sherouse@unc.UUCP (George W. Sherouse) (02/19/84)
Excuse me if this rambles, but I'm not sure what it's about. I think (I'm not sure, mind you) that I've been had. It has started me to thinking about the whole concept of the evocative power of music. Begin at the beginning, George. Of late I have found myself occasionally watching/listening to MTV in the hope that something of interest to *me* will be aired. I am rewarded very rarely. A psychologist friend of mine, who incidentally has also been sucked in by MTV, explains that this type of reinforcement schedule is a particularly effective one and is the reason pinball/video arcades can make a profit. The idea is that you take the "just one more" risk so many times that you wind up with a tremendous investment in obtaining what you want and are thus tremendously rewarded when you finally get it. Nobody can make a case for MTV (or indeed most radio) being anything other than a promotional vehicle for the recorded music industry. Who among us has not been infected by some particularly incidious hook and wound up buying the associated vinyl only to find that it does not sustain interest? Well, it seems that video promos go one step further. They attach an *IMAGE* to the hook. For me music has always been a particularly evocative form of communication. Usually, again for me, it evokes an ambience rather than any particular wordly image. I recall my early experiences in elementary school music class where the teacher tried in vain to get me to see the swans dancing or whatever. I get the sense of competing music lines or parts but not of direct correlation between musical pieces and physical actions or characters. The same still holds true. I get images of constantly changing geometric forms or sense particular moods or ambiences from the music I listen to, with the character of the images and/or moods depending on the type of music. Now edging closer to the point, I have noticed that of the very few "rock videos" I have seen and *enjoyed* only about half accompanied music which I would have chosen to listen to otherwise. A prime example is "TV Dinner" by ZZTop. While I have nothing in particular against ZZTop, I have just never found their genre of music terribly appealing. However, their video for this song (which, for the blissfully uncabled, features a small Creature-From- The-Black-Lagoon-type fellow who emerges from a TV dinner to help himself to the TV remote control, potato chips, beer, etc.) is so funny that it stands on its own. Another case in point, and the spark of this discussion, is the "Blinded by Science" song/video by Thomas Dolby. I find both the song and the video moderately amusing for modern pop, to the extent that I bought the LP (sucker!!!) for a little light diversion. I found two particularly disturbing things upon listening to the LP. One is that I cannot shake the images from the video. More to the point, I CAN'T SEEM TO HEAR THE SONG FOR ALL THE CONFLICTING IMAGES. Second, I am not particularly engaged by the rest of the LP, and so am forced to wonder about my judgement of the aforementioned tune. THE POINT (I think): The use of images to sell music seems to me to be a very powerful tool, more so than I would have guessed. It bothers me that I can be so easily influenced in something which I am normally very critical about. It makes me wonder anew just how TV commercials influence me unduly. And what about the flip-side? How does a choice of background music effect the way I perceive an image or a radio commercial? This is, of course, well-worn turf but topical nonetheless. AN ASIDE POINT: Does everyone else get images from music? What kind? Do you see the wolf chasing the duck? Or do you see geometrics like I do? What about the setting for a vocalist? Is he/she suspended in a space created by the music (my vote) or leaning on a piano or what? Good tunes to you, (the real) George W. Sherouse <decvax!mcnc!unc!sherouse> "...I couldn't act naturally if I wanted to."
