In order to create an academic foundation for our radiodocumentary, Patricia and I read several books and took notes to base our research on. Below you can read which parts of this literature we found interesting and useful for our documentary.
1) Kevin Williams, Why I [still] Want My MTV
Some Claims Made About MTV
• Since its introduction, MTV has been the subject of many debates. Critics, journalists, and researchers have characterised music video as a revolutionary new form of television, as an antidemocratic form of discourse, and as mindless trash. Music Television has been condoned and condemned, praised and despised, accepted and dismissed.
• Regardless of whether MTV is an entirely new kind of television, or a truly new way of processing information, it has in any case forced us to reconsider television, its codes, logics, and limits as well as those of popular music. Indeed, the ways that popular music and television are seen, made, and consumed have been transformed with the arrival of MTV.
• It has been considered that, through its visual presentation, the meaning of the video is advertised and sold to the viewer. -> Videos offer the meaning of a song as a commodity. Thus, music video produces the meaning for the viewer; this process is seen as diametrically opposed to the imaginative and personal meaning(s) that is created when listening to music.
The Television Set And Stereo System
• Pittman (Ontwikkelaar MTV): “We are now seeing the TV become a component of the stereo system. It is ridiculous to think that you have two forms of entertainment- your stereo and your TV- which have nothing to do with one another. MTV is the first attempt to make TV a new form, other than video games and data channels. We’re talking about creating a new form using existing technologies.”
• This technological integration and reassembledge of the television and stereo system did foster a new way of considering home entertainment.
• “Today, when I casually and unscientifically poll my students, roughly more than 80% percent listen to music television in high fidelity stereo.
Radio and Television
• MTV, until the station began regularly showing programs such as The Monkees and Saturday Night Live, is both radio and television, and, at the same time, neither radio nor television. (...) Music Television was televised video in a radio format.
• MTV (...) was initially, and to some extent still remains, structured less like television and more like radio.
• Radio networks format rather than program broadcast time. A format is a structuring of announcers, music, and commercials around a common thematic or genre such as music styles, sports, or news. MTV, by featuring VJs who announce songs and by playing an organised and limited selection of musical styles, has taken radio formatting and made it the basis of its television programming.
• Early Music Television’s format, as conceived by Pittman, took advantage of television viewers who would watch without a preplanned agenda. These viewers would gaze or surf the channels or flip between programs, advertisements, and promotional announcements. Pittman designed MTV to take advantage of channels surfers, to accentuate television’s perceptual flow of sights and sounds, and to develop a channel that could be tuned into at any time, especially in-between the programs shown on other networks. In this way, MTV’s presentation was a pastische of pop music radio stations.
• Radio formats are designed to attract and maintain audiences who are often, even most probably, engaged in tasks other than attentive listening; the structuring of music, news, and talk is designed for an audience whose attention is dispersed. Listening to the radio often takes place in the house, car, office, and gym, and while eating, working, and exercising. Although one can do the same with television, radio is particularly well suited of this type of inattentive attention because it relies on the ear more than the eye.
• Radio, and perhaps popular music in general, is consciously designed to be heard (background) as well as listened (foreground). It is less clear that television is programmed this way. After all, advertisers want you to ‘see’ their commercials: This is the situation in spite of the fact that we know that people often use television as background. Indeed, we often ‘watch’ television while engaged in other tasks. Of course, one could argue that this is not ‘watching’, but this would be more a semantic argument than a description of experience. The activity of watching television is a participatory engagement, but it is not necessarily a focused experience. We do not have to look at television to ‘watch’ it.
• And yet, while television, like radio, is a medium that can be inattentively attended to, it is very often the sound, as opposed to the sight, that brings our visual attention back to the screen. We hear something interesting and turn to see what is happening. Sound, which is too often disregarded in television studies, is better suited than sight to communicate to a dispersed audience because sound is experienced in ebbs and flows that allow for inattentive attention.
• a channel of television with no beginning, middle, or end; one in which time was seemingly unenacted, not even nonexistant, as one video flowed into the next and into the next and so on a continuous streaming of sounds and images.
Music and television
• MTV assembled its style more on the logic of radio formatting than on television programming. The radio format is an electronic form; it is a continuous streaming of information.
• We had a choice, Pittman said, we could either take music and try to make it fit the form of TV, the format of TV, or we could reinvent the form of TV to make it match the music- which is what we did. By integrating music and television, MTV did indeed create a new form of television, a form born of the synergistic assemblage of radio and TV. It is both television and radio, and, at the same time, it is neither radio nor television; it must be understood in its own right.
Music and Visuals
• The relationships between music and visuals, sight and sound in music videos have been the focus of some attention.
• Music videos present an interesting case as they promise to dismantle any presupposed hierarchy of vision over sound because the song may be considered as the foundation of the visual presentation.
The Audial Depth Of The Visual Scene
• As the sheer impact and magnitude of visual imagery, styles, and attitudes are revealed, the sound and aural imagery appear as phenomena that demand to be described for their own sake. As I review the writings on Music Television and music video I am stuck again and again by the lack of attention paid to the music. Moreover, when the music of music videos is considered, I am struck by the lack of attention paid to the sound of the music. The music’s presence is often ignored for what it represents; it is considered categorically (as rap, alternative, etc.) and economically (as related to its modes of production and consumption). Television sound in general is often considered uninteresting, as it is commonly heard through a tiny speaker and considered to merely illustrate the visual perception.
• Music and sound create the mood of the visual scene, the depth of visual perception. Sound enhances otherwise mundane sights. Indeed, Ellis and Altman have argued that television’s sound actually dominates the visual presentation by announcing the visually interesting. Furthermore, the sound of MTV appears to be its defining phenomenon, as the visuals resonate with its intensity, rhythm, dynamics, and tone. Thus, the sound and music of the music video may be considered as foreground as well as background.
2) Jody Berland, Sound and Vision- