Is this shark on a murderous rampage or just curious? The music will tell you. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Great white sharks are capable of inflicting horrendous damage to a human. Millions of years of evolution have honed them into nature’s perfect hunter, but humans aren’t on the menu. After Peter Benchley wrote Jaws and Steven Spielberg decided to enlist composer John Williams to score the film about Benchley’s novel, a few simple notes of a song have worked their way into our collective consciousness. Those notes are so ingrained in us that we know they’re supposed to illicit fear, and they’re tied tightly to our fear of sharks.
In his most recent YouTube video, shark enthusiast Carlos Gauna explores just how much the Jaws theme song changes our perception of what we’re seeing. Using recent footage of a swimmer approaching a juvenile white shark, Gauna changes the soundtrack to show that simply playing a different song can vastly change the feeling of the footage.
“Encounters like this happen more often than we realize,” Gauna narrates. “Most of the time, they look just like this; calm, uneventful, ordinary. Until you add the music.”
The music that Williams came up with for Jaws is now synonymous with both fear and sharks — especially great whites. Benchley later came to regret how his story had an outsized impact on the general public’s perception of the great white. He famously said he regretted writing the book, and Spielberg eventually had similar feelings about making the film.
“I truly, and to this day, regret the decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film. I really, truly regret that,” Spielberg said during an interview on the BBC’s “Desert Island Discs.“
