Synaesthesia- Literal Music Videos

In my opinion Synaesthesia is probably one of the most important aspects of music video. Synaesthesia works on the basis of building up visuals to a soundtrack, allowing the viewer to create their own interpretation of sounds, taking into consideration the way they introduce a certain felling or mood. Music videos can illustrate the meaning of lyrics and genre, providing a sometimes over literal set of images. This makes this the most straightforward technique and the classic example of visualisation, with everything in the music video based on the source of the song. We looked at literal music videos on youtube to understand how having lyrics relating to exactly what is happening on the video can create quite a comic effect.


When introduced to synaesthesia, we listened to the song "Frozen" by Madonna and we had to write down images and colours that appeared in our mind when listening to the song alone and not watching the video. I wrote down:
-Blue
-Grey
-Dessert
-Ice
-Water
-Isolation

This was very similar to what other people had written down. We then watched the video:

The actual video is very similar to what people had written down, proving that the style of song can subconsciously put images into peoples minds when you listen to it.