Music is the color of your film (Jaclyn Bell, 2010).

Music creates the atmosphere for a film. It enhances a story and always helps strike an emotional chord with the audience. Music helps tell a story consciously and subconsciously as well. 

 

Music is of course used in media in every part of the world. But me growing up in South Asian country, music in media is taken to another level. We are no strangers to dramatic music in every scene and breaking out into dance and music every five minutes. 

 

In the work that I have done with other people and by myself I have heavily relied on music to obtain the desired effect. I produced music for a short film recently which was ominous and fell under dark comedy. I am not a very skilled producer but I tried my best to convey the sound in my head and then putting it into my work. A horror film wouldn’t be the same if it didn’t have background music and sound effects. The fear factor would be minimised without it. The music I created was creepy and slightly unsettling. It was not only through the scary scene, but also before a lot of it be gone as I wanted to warn audience or make them make them aware of what will be the undertone of the movie before it had even begun. I had done a similar piece of work with my peer and friend Aghigh. Where the music for our piece created a lot of suspense, stress, mystery, anxiety etc. Also used music for a build up for an impending doom. 

On the contrary I have recently created music that leave you feeling a lot of love, warm and wholesomeness with predominant use of major chords or some heart break with some minor chords and also created a dance track with some upbeat melodies. All of them are sounds but orchestrates a different emotion. 

Sound has been entangled with vision since the conception of modern ideas of race and it has often operated at the leading edge of the visual to produce racialized identity formations (Jennifer Lynn Stoever, 2016). Music has always been a significant part of black culture.

It has a direct correlation to political activism, fight for equality and justice. 

In 2012 a seventeen year old boy Davis and his friends were at a gas station in Florida, they were asked by a man named Michael Dunn to turn down the hiphop music their car, upon refusal, Dunn shot into their car and fled.

" My book is about where and how you learned that voice— how you came to believe it was ‘black,’ why you think it sounds funny and weird and sexual, and how you feel like you own it, so much so that you whip 

it out to a stranger in a coffee shop ". (Jennifer Lynn Stoever, 2016)
Music is a form of expression and it often brings to surface the truth about what lives black people had to choose or was forced to live. Even though it is heavily discussed that rap culture promotes profanity, violence and sexual slang; similarly we need to analyse the roots of it. Just from the top of my head I can point out how slavery is directly related to rape and sexualisation of women, how due to lack of job and educational opportunities many black men had to turn to selling drugs and would never get a seat at the table of the posh societies, yet we still frown at the heavy usage of profanities.

In the book Audio-Vision, Michel Chion suggests the sound and film together forms a complete new perception, it’s like you can hear the images or scenes. 
"the two perceptions mutually influence each other...lending each other their respective properties by contamination and projection.”( Michel Chion, 1993).
Chion talks about synchresis (combination of the words synchronism and synthesis) it’s the forging between what we see and hear.

 

The music industry create music that is meant to be catchy and popular, and it is played over and over through different forms of media to solidify people’s taste in music. Music is being sold as a commodity. In 2023 music is a $26.2 billion industry. However there are still many many artists who are preserving the purity of this art form and are not succumbing to the pressures of commercial endeavours. The kind of music that was consumed twenty years ago is not the same as today. Every industry has diversified a lot and there are makers and consumers of everything. After all as human beings we are so different yet so similar in many ways.

 

Our subjectivities are based on our social class, gender, sexuality, race, spiritual / religious practices, where we grew up, our thoughts, practices and education. This is what effects our actions. In the book ‘ Making Popular Music ‘ Toynbee suggests that production of popular music is not intuitive rather based on careful research, planning, monitoring and then certain creative decisions are made.

Music is a very multifaceted topic as discussed above, it is used to enhance any visual media and the message that it is trying to convey, it is also used as entertainment.
Music is the way a lot of people relate to the world. And people who create music, even under a same theme , have their unique ways of putting their music out there.
And all of it relates back to our individual identities, and the experiences that have shaped our lives.
We also shed some light on how it is a commodity that is popularised and sold.  
Many years ago, there probably would not have been a market for music that is not so popular, but now there is because of so many streaming platforms and Social media which is so accessible to everyone. Everyone is using soundbites for their content; be it their original work, or someone else’s or existing music that has been altered by artificial intelligence. With the shorter attention span of this generation, music is used very differently today. The sound bites that now play in peoples head are not particularly songs that you hear on the radio on repeat. It is usually a 15 second TikTok video soundbite from a popular song which has been sped up and has a quirky artificial voice. And thirteen year olds are lip-syncing to it,  even thirty year olds. From the research, I have done music up until a few years ago was predominantly what the music industry curated for the world to consume. But now as there are so many bedroom producers, so many music making apps and how easy it is to alter sound, music has taken a whole different form. Music is no longer about rich chords, meaningful lyrics and a traditional song structure. Recently I came across a popular and enjoyable track that was sung / spoken by the  voice we usually hear iPhone Siri speak in. Soundbites are so widespread now that it is becoming very hard to claim or copyright them. Even a slightly altered version of a popular song would be found under a random TikTok creators video as original sound. Even though I’m not the most finessed creator out there but I always had an appreciation for high art. This, as an artist had somehow made my life very difficult and I constantly felt the pressure that I need to be up to a certain standard to even begin to put myself out there. Initially I used to get annoyed by popular social media content creators releasing very quick and casual spoken word songs with a simple beat which would have millions of hits as children were predominantly consuming it. These lyrics were not thought out at all nor the production of these tracks were top-notch. But slowly, even I found myself enjoying these songs, and I think where I resonated with this type of music was the lightheartedness it had, and how it was a mockery of a lot of things. By that, I mean, even how much I valued myself expression, whereas maybe it actually does not have to be that serious. In future, I see music going into a very casual direction and a lot of it will possibly be influenced by artificial intelligence. I feel like a very thought out well written, well produced piece of music will still be valued. But the market will be saturated by billions of different forms of sound bites and music. I feel like it is the result of how this current generation or how everyone collectively in this time on this planet is operating. People do not practice patience anymore. Every thing is constantly changing at an immeasurable speed. There is a new trend every few hours. Just because everything is so fast paced and easy to consume people are also losing meaning in art and expression and we have the advancement of technology to thank for that. Depression (which essentially means not finding meaning, value or purpose in things / life) is at an all time high. So is anxiety, which is being enabled (not only did Covid solidify it), but nowadays people are really not valuing human contact. Just how there are bedroom producers, people can now make money through making content just from home and limit their interactions, people can work from home or attend classes online. So stepping out into the real world and having to interact with other human beings can feel really alien and can highly contribute to social anxiety. There are people dressing up very glamorously at home and creating content they might seem confident or sure of themselves and they may even preach about it but there's not much validity to that claim as they will barely have to account for any real repercussions as they are hiding behind a screen and will probably never have to face or answer to the people consuming there content. also with how fast things blow over on the internet there are no real repercussions. Which also means due to the fickle and saturated nature of the internet there is not much appreciation or value placed on something great.  It is definitely taking away from building something long, sustainable and high in value which in return gives human beings that sense of fulfilment. And that all applies to music and many other forms of art.