Theories

Andrew Goodwin’s

There are 5 key aspects of music videos that we the audience should look out for which are:
Thought beats- seeing the sound

§  First step- to look at the music video itself. We must take into account the structure of the song for e.g. chorus/ verses

§  Secondly- the voice of the song. The artist voice is extremely unique and can form identification or trademarks that work well with the star image. Roland Barthes theory of the Grain of voice can be related to this. He sees the singing voice as an expressive instrument and therefore able to make associations of its own.

§  Thirdly- Goodwin also points out the artist mode of address. Songs can be seen as stories and the artist the storyteller, making the music video a two communication device, them telling us a story and us listening.
 Narrative and performance

§  Most songs fail to give us the complete narrative

§  We only tend to get a gist of the meaning of the song and then tend to make up our own idea of what is being told. Goodwin explains that music videos should ignore common narrative. It is important in their role of advertising. Music video should coherent repeatability. Narrative and performance work hand in hand it makes it easier for the audience to watch over and over without losing interests.  The artist acting as both narrator and participant helps to increase the authenticity, however the lip sync and other mimed actions remains the heart of the music videos. The audience need to believe this is real.

§  It helps to make the song look more realistic and also giving the audience a special connecting and good understanding of the song. For example Katy Perry ROAR, she is the main actor in the song an also the singer and it helps the video by making the song and video look more realistic and this also help to engage the audience.

 The star image

§  The star image is another vital aspect of music videos. Meta narrative which is a big story that describes the development of the star over time,  it has an important part to play in the music video production process.

§  This helps to promote the artist/stars image in public and also helps to promote the video while creating a public reputation for the artist.
 Relation of visuals to song

§  There are three ways in which music videos work to promote a song.

§  Illustrate- music videos can use a set of images to illustrate the meaning of lyric and genre, this is the most common. This explains the meaning of lyrics to their song and the genre.

§  Amplify- this is similar to repeatability. Meanings and effects are manipulated and constantly sown through the video and drummed into our vision.

§  Disjuncture- this is where the meaning of the song is completely ignored

§  He believed that a music video can promote a song by though the way it analysis the lyrics. This is shown in many music videos when a character does exactly what the song says. For example when the song says JUMP JUMP JUMP and on the video there are characters/actors actually jumping.
Technical aspects of music video

§  Technical aspects hold the music video together through use of camera work, movement, angle, mise-en-scene, editing, sound and special effects.

§  Speed, camera movement, editing, cutting and post production are all forms of use of camera.

§  Lighting the colour help set the moods and emphasise key moments of the song for dramatic effect.

§  Mise-en-scene, the setting of music videos is vital, it needs to look authentic to attain professionalism.

§  Beats, music videos use cuts to go with the beat or rhythm making the video more entertaining. This is very useful as they can help to create effective cuts that go with the rhythm of the song to make the music video look more entertaining. 

Laura Mulvey’s

The male gaze 1975

She believes that in television audiences have to “view” characters from the perspective of a heterosexual male.

This is the concept of the gaze is one that deals with how people an audience views the people presented.

For feminists it can be thought of in  3 ways:

1.       How men look at women

2.       How women look at themselves

3.       How women look at each other

Features:

·         The camera lingers on the curves of the female body, and an event which occurs to women are presented largely in the context of a man’s reaction to these events. Relegates woman to the status of objects. The female viewer must experience the narrative secondarily, by identification with the male.

Also some theorists also have noticed the sexualising of the female body even in situations where females sexiness has nothing to do with product being advertise

Criticisms:

·         Some women enjoy being looked at, for example beauty pageants

·         The gaze can also be directed toward members of the same gender for several reasons, not all of which are sexual, such as in comparison of body image or in clothing.

