Empathetic sound - music or soundeffects whose mood matches the mood of the action 

Sound can directly express its participation in the feeling of the scen, by taking on the scene´s rythm, tone and phrasing. 

In a film´s diegetic narrative the soundscape is antropocentric. Soundeffects in the environment reflects the overall mood of the scene - sometimes it even shows the characters inner feelings. 

In Jonathan Demme´s Silence of the lambs when Judie Foster visits Lecter in the dungeon the ambience are made of animal screams and noises. The roomtone is a lunatic kind of screaming processed, slowed down and played in reverse. 

In Demme´s Philadelphia a bus with ugly brakes comments the scen when Tom Hanks tries to talk Denzel Washington into taking the case. The bus is never seen but it constantly hangs in and fills in the gap in the conversation with ugly squeals. 
 
 

Anempathetic sound - usally diegetic music - that seems to exhibit conspicuous indifference to what is going on in the film´s plot, creating a strong sense of the tragic. For example, a radio continues o to play a happy tune even as the character who first turned it on ha died 

Anempathetic effects can occur with soundeffects - in a very violent scene after the death of a character some sonic process continues like the noise of a machine, the hum of a fan, a shower running as if nothing had happened. (In Antonioni´s The passenger - the electric fan, in Hitchcock´s Psycho - the running shower) 

.. a scene with indifferent music has the effect not of freezing the emotion but rather of intensifying it on a cosmic background .. 

.. Anempathic music conjures up the mechanical texture of films tapestry of emotions and senses ... What does anempathetic music do if not to unveil this reality of cinema, its robotic face? .. 

(Edited excerpts: Audiovision page 8-9, 221-222 and Ron Bochar in E Weis: Sync Tanks, Cineaste 1995) 

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