S.F. Blues’, heard playing on a home hi-fi system somewhat later on. We hear sirens even when they’re not there. And once more there’s that confusion between the inside and outside of the narrative diegesis; between music and noise.
Just short of three minutes into a hit single from 2011 by American pop singer-songwriter, Jason Derulo, the same panic signal rises up out of the mix. ‘Don’t Wanna Go Home’ was the lead single from Derulo’s second album, Future History. It debuted at number one in the UK charts and reached the top ten in five other countries. With an infectious riff sampled from 'Show Me Love’, the early 90s dance-pop hit by Robin S., and a catchy chorus lifted from the popular Caribbean tune, 'Day-O’, the final ingredient necessary to make it a surefire hit would seem to be the wailing siren that takes us from the breakdown after the second chorus into the middle-eight. With its auto-tuned injunction to “Turn the lights low 'cos we about to get blown”, the greatest emergency faced by Derulo is not so much the end of the world as the end of the party. More than half a century after When Worlds Collide, the siren would seem to have definitively left behind any link to the semiotics of disaster in favour of a purely visceral power to surge and rise up in a wave of sheer intensity.
Read the rest of my piece on musical sirens for the Quietus.