Marjorie Ferguson (1980) categorised facial expressions for women:

·         Chocolate box

·         Invitational

·         Super-smiler

·         Romantic

·         Sexual

While Trevor Millum (1975) categorised facial expressions for men:

·         Carefree

·         Practical

·         Seductive

·         Comic

·         Catalogue 

The Uses and Gratification Model

An approach to understanding why and how people actively seek out specific media to satisfy specific needs. UGT is an audience-centered approach to understanding mass communication

This communication theory is positivistic in its approach, based in the socio-psychological communication tradition, and focuses on communication at the mass media scale. The driving question of UGT is: Why do people use media and what do they use them for? UGT discusses how users deliberately choose media that will satisfy given needs and allow one to enhance knowledge, relaxation, social interactions/companionship, diversion, or escape

It assumes that audience members are not passive consumers of media. Rather, the audience has power over their media consumption and assumes an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives. Unlike other theoretical perspectives, UGT holds that audiences are responsible for choosing media to meet their desires and needs to achieve gratification. This theory would then imply that the media compete against other information sources for viewers' gratification

Research has shown that media taken in for entertainment purposes (i.e., movies, songs, television, etc.) have a wide range of uses and emotional gratifications, and that these are not mutually exclusive but can overlap with each other.

·         Mood management: This is the most prominently cited emotional gratification of media use. People prefer to maintain a state of intermediate arousal; this is a pleasant medium. When in a bad mood, bored, or over-aroused, people will seek media as regulation for or distraction from their mood.

·         Affective disposition: Affective disposition theory states that people enjoy "rooting for" characters depicted as good and moral. Users experience gratification when good things happen to characters with "good" morals and also when bad things happen to "evil" or "bad" characters.

·         Excitation transfer: This use and gratification for media posits that people like to feel worried for characters we perceive as "good," and this is even more gratifying if that character gets "rewarded" in some way in the end.

·         Sensation seeking: This use and gratification can be understood when considering excitement as its own reward.

·         Modes of reception: "Emotional involvement correlates with other modes of reception, especially with diegetic involvement (getting absorbed in the fictional world), socio-involvement (identifying with characters), and ego-involvelment (relating the film to one's own life). ...Emotional involvement can be helpful for the pursuit of a broader variety of goals in the reception process. ... It can be concluded that the experience of emotions can be functional in a number of other ways than just regulating emotions in terms of affective valence and arousal."

·         Intrinsic motivation: If the user experiences a challenge to his or her media-related skills, but not to the point of being frustrated or overwhelmed, then the gratification is a reward in a feeling of competence that inspires the user to continue using the media in question.^[40]

·         Mood adjustment: Users are gratified by using media to adjust their mood to whatever is currently happening. For instance, once already provoked by an aggressor and promised a chance to retaliate, males were found to prefer bad news over good news in that emotionally charged moment.

·         Gender socialization of emotions: This use is gratified by the idea that women enjoy feeling other-directed sadness (empathy, sympathy, and pity) because our culture values and validates women’s feeling these; similarly, teenage couples like to watch scary movies so the male feels protective and the female feels vulnerable.

·         Relationship functions of entertainment: According to this particular branch of use and gratification, we use entertainment to apply lessons to or escape from our real-life relationships.

·         Parasocial relationships: Consumers of entertainment media sometimes use it to gratify a need for social connection by becoming very attached to characters seen in entertainment media, such as characters in a TV show or newscasters.

·         Vicarious experiences: A related use and gratification for entertainment media is the idea of living through the characters portrayed and imagining ourselves in their lives by adopting the characters' perspectives.

·         Downward social comparison: This use and gratification holds that we enjoy taking in media that portrays people similar or worse off than ourselves

·         Eudaimonic motivation: Media consumers also turn to entertainment media to search for deeper meanings, insights, purpose for life, finding beauty, raising morale, experience strong emotions, and understand how others think and feel.

Hyperdermic Needle Model

This is a model of communications suggests that an intended message is directly received and wholly accepted by the receiver. The model is rooted in 1930s behaviourism. This theory is not based on empirical findings from research but rather assumptions of the time about human nature. People were assumed to be uniformly controlled by their biologically based instincts. This theory is also known as the Magic Bullet this assumes that the media's message is a bullet fired from the "media gun" into the viewer's "head" (Berger 1995). This suggests that the media injects its message straight into the passive audience, and then the audience is directly affected by the message. This suggests a powerful and direct flow of information from the sender to the receiver.

 It suggests that media messages are injected straight into a passive audience which is immediately influenced by the message, because of the limited communication tools and the studies of the media’s effect on the masses at the time. There is no escape from the effect of the message in this model. People are seen as passive and end up thinking what they are told because there is no other source of information.

Factors which contribute:

Speedy increase of popular media

Industries Persuasion by advertising or public opinion

Impact of motion pictures on children (The Payne Fund)

Hitler’s monopolization of the mass media in world war two.