Headphones by DenisseDLC

This Thanksgiving weekend I felt like getting in touch with music, something that I hadn’t done in a while. And by getting in touch with music, I mean catching up on songs I have been listening to on YouTube but never actually downloaded because of time constraints.

I started to make a list of music and realized that I had a lot of catching up to do. As I downloaded music, I was trying to imagine what parts of songs I could use for an upcoming film project I’m working on. It dawned on me how interesting sight and sounds work for people. I was correlating different images in my head to specific combinations of music lyrics and beats of songs. It really demonstrates how interconnected our visual sense is to our hearing.

How many times has a smell triggered a specific memory? Or a sound make you think “where have I heard that before?” and then you remember, or you can’t remember a specific moment through your imagery.

It’s truly fascinating how things connect in our minds when we naturally use our senses.

My project has a couple of scenes where I am walking around my home town of New York City. As I was re-watching those scenes, the music that connected with them connected more with me than that of a scene I took as I was walking here in Vermont.

Music has a way of pulling at your heartstrings, or lightening the mood after a heavy scene in a film. It’s a medium that impacts us in many different ways. I keep having all these thoughts that relate back to that idea. Just like when I was teaching a Middle School class at MUMS here in Middlebury, the aspect of the lesson that we focused on was Digital Media Grammar. The demonstration that we showed the kids was that of the genderremixer website and then we gave them a prompt that implied what they would do if they could make their own toothpaste commercial. Lots of the responses were very different because of the musical direction that the children chose to take.

All in all, whether the music be in commercials, or on a film or even something that triggers a memory, music has some serious ties to imagery and I hadn’t’t even thought of it until I was catching up on some music downloads.