Visual accompaniment in songs

[Peggy]

How much do you think the visual aspects in music as presented through videos associated with a song effect your creative process, listening to or preception of a song?

 

 

[Steve]

That's a great question. I haven't written anything for many years, but all of a sudden, I am back writing songs in quite an intensive way! And curiously, I am imagining what the song will sound like with a video, and what the video will look like to accompany the song! I have never done this previously, and am not quite sure why I am doing it now? Maybe subconsciously, it's all the YouTube videos I watch and am inspired by! I know that listening to a song on YouTube that has a static photo attached is somewhat disappointing! I think it's almost expected that a song will have a video. Maybe that's what is in the back of my mind! I think it can actually help in the process of laying out the foundations of what you want the song to be.

[HoboSage]

@Peggy My answer to each subpart of your question is "not at all."

[Peggy]

16 hours ago, Steve said:

That's a great question. I haven't written anything for many years, but all of a sudden, I am back writing songs in quite an intensive way! And curiously, I am imagining what the song will sound like with a video, and what the video will look like to accompany the song! I have never done this previously, and am not quite sure why I am doing it now? Maybe subconsciously, it's all the YouTube videos I watch and am inspired by! I know that listening to a song on YouTube that has a static photo attached is somewhat disappointing! I think it's almost expected that a song will have a video. Maybe that's what is in the back of my mind! I think it can actually help in the process of laying out the foundations of what you want the song to be.

 

I think you hit on it. Interesting that you are thinking about that visual presentation during the creative process and not an afterthought...giving the song another dimension.   It does seem to be an important aspect of the enjoyment and entertainment for the listeners today as well as the expectation because of the platforms with music videos. I see my nephew's and nieces and they are always watching the vids as they are listening.  I watch the videos when selecting songs for our YouTube playlists, for lots of reasons. But, I also watch those that grab me.  I always visualize while I'm writing but I've never really mirrored that up with the song when finished. That absence might be leaving much of my creativity on the table.

[Peggy]

17 hours ago, HoboSage said:

@Peggy My answer to each subpart of your question is "not at all."

I totally get it, pretty much saw videos as  an applied part of the presentation.  But I am recognizing the imagery in my thoughts when creating, I'm just not doing anything with them.

[Glammerocity]

Maybe we older folks who remember pre-MTV will have different attitudes to gen-Z. I spent an evening with a name artist (who shall remain nameless to avoid name-dropping but was big and cool in the 80s and 90s). He told me his band didn't make videos, because we grew up creating the images for the music in our heads. Video cements an image to the music. Think of Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer or Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love and you can't unsee the video images.

 

Now I'm ok with watching music. It's a visually creative discipline and I wonder how many people would bother watching creative visuals without it being a music video of a song or artist they like. I watch a lot of kpop, where concepts are an important, almost must-have, element of the music and the video, so the video helps expand on what the music is about. Fans love to analyse the videos for hidden meaning and I've even made an analysis video myself for a group whose video used Da Vinci imagery - Helicopter by CLC. Da Vinci's helicopter design was an obvious starting point but when I dug down into the video's images, with some subliminal one-frame shots included, it got quite deep, including transformation (organic shapes from geometric patterns) and the flower of life. I got the impression that the lyric had been written with all of this in mind before the music was even recorded.

 

I never wrote with a video in mind, probably because I never expected to get that far, but I could see how it might actually help somebody write better with a visual image in mind, even if that image isn't the one finally presented to listener-viewers. Maybe we've done that subconsciously without noticing.

[Glammerocity]

Thinking further on this topic, the choreography of the kpop videos I watch got me onto musicals, which have visuals to accompany the songs, written to fit a narrative and a visual concept. Do we hear Singin' in the Rain without thinking of Gene Kelly actually doing so? Or John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John doing You're the One That I Want at a fairground? They're still great songs and it was the writers who made them so, because without great songs you have no musical to make.

[Danger Man]

I want to see concert videos--not music videos. I hate the MTV type stuff, lip syncing and prancing and all. Pick up a real instrument and SHOW me what you can do with it. I'd rather see a beginner doing his best in real-time than people pretending to play along with a prerecorded track.