Music in vids: a little background

[tishaturk]

As mentioned in my last post, I've spent much of this spring reading about music and thinking about how what I'm reading might apply to vids. This post is some background about why I've been doing that.

Comments

[kiki_miserychic]

This is completely engrossing. Do you have thoughts on vids that use spoken word or pieces that aren't considered a song too? There's not many, but wow. When they're good, they're good.

[tishaturk]

Ahaha, I was just thinking of you -- giandujakiss mentioned you in the comments on the DW post!

So, okay -- I *do* have thoughts about vids that use audio other than songs! But we need a little bit of a ramp up to that point, so brace yourself for some hardcore geekery here for a second.

When I say "no music, no vid," I am partly being a smart-ass, but mostly I am talking about vids as a genre rather than any specific individual vid. I'm going to paraphrase Peter Rabinowitz here: a genre isn't a tickybox list of features that's found in a text (a poem/novel/sitcom/vid/whatever) but rather a set of operations that a reader/viewer performs in order to make meanings out of a text. We pick a particular set of processes (out of the many available to us) because of our sense, when we begin a particular work, of which processes ought to apply: is this a poem or a novel? is it romance or comedy? is it sci-fi or is it a western? That sense is informed by things like who made the work, where we found the work, what the trailer/review/back-cover blurb

[sabaceanbabe]

TPTB at YouTube should read this and rethink some of their idiotic policies, like suggesting you replace your chosen song in a vid with one of these other "approved" songs. They really don't get it that it's a package deal and if you swap out one song for another, even if they somehow miraculously work in regard to timing, it's still not the same vid.

[tishaturk]

Right, totally -- a vid isn't like somebody's home movie of their kid's birthday party where you swap in another relatively upbeat song and it's all good! One of my fan studies colleagues is actually working on a piece about this exact thing, YouTube's "Swap audio?" question. And of course it's infuriating, because anybody who knows anything about vids knows that it's a dumb suggestion! It doesn't work! When vid mashups were popular for a while back in 2008 or thereabouts, it was partly because the inappropriateness of most of the combinations was hilarious and also because the occasional combo that DID work really did feel miraculous, as you put it -- it shouldn't work, it mostly doesn't work, because a vid is built with and on a particular song