The aesthetics of music video: an analysis of Madonna's ‘Cherish’

Popular Music ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Vernallis
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Music Video ◽  
To Come

When we become engaged with a music video, what draws us in? What constitutes craft or artistry in the genre? Theorists of music video have usually addressed these questions from the perspective of sociology, film theory or popular cultural studies. Film theory, in particular, has had a tremendous influence on the analysis of music video, because of the two genres' apparently similar structuring of sound and image. But by the criteria of film, music videos tend to come off as failed narratives; the genre's effectiveness eludes explanation.

Polyphonie und Audiovision

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernand Hörner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Audiovisual Material ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
The Third ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
The Voice

This interdisciplinary analysis uses concepts of voice and polyphony both as visible, audible and understandable means of expression and as abstract analytical categories for the interpretation of music videos. The study combines abstract concepts of voice from music, media, literary and cultural studies, and linguistics with an analysis of the orchestration of the voice in the audiovisual form of music videos. The book has three parts: The first part highlights theories of voices and polyphony. The second part consists of the audiovisual transcription of a music video (‘Verliebt’ by the German rap group Antilopen Gang) by means of the online transcription tool trAVis. The third part offers an interpretation of the music video, joining the transcription with the theoretical concepts and the methodological approaches based on polyphony. This music video serves as an exhaustive test of ‘polyphony’ as a theoretical and methodological background against which one can interpret audiovisual material.

scholarly journals YouTube, ageing and PJ Harvey: An ‘everyday’ story of the erasure of age

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 1155-1167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail Sara Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Digital Environment ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ageing Body ◽  
Screen Space ◽  
The Relationship

Ageing is starting to matter in popular cultural studies but the matter of ageing within YouTube is, at present, unwritten. This article is an attempt to start that process. YouTube hosts the music video for PJ Harvey’s single release The Community of Hope (2016) . Shot by Seamus Murphy, it shares screen space with official music videos from Harvey’s 23-year career. Raising questions about the relationship between her past and present, this article examines the link between YouTube and ageing through two concepts, repetitive circularity and the flat archive. These rely and inform each other in a process that prioritizes the presence of youthfulness through the absenting of age, whereby the ageing body is erased from a popular cultural forum. YouTube’s ‘wallpaper of the past’ has a nagging impact on how we might read the body’s progress through time, in particular, how it ages. Tackling the paucity of work on ageing as it surfaces within the changing topographies of popular music encounters, the article considers how ageing is presented within a digital environment such as YouTube and concludes that the story is one of age erasure.

Viewing music videos: Emotion and viewer interpretation

2002 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan M. Preston ◽  
Michael Eden
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Emotional Content ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Mediating Factors ◽  
Comparative Media

Abstract. Music video (MV) content is frequently measured using researcher descriptions. This study examines subjective or viewers’ notions of sex and violence. 168 university students watched 9 mainstream MVs. Incidence counts of sex and violence involve more mediating factors than ratings. High incidents are associated with older viewers, higher scores for Expressivity, lower scores for Instrumentality, and with video orders beginning with high sex and violence. Ratings of sex and violence are associated with older viewers and lower scores for Instrumentality. For sex MVs, inexperienced viewers reported higher incidents and ratings. Because MVs tend to be sexier but less violent than TV and film, viewers may also use comparative media standards to evaluate emotional content MVs.

scholarly journals Impact of Visual Design Elements and Principles in Human Electroencephalogram Brain Activity Assessed with Spectral Methods and Convolutional Neural Networks

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (14) ◽  
pp. 4695
Author(s):  
Francisco E. Cabrera ◽  
Pablo Sánchez-Núñez ◽  
Gustavo Vaccaro ◽  
José Ignacio Peláez ◽  
Javier Escudero
Keyword(s):  
Brain Activity ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Visual Design ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Eeg Signal ◽  
Design Elements ◽  
The Public ◽  
Learning Classifier ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Human Electroencephalogram

The visual design elements and principles (VDEPs) can trigger behavioural changes and emotions in the viewer, but their effects on brain activity are not clearly understood. In this paper, we explore the relationships between brain activity and colour (cold/warm), light (dark/bright), movement (fast/slow), and balance (symmetrical/asymmetrical) VDEPs. We used the public DEAP dataset with the electroencephalogram signals of 32 participants recorded while watching music videos. The characteristic VDEPs for each second of the videos were manually tagged for by a team of two visual communication experts. Results show that variations in the light/value, rhythm/movement, and balance in the music video sequences produce a statistically significant effect over the mean absolute power of the Delta, Theta, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma EEG bands (p < 0.05). Furthermore, we trained a Convolutional Neural Network that successfully predicts the VDEP of a video fragment solely by the EEG signal of the viewer with an accuracy ranging from 0.7447 for Colour VDEP to 0.9685 for Movement VDEP. Our work shows evidence that VDEPs affect brain activity in a variety of distinguishable ways and that a deep learning classifier can infer visual VDEP properties of the videos from EEG activity.

