Video Music

A video expression, of a musical expression.

That's what music video is all about.

- My thesis on Video Music.

Music:

Music is a way of expressing oneself. People who create music often get lost in a reverie of rhythm, beat, repeating emotion, and a psychological stillness accompanied by physical movement. If you watch a musician while she or he plays, the musician is apt to close the eyes, tap the feet, and bob the head while playing.

This movement can be attribute to there being more than one experience happening at once for the musician. The musician is in a place playing an instrument, but at the same time, they often describe the feeling that they are transcending the space they are in. This happens with audience members as well; a sense of transcendence and harmony with the music (1).

Video:

Given these phenomena that are present when creating or listening to music; one then may consider what is going on when people are producing a music video. That sense of transcendence is, arguably, what many creators of music videos are seeking to capture while crafting the set of images to associate with the music.

Crafting the images is done very carefully, as dissonance in imagery and music will break the sense of reverie and transcendence... suddenly, the audience is no longer 'seeing music'. The synesthesia that was occurring comes to an end, and the audience changes the channel (2). Therefor, it can clearly be seen that people who put video to music seek to capture the true 'visual' sense of the music.

Video Music:

While we may readily realize that there is someone creating a video to match the music, we tend to forget that what we are seeing is an expression of an expression. Music video style almost always exists in this form; which might be why we are able to identify a music video when we see one (3).

The reason I say "Video Music" instead of "Music Video" is because the video is adapted to the music... not the other way around. To fail to recognize the music of a music video is like ignoring the visuals of a film in favor of its soundtrack. It just doesn't work.

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Source cited: Williams, K. "Why I [still] want my MTV: Music and Aesthetic Communication"

1- Page 97 of Williams book describes how the downplaying of the musical dimension of music video, and focusing solely on visuals, has left the medium misunderstood.

2- On page 93, Williams describes Sut Jhally's analysis of Music Video; noting that for Jhally, MTV is the "blurring" of advertising and program. Without the effective transmission of programming/advertising (i.e. the video) the audiences' interest is lost.

3- On page 100, Williams writes that "Music-visuality is... the interplay of sights and sounds, music and visuals, whereby sights dance to the sounds of music and sounds appear visually." This is an important observation because we can identify this phenomena when we see it; and being trained to look for it, we cna critique it.