oscar@utcsrgv.UUCP (Oscar M. Nierstrasz) (02/20/84)
Of the power of images to move and inspire, much has already been said. Of the worthlessness of television, much too has been said -- I haven't watched TV (regularly) since 1976. This matter about music and image, however .... I find not so much that music evokes images so much as it does emotions, or even, more importantly, *programmed responses*. I can't listen to Also Sprach ... or the Blue Danube Waltz without thinking of 2001, or to Singin' in the Rain without remembering Alex in A Clockwork Orange. These images, or emotions, are *after the fact*, however. Most of what I listen to inspires no image whatsoever, the exceptions being opera and programme (or `programmatic') music. Like being on drugs or being asleep, you see whatever you happen to be thinking about. If the music evokes an emotion, that emotion may spark images that are associated with that emotion -- a sort of Pavlovian response. It is *you* that provides the image, and it will be different for everyone. (Again, the exceptions being for some well-established image-evoking cliches, leitmotivs, or what-you-will.) A fine example of how the mind can be triggered by something as simple as a snatch of music or a particular phrase occurs in the writing of Tom Wolfe: Wolfe is fond of creating `macros' or `global variables' that automatically expand whenever you encounter them. The device is very simple yet astonishingly effective. In "The Right Stuff", for example, he describes early on the Precise Meaning of the euphemism "burned beyond recognition". He explains how it *is* a euphemism, and then he goes into gruesome detail for a page or two explaining what is Truly Meant by this oh-so-genteel turn of phrase. 'Nuff said, says Tom. Every time after this that he mentions this phrase, *without adding anything more*, the reader instantly fills in the missing detail with a veritable flood of ghastly images. Of course, Tom Wolfe has deliberately set us up, but this is an excellent illustration of what happen, I suspect, whenever we say, Oh, this music reminds me of such-and-so -- don't you *see* that? Sometimes these associations are set up publicly, so that the playing of The National Anthem (pick yer faverite) will illicit a certain response from all citizenry alike, and other times they manifest themselves privately: "It's *our* song!" In the two-hour epilogue to Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder gives us *his* rendition of the hero's `dream' (a coma-like revery that is the only possible reaction to the events preceding.) The story is set in 1928, but Fassbinder uses such music as Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen etc. etc. in this part of the film. He *doesn't* use this music elsewhere, but then only here are we seeing *Fassbinder's* dream of Biberkopf's dream. The music, blatantly anachronistic, is not out-of-place if we can accept the premise that this is a *dream*. (After 13 hours of this story, we are ready to accept *anything*!) In a dream, anything makes sense. We do not impose the limitation that everything be logical. Rather, we flow from thought to thought, image to image, like a stone skipping along the surface of a pond. Think of the dreams that you've had and remembered -- how often does the beginning of the dream have nothing to do with the end? Rather, each part leads to another without there necessarily being any grand pattern to the whole mess. Music can set one off on a spree of daydreaming that brings forth images as they do in real dreams. In Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder was using music that *he felt* belonged to the images he was showing us, the ideas he was trying to express. Film, however, is a medium of communication, which can only succeed if the language can be recognized. Fassbinder, therefore, must have been counting on us to bring to the film through the music some of the same associations that it had for him. (This would, of course, break down if Leonard Cohen reminded him of a thwarted love affair that he had that reminded him of Biberkopf, but we, the audience, have no way of knowing about.) So, yes, I think that music can evoke images, but it does so in complex and often personal ways that may have nothing to do with `what the composer intended' (as if that had anything to do with anything). Yes, propagandists and advertising executives can set up associations between pieces of music and images or ideas. Yes, an entire generation can have a particular association between a piece of music and an image that other generations do not (the first few notes of Beethoven's Fifth to anyone who heard German broadcasts throughout WW II; Beatles' music to kids growing up in the Sixties; ...). And yes, music may not bring forth any image whatsoever. For me it usually doesn't. Oscar Nierstrasz @ utcsrgv!oscar
elf@utcsrgv.UUCP (Eugene Fiume) (02/20/84)
Some good points have been made regarding the connection between music and image. Oscar remarked, and it is worth reiterating, that in many rather poignant cases, a powerful image has been associated with a musical piece after the fact. If the image is particularly evocative (I'm singin' in the rain, just singin' in ...), then somehow a little "music post-processor" is installed, so that we then have trouble disassociating the music from the image. It seems to me that music videos are at heart just another attempt at giving a piece of music a programme. We already have a precedent for this in rock music: the concept album. (Programmatic music has been around in music of all ages, of course--particularly in late-Romantic.) The concept album seems passe now, and it isn't a coincidence that there's an alternative. If only videos weren't so god-damned dumb... It also demonstrates the focus on singles in today's music market. Has someone decided that we don't listen to albums any more? Maybe we don't. I avoid purchasing short EP's, long EP's, singles, extended singles, re-mixed dubbed originals, and single-play-then-disintegrate records. I like records of the 35-40 minute variety--and I play them in a very novel way: I put on side 1 (or A), and then after 17 minutes or so, I turn the record over and I play side 2 (or B). But I have digressed. If there are any psychologists out there, you may wish to explain why we accept novelty in visual art much more readily than in music. This always seems to have been so (e.g. witness our readiness to accept 20th Century art forms, vs. analogous musics). This may provide a clue as to why we can readily connect a new image to a pre-existing piece of music. Funny, if you are capable of doing the reverse, you'd probably be called a composer. Eugene Fiume