"The Sounds of Silence: Songs In Hollywood Films Since the 1960s"

Although film historians lament the demise of classic Hollywood musicals after 1960, films since then have incoporated songs as imaginatively as they did in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. While some of the conventions for the presentation of song have remained the same, such as presenting a song as a performance before an on-screen audience by an actors portraying singers, new conventions for the presentation of song have emerged since the 1960s. One of these conventions we call "silent song," where a song is heard on the soundtrack that expresses a character's feelings at a particular dramatic moment but the on-screen character does not actually sing the song. First used in "The Graduate" and other films of the 1960s and '70s to give voice to what characters portrayed by such non-singing actors as Dustin Hoffman, Steve McQueen, and Paul Newman were feeling, "silent song" was extensively used in "Yentl" where songs sare ung by Barbra Streisand on the soundtrack to express her on-screen character's feelings, but Streisand never sings openly on screen until the very end of the film.

"The Sounds of Silence: Songs In Hollywood Films Since the 1960s" Academic Article