Uploaded March 2016 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Emotions are immediate, powerful and beyond our control. Because emotions deal with the important things in life (attraction, fear, anger, jealousy) our brain ‘tags’ emotional experiences (‘Remember this!’). For this reason, emotionally-laden experiences are far more memorable than ordinary ones. As teachers of course, we want our students to have memorable learning experiences. One way of doing this is to introduce music in class.
This clip contains 7 very evocative short extracts from the soundtrack of different film genres. Here are two possibilities: Students listen to the music and make very brief notes of the kind of images that come to their mind. Then they can simply share what they have imagined with the person next to them (the differences are often quite interesting). Alternatively, students could write a short paragraph describing the images that the music triggers in their mind; the teacher can collect these pieces of writing and put them up on the wall. The students could walk around and try to guess who wrote what.
[Key: 0:00 – 0:59 Silent Film / 1:00 – 1:59 Spy Film (James Bond) / 2:00 – 2:45 Romantic Film / 2:47 – 3:47 Western / 3:49 – 4:38 Comedy / 4:39 – 5:32 Thriller / 5:34 – 6:39 War Film]


[NB: I do not own the copyright to this audio clip. I have uploaded it here for educational purposes].