Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia 

Synaesthesia is the process of picturing sounds in the minds eye. Andrew Goodwin said that a music video is a film that responds to the pleasures of music, and which that music is made visual, either in new ways or in ways that accentuate existing visual associations. 

Over a few of our media lessons we listened to two different songs as a class and we all had to draw what came to mind; whether that be actual items, parts of a video or just random shapes. The first song we listened to was called Intro by The XX. 

My interpretation of the song before seeing the video

There are links between my interpretation of the song and between the music video. For example, the theme of isolation is prominent in both my drawings and the music video. When drawing, I also drew a person wearing a hoodie, something usually associated with people on the street/crime, some of which is shown in the video. 

The second song that we listened to was For Your Love by Josh Record.

My interpretation of this song before I saw the video

There are also some links between my drawings and between what is shown in the video. For example I have drawn stars and most of the video is set at night. I have also drawn sad faces and happy faces, and both of these emotions are evident in this music video. However, my drawings for this music video are less strongly linked that the first. This may be because the second video was narrative based.

From doing this research, we can see that there is often a link between what we expect to see in a music video and what is shown. Therefore I do agree with Andrew Goodwin’s quote ‘music video is a film that responds to the pleasures of music, and which that music is made visual, either in new ways or in ways that accentuate existing visual associations.’ However, I think that it is harder to predict the content of a music video when the video is narrative based. This is because the video would then follow a specific story line which would be hard to predict as this could link to the lyrics or the sounds interpreted by the director or singer themselves.