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The question of musical meaning has been controversial and much debated over the years, especially music’s ability to express any kind of ‘content’ or ideational meaning. Wingstedt (2005, 2008) and Wingstedt et al. (2010) have discussed how narrative media music (music in film, computer games etc) can be categorized into six basic narrative functions: the informative, descriptive, emotive, guiding, rhetorical and temporal functions. These can in turn be put in relation to Halliday’s three metafunctions of communicational meaning (ideational, interpersonal, textual). This paper/presentation will discuss how narrative media music can express ideational meanings in defined narrative contexts, in interaction with other modes such as moving image, speech and sound design. The ideational metafunction is the content dimension of communication, representing what goes on in the world, ‘who does what, with or to whom and where’ (Kress et al, 2001:9). In multimodal narrative settings, music will typically contribute ideational meaning by informative and descriptive functions. In performing informative functions, music will often make use of culturally known and recognizable features expressed through different genres or specific musical compositions or performances. Typical examples are how music is used to establish cultural settings, as when playing ‘French music’ when a filmic narrative cuts to a location set in Paris – or using musical style to convey certain time periods or to indicate social events or status. The descriptive functions of narrative media music are akin to programme music, a type of art music attempting to render an extra-musical setting or narrative. This includes setting out to metaphorically describe attributes of physical atmosphere or environment, such as ‘the ocean’, ‘the pastoral’ or ‘the city’ – or by mimetically expressing physical movement, a technique that, when emphasized, is known as Mickey Mousing. Also, expressing mental processes or ‘observed emotions’ (rather than ‘experienced’), can be seen as descriptive functions of music. Musical narrative tools such as the use of leitmotifs (a recurring motif associated with characters, places or ideas of the narrative) will function on both an informative and descriptive level, symbolically representing a specific phenomenon and at the same time describing its attributes. The dramaturgical position of the music as being either diegetic (part of the spatio-temporal world of the story) or non-diegetic will also affect how ideational meaning is manifested. The different functions will be illustrated by using examples from various film scenes.