synaesthesia

Synaesthesia definition

The basis for visualising images comes from a psychological process called synaesthesia, where you picture sounds in your mind’s eye. Derived from anaesthesia (loss of feeling or sensation), the term synaesthesia is formed by combining syn (with, together, similarity, alike) and aesthesia (to feel, perceive). Commonly defined as “A sensation in one part of the body produced by a stimulus applied to another part - or- Production, from a sense-impression of one kind, of an associated mental image of a sense-impression of another kind.  This idea is absolutely central to understanding music video as they build on the soundtrack’s visual associations in order to connect with the audience and provide that additional pleasure. 

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The music theorist Andrew Goodwin claims that a good music video is:

‘…a film that responds to the pleasures of music, and in which that music is made visual, either in new ways or in ways that music is made visual, either in new ways or in ways that accentuate existing visual associations.’

In my media lesson we explored this theory by listing to music videos and start to visual the video without looking at it for the first time and try to embed our visualization into images on a piece of paper. We had to draw anything that we visual from the sound and music and apply it into our pieces of visualizations.
The music videos we explored in our lessons and applied Andrew Goodwin’s theory were:

• The xx- The visulisation we imagined for this music video were, alleyways, characters in hoods, dark/dim places, some sort of journey, blurry effects. After listening to the song for the our first time and draw our visualisation we watched the video to compare our visuals and the actual music video. In my experience, I believe Goodwins theory is again proved right, as the majority  of mine and the class visuals where in the video.

• Josh Record- For this music video, majority of our class drew stars (which connotes a dark and starry sky), rings, hearts and the main singer with his girl ( a couple in a relationship), due to the slow pace music and rather romantic lyrics. As we can see from the offcial music video, our visualisation were smiliar, even though we have never watched/ seen the video before.

This processes tells us that when creating our music videos in the year, we need to first listen to the song and see what we visuals we subconsiously picture in our minds eyes.