Visual tagging of music and it's manipulations

Something that I've touched on several times is music and what trends I've gone through over the years. What I want to focus on now is how music can affect us, how it binds itself to fragments of our lives and how we can be fairly easily emotionally manipulated by music. There are several links in this post to tracks on Spotify, so if you don't have an account (or got hold of a free account), you'll have to make do with the YouTube links. Of course, all the examples I'm going to give are highly personal as you'd expect. The upshot, aside from maybe discovering some new music, is that these tracks will probably illicit no (or completely different) emotional responses.

Unless you watch a lot of the music channels, music is - by definition - an aural experience. The upshot of this is that when we begin to link music with sights, thoughts and feelings we experienced with the times when we acquainted ourselves with the music. Here are some examples from various points through my life from my Spotify "memories" playlist (in no particular order):

Kent - 400 Slag

(It's Swedish before you start thinking anything else!) From 2006, I first picked up on this song from my beloved Pandora (before the feed to the UK was killed) and the album was the first one I bought as a result of Pandora. It's a long, moody intro and the singer has a really smooth voice which is a bit melancholic. The fact that the song is in Swedish means that you really focus on the melody - especially the sweeping choruses. While it's not the best song on the album, it's a song that takes my mind back to 2006 and sitting in my room in House 3 at Trevs. I think the best way to describe that entire year would be nihilistic: I feel I was living without purpose. What should have been a really fun and exciting year just past me by. While the song perhaps sets a depressing picture, I don't really see it as such - just as an aural passport back to that ridiculous room right next to the boiler (which never turned off).

T'Pau - China in your hand

Obviously this is an old one. When I was younger, I went to a swimming club on Thursdays. I was quite good at swimming, especially breaststroke, but I just wasn't competitive. Also, I lacked stamina and I found myself always struggling by the end of the sessions. I didn't know anyone else that went, so combined with my crippling shyness, I didn't have any friends there either. I also found some of the exercises (such as backstroke leg-kicks) fairly claustrophobic (I guess cos I could see where I was going and my ears were underwater meaning I couldn't hear anything and I felt disoriented). All this meant I really didn't look forward to going at all. The session began at 7.30 which meant I just had time to see who was number one of Top of the Pops before I had to go. I guess T'Pau was one of the most catchy tracks from that era and the two things are linked.

Radiohead - Lucky

At this point in my life, I still cling to the belief that the best album I have ever heard is OK computer by Radiohead. To my mind no other album went on such a journey from the raucous, confused and fuzzy opening of Airbag through to the chilled out, lethargic The Tourist. It could be argued that perhaps 2007's In Rainbows finally surpassed it, but being a guitar fan, I think OK Computer still just about stands out as their best for me. Now, the year was 2007 1997 (oh dear, that's a long time ago now!), and several of my friends who were into Radiohead were really excited about the release of OK Computer. Obviously at the time I was very impressionable and I immediately looked to see if any of my compilations had any of their songs as I wasn't familiar with them at all. I found that I had a CD with the track Just. It was a song that I'd skipped in the past as it was an immediate song. In fact, the intro to Just is a very confusing and intimidating beginning to a song. It seems strange now to say that a song intimidated me, but it did. I began to be intrigued by their style. Radiohead seem to be a very polarising band. In 1997, even more so. People either loved them or hated them. Thom Yorke's vocal style is very distinct and can take getting used to. After hearing Paranoid Android (the lead single from OK Computer) for the first time - and not being overly familiar with the band - it left me a bit cold, but there was something about the song nagging at me to go back to it. As OK Computer was released, Woolworths did it and The Bends for £20. I snapped them both up and set about listening to them. A week later I went on a family holiday to Rhodes which involved a night flight and arriving very early in the morning. The song that has perhaps the most immediacy is Lucky. It's a very desolate song, with the constant ringing of the guitar strings heard in the intro carrying on in the background all the way through the song almost like crickets. The tremelo effect of the lead guitar coming in and out throughout in the background and the choral synthesiser effects and backing vocals in the chorus all add to create a unique audio landscape. Travelling by bus across Rhodes from the airport at 5 am, I had my walkman playing this song when I peered through the curtains and saw a desolate rocky, barren desert outside. The view just perfectly fit with the music and this link has stayed in my mind ever since.

Hans Zimmer - Like a dog chasing cars

Back to 2008 and the release of The Dark Knight. I'd really enjoyed Batman Begins in 2005 as a great example of how far comic book movies had come in the last 10-15 years. Gotham was now a believable, gritty, crime-ridden city rather than the pantomime neon or overly Gothic creations seen before. Rumours were that The Dark Knight was even better but nothing could have prepared me for it. We drove down to Bradford to see the film at the IMAX screen. It was a pretty horrid day by the time we got there - overcast, raining and cold. The weather fit completely with the tone of the film. It was epic. Constantly tense, the music served to alternate between the schizophrenic, tension of the strings which marked out the Joker's presence, to the bursts of heroic theme which quickly transitioned back to a tension-raising version. By two thirds of the way through the film I felt completely emotionally drained. If anything, the film was too much to take in. This track I've chosen will always remind me of sitting in that cinema and being so overwhelmed with what was happening and the feelings carried over with me for days and are retained on repeat viewings.

Moby - Look back in

At the end of my 3rd year at Durham I felt quite depressed. The majority of my friends had finished their degrees and I knew the next year would be a very different experience. During that summer I began to rediscover some albums by listening to them in the dark. I suddenly found that effectively shutting off my visual inputs left me free to concentrate more on the music and let my mind wander to wherever the music took it. This short track from the album 18 was the one track that summed up this very reflective period in my life. It's very short at under 3 minutes in length, but has a dreamlike quality to it. The title - Look back in - captured how it made me feel: looking back over the last three years. I just wish it was a little longer. A lot of people didn't like the album 18 as they felt it was simply a poor rehash of Play, but there are a lot of really nice chilled out tracks such as One of these mornings and In this world.

So there you have it - some really wide ranging examples of a small selection of music that instantly transports me somewhere in my mind. I'm sure everyone has their own examples and I encourage you to think about them and use a service like Spotify to create playlists of them to send some emotional, nostalgic chills down your spine.

Of course, people know that music can act in this way and seek to take advantage of it. The obvious example is with soundtracks. As with my Dark Knight example, music can emphasise the impact of the moving pictures. It's hard to do, but try and find a dramatic scene from a film or show with and without the backing music and often it won't have the same impact without the music. Obviously, here the music is tailored specifically for the scene and scored to maximise any points or moments the director desires. A slightly less unique approach is that employed by advertisers. They know that music has the power to get straight through the logical part of your brain and wedge itself straight in the emotional part, which is exactly what they want so you don't question exactly why you need a new *thing* - you just want it! Often times, simplified, cut down arrangements can often get through to people. A good example of this is the John Lewis Christmas campaigns. Here are the 2008 and 2009 adverts





Both feature stripped back versions of famous songs. The irony is that the Sweet Child Of Mine cover was released as a single, but didn't actually work as a song as it's far too dull an arrangement to sustain interest beyond the runtime of the advert. The piano is one of the best solo instruments to achieve this effect of conjuring up the required emotion. I'll finish this off with a piano arrangement of a suite of music from one of my favourite films, Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Regular readers may remember that this film features large portions of silence, which Disney didn't think Western audiences would be comfortable with, so they actually commissioned the original composer to re-score these previously silent passages when the film came to be released in the West!