Synaesthesia

Is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes.
Putting that more simple to understand, it can be recognised as a mental illness which allows you to picture sounds in you're head known as ' The proccess of picturing sounds in the minds eye'. People who have this condition often see colours and pictures in their head which others don't nessescarilly see.

It is a theory that all of us could have a small part of Synaesthesia, as we all think of certain things when we hear a song. This is also a very important part when it comes to making out music videos. Andrew Goodwin's theory is a good example of this-

"A clip that responds to the pleasures of music, and in which that music is made visual, either in new ways or in ways that accentuate existing visual associations."

- Andrew Goodwin (Dancing in the Distraction Factory 1993)
 

The article by Steve Archer in the Febuary edition of 'MediaMagazine' in 2004 sated that Synaesthesia is the most important part when looking at creating a music video. He states that when looking at the song, the lysics arn't that important, only the ones that jump out at you which would most likely be in the chorus, because thats the part in the song that you remeber most. A quote that stuck in my head from him was this:

 "If songs are stories, then the singer is the storyteller and this obviously makes music videos stand out , as they feature a first person mode of address rather than the invisible 'fourth wall' of television narration."

-Steve Archer (Media Magazine 2004)

 
 

The music including the instrumentation is a big part of Synaesthesia and the type of microphone which adds grain to the voice or not. for instance a clear sounding voice reminds me of pop music because it is very together and the voices sort of join as one. Whereas if you have more grain to the voice and have trumpets with a filter on the end, it gives this old 1920's jazz style. When I hear the sound of a music bx for instance i instantly think of a dainty ballerina or halloween because it has a creepy side to it. As he says in his article, " everyone shares some of the same visualisations of what the music fits to". For instance if you heara fast upbeat song your gonna think of fast upbeat things and the lines would be much shorter and snappy, Whereas if you were listening to a slow song your gonna go a lot slower and more flowy.

In our class we did an example of this 'mental illness' and tried to recreate the effect for ourselves. we chose two songs which were compleately different. One of them was called Red by Rhora, and the other one was called Never Gonna Let You Go the remix version by Tina Moore. we noticed that with the faster one that our lines were alot more choppy and we had this constant theme of crosses on the beat. The lines were alot shorter and it was more of a set pattern than random doodles. The slower one had more flowy lines, which never ended. the shapes drawn were so much softer and had no sharp edges. By doing this we could then based from the drawings we made, come up with ideas for a music video

Never Gonnna Let You Go

- lots of neon
-short bursts of people dancing with flashing lights
-neon lines following people down the street
-dance scenes
-slow motion for the raunchy sort of dancing


Red

-under water
-slow motion
-love
-long flowy dresses under water slow motion
- people running underwater
-long panning shots representing the never ending lines