Examining the Role of Sound and Image in Music Video:

Within current media theory, the one space in which post-cinema can be evaluated is through music videos. Music videos take another step forward from visual effects by outlining fresh sound-image relationships that juggle different forces than traditional projected cinema. As Steven Shaviro (2016) suggests, one can even see how the sound in the music video like Massive Attack’s “Splitting the Atom” makes the value attached to these “cinematic” images greater. Referencing Chion’s work, Shaviro believes that sound creates an “audiovisual contract,” adding some extra meaning and directionality to moving images: bringing a more coherent experience for the viewer (Shaviro, 2016, 364).

But in digital music videos, this contract has been broken. The old sound-image relationship is subverted in that now it can only show just how the shift in perspective takes the story further in a new linear style in the digital age. For example, in Splitting the Atom, the video illustrates what Shaviro has termed the short-circuiting of the visual. Here, narrative time fails to allow any space to explore environments, virtual or otherwise. This mode of dealing with time and space in music video production is therefore database logic, which privileges the spatial connections that the viewer encounters above a more temporal one. This fragmented narrative structure of digital music videos mimics dislocation in digitally processing and consuming information.

Thus, music videos provide a fascinating example of post-cinema that transcends traditional filmic language, blending sound and image in ways that reflect our contemporary relationship with media technology and digital spaces.

Steven Shaviro, (2017), ‘Glitch Aesthetics’, Digital Music Video. Rutgers University Press.  

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Oliver Frieze