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.

Understanding the Pleasures of War’s Audiovision

2013 ◽  
pp. 309-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Sumera
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Close Analysis

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This chapter seeks to explain the potency and appeal of music in contemporary war representations. Through the close analysis of war music videos—amateur productions, set to some form of popular music and posted online—the chapter addresses the ways in which music has become a generative, affective force in countless war depictions. In examining the ways in which such videos circulate, including how soldiers create, discuss, and use them, the chapter ultimately argues that these contemporary audiovisions are not about war as much as they are part of it.

Negotiating Gender, Popular Culture, and Social Justice in Music Education

2015 ◽  
pp. 581-597
Author(s):  
Joseph Abramo
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Female Empowerment ◽  
Music Video ◽  
The World ◽  
Relations Of Power

This chapter describes how educators may use Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model to create instruction and curricula that challenge students to critically examine popular music. Through this process, students generate dominant, oppositional, and negotiated readings of songs, music videos, and other popular culture texts, and situate these readings within relations of power and privilege. This pedagogical process is illustrated in an analysis of contested notions of “female empowerment” in Beyoncé Knowles’s music video Run the World (Girls). Finally, limitations of the encoding/decoding model are accounted in order to create new aims for social justice in music education, including the exploration of diversity and the exploration of societal power and privilege in the production and reception of popular music.

scholarly journals Storytelling through Popular Music: Social Memory, Reconciliation, and Intergenerational Healing in Oromia/Ethiopia

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 70
Author(s):  
Tatek Abebe
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
Online Discussions ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Music Video ◽  
National History ◽  
Alternative Spaces ◽  
Speak Up ◽  
Intergenerational Connections

Drawing on a popular music video titled ‘Beelbaa’ by a young Oromo artist, Jambo Jote, this article discusses the moments and contexts that compel young people to speak up in subtle and poetic ways. By interpreting the content of the lyrics, doing a visual analysis of the music video, and connecting both to contemporary discourses, it explores how researching social memory through music can be used as a lens to understand Ethiopian society, politics, and history. The article draws attention to alternative spaces of resistance as well as sites of intergenerational connections such as lyrics, music videos, songs, and online discussions. I argue that storytelling through music not only bridges differences on problematic and sometimes highly polarized discourses engendered by selective remembering and forgetting of national history, but that it is also indispensable for reconciliation and peaceful coexistence. Tuning into young people’s music can touch us in ways that are real, immediate, and therapeutic, making it possible for our collective wounds to heal. I further demonstrate that as musical storytelling appeals to multiple generations, it can facilitate mediation, truce, and intergenerational understanding.

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.

scholarly journals Absence and Presence: Top of the Pops and the Demand for Music Videos in the 1960s

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-544
Author(s):  
Justin Smith
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
British Music ◽  
American Artists ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Uk ◽  
International Success ◽  
The Relationship

While there is a surprising critical consensus underpinning the myth that British music video began in the mid-1970s with Queen's video for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, few scholars have pursued John Mundy's (1999) lead in locating its origins a decade earlier. Although the relationship between film and the popular song has a much longer history, this article seeks to establish that the international success of British beat groups in the first half of the 1960s encouraged television broadcasters to target the youth audience with new shows that presented their idols performing their latest hits (which normally meant miming to recorded playback). In the UK, from 1964, the BBC's Top of the Pops created an enduring format specifically harnessed to popular music chart rankings. This format created a demand for the top British artists' regular studio presence which their busy touring schedules could seldom accommodate; American artists achieving British pop chart success rarely appeared on the show in person. These frequent absences, then, coupled with the desire by broadcasters elsewhere in Europe and America to present popular British acts, created a demand for pre-recorded or filmed inserts to be produced and shown in lieu of the artists themselves appearing. Drawing on records held at the BBC's Written Archives and elsewhere, and interviews with a number of 1960s music video directors, this article evidences TV's demand-driver and illustrates how the ‘pop promo’, in the hands of some, became a creative enterprise which exceeded television's requirement to cover for an artist's studio absence.

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.

Defining experimental animation: A follow-up

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-31
Author(s):  
Paul Taberham
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Experimental Animation ◽  
Analogue To Digital ◽  
Unique Relationship

This article offers further reflections on a chapter I published in the anthology Experimental Animation: From Analogue to Digital. I begin by exploring the reticence artists and critics have shown in attempting to define what experimental animation is, and I then offer a way to provide a definition without delimiting what it is or can be. Subsequent to this, three additional traits of experimental animation are added to the original list of defining features that were published in the original article. They are as follows: the subversion of unchecked assumptions about filmic experience, a willingness to potentially alienate viewers, and the application of symbolism in which viewers might not be able to discern the artist’s original intentions. Following this, the unique relationship experimental animation has with the commercial realm (notably in idents, title sequences and music videos) is also considered. Finally, the conclusion points towards the experimental animator’s creative process as a further avenue of exploration.

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