Music video in its contexts: popular music and post-modernism in the 1980s

Popular Music ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Straw
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Surrounding Rock ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Post Modernism ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
Music Experience ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Individual

Writing on music video has had two distinctive moments in its brief history. The first wave of treatments tended to come from the culture surrounding rock music and from those who were primarily interested in music video as something which produced effects on that music. Here, two claims were most common, and generally expressed in the terms and the contexts of rock journalism:(1) that music video had made ‘image’ more important than the experience of music itself, with effects which were to be feared (for example, the potential difficulties for artists with poor ‘images’, the risk that theatricality and spectacle would take precedence over intrinsically ‘musical’ values, etc.);(2) that music video would result in a diminishing of the interpretative liberty of the individual music listener, who would now have visual or narrative interpretations of song lyrics imposed on him/her, in what would amount to a semantic and affective impoverishment of the popular music experience.

scholarly journals “Okay ladies, now let’s get in formation!”: Music Videos and the Construction of Cultural Memory

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura M. F. Bertens
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Limited Length ◽  
Diverse Audience

Abstract This paper explores strategies for constructing and perpetuating cultural memory through music videos, using Beyonce’s Formation (2016) and Janelle Monae’s Many Moons (2008) and Q.U.E.E.N. (2013) as case studies. The medium’s idiosyncrasies create unique ways of communicating and remembering, explored here within a framework of Cultural Studies and Memory Studies. Easy dissemination and the limited length of most videos ensure a large, diverse audience. The relative freedom from narrative constraints enables the director to create original imagery, and most importantly, the medium allows an intricate blending of performance and performativity; while the videos evidently are performances, they are strongly performative as well, not only with respect to gender and ethnicity but in significant ways also cultural memory. A close reading of Beyonce’s video Formation shows how she explicitly does the cultural memory of the New Orleans flooding. The videos by Monae are shown to produce counter-memories, relying heavily on the strategy of Afrofuturism. As such, these densely woven networks of visual symbols become palimpsests of black lived experience and cultural memory, passed on to millions of viewers.

Abstract Machine – Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for literary and cultural studies: ‘Mapping Kavanagh’

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 17-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Travis
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Geographical Information Systems ◽  
Practical Work ◽  
Geographical Information ◽  
Abstract Machine ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Spatial Dimensions ◽  
To Come ◽  
Gis Software

Drawing upon previous theoretical and practical work in historical and qualitative applications of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), this paper, in Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's terminology, conceptualizes GIS as ‘an abstract machine’ which plays a ‘piloting role’ which does not ‘function to represent’ something real, but rather ‘constructs a real which is yet to come.’ To illustrate this digital humanities mapping methodology, the essay examines Irish writer Patrick Kavanagh's novel The Green Fool (1938) and epic poem The Great Hunger (1946) and their respective contrasting topophilic and topophobic renderings of landscape, identity and sense of place under the lens M.M. Bakhtin's ‘Historical Poetics’ (chronotope) to illuminate GIS's ability to engage in spatio-discursive visualization and analysis. The conceptualizations and practices discussed in this paper reconsider GIS software/hardware/techniques as a means to engage subjects of concern to literary and cultural studies commensurate with the recent strong interest in the geographical and spatial dimensions of these cognate areas.

Experimental animation and the neosurrealist remediation of popular music video

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-106
Author(s):  
Lisa Perrott
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Animation Technique ◽  
Experimental Animation ◽  
Functionally Diverse

Once appearing to function primarily as a commercial tool for popular entertainment, the popular form of music video has recently been exposed by scholars as formally and functionally diverse, with a rich history stretching back decades before the advent of MTV. Animated music videos owe much to centuries old traditions spanning the visual, musical and performing arts, providing performative and material models that inspire contemporary video directors. Experimental animation, surrealism and music video form a matrix of historical and contemporary significance; however, few scholars have undertaken close examinations of the relations between them. John Richardson and Mathias Korsgaard show how music video directors have employed surrealist compositional strategies together with experimental animation methods, thus giving rise to challenging new forms that traverse disparate approaches to art and culture. Building upon their contributions, this article explores the continuity between experimental animation, surrealism and music video, with a view to discovering the subversive potential of this matrix. In order to probe this potential, the author examines how music video directors experiment with animation technique as a means of subversion and enrichment of popular music video. Through close analysis of music videos directed by Adam Jones, Stephen Johnson, Floria Sigismondi and Chris Hopewell, this article charts the continuity of surrealist strategy across culturally specific moments in history, thus provoking questions around the perceived functions of animated media and popular music video.

Proximate Forms and Sites of Encounter : Music Video and Experimental Tradition

Fanvids ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Charlotte Stevens
Keyword(s):  
Video Art ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Television Studies ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Definition Of

Vids resemble music videos and found footage films. They have the form and appearance of a music video, and they re-use existing moving images in a way that appears to meet the definition of found footage work or remix video art. This chapter establishes some parameters within which the vid can be viewed in relation to proximate forms. This chapter works through specific academic framings of similar forms such as found footage films in the experimental tradition and music video before discussing canons of vids that are formed through recent gallery contexts. These additional lenses—beyond fan studies and television studies—offer further reference points through which to understand vids.

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