Music videos came around in order to promote an artist’s song but in today’s world, as stated by Vernallis, we are now seeing a wave of video production made by ‘individuals as much as record companies’ (Vernallis, 2014) where a music video can be anything from a 2 second clip to an hour long video. Platforms such as YouTube provide free entertainment and give the ability for amateur creators to post videos as well. Vernallis also states that ‘music video has since undergone shifts in technologies and platforms, periods of intense cross-pollination with other media, financial booms and busts, and changing levels of audience engagement’. Music videos have moved from once being occasionally made for promotional platforms such as MTV to now being an expectation after any single is released.

Theorist Michel Chion calls the audiovisual contract a ‘basic paradigm for the relationship between sounds and moving images’ (Shaviro, 2016). Chion argues that in music videos, added value is brought by imagery as opposed to in cinema where sound brings added value to the image. The audiovisual contract is used in Kanye West’s music video for the song ‘Welcome to heartbreak’ featuring Kid Kudi. The lyrics of the song express the feeling of going through heartbreak. On its own, it’s easy enough to understand the premise of the song, however, once paired with vibrating, shaky imagery and glitching, distorted effects, the song is given added value. In my opinion, the music video allows the audience to understand and empathise with how the artist feels when singing the song. In Welcome to Heartbreak, you can see the turmoil and confusion he is going through by the use of the techniques I have stated. Therefore, the semiotics of a music video can enrich a song just like a ‘sound enriches a given image’ in cinema, as said by Chion.

By Maddie Wood, 307 words

References

Shaviro. S (2016). 3.4 Splitting the Atom: Post-Cinematic Articulations of Sound and Vision. [online] Available at: https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/3-4-shaviro/.

‌https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/3-4-shaviro/

Vernallis, C. (2014). Unruly media : you tube, music video, and the new digital cinema. New York: Oxford University Press Inc.

http://www.youtube.com. (n.d.). Kanye West – Welcome To Heartbreak ft. Kid Cudi. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMH0e8kIZtE&list=PLs0CuxEPlt1wW47SlkHZuBGWPR2goRvtt&index=18 [Accessed 22 Nov. 2022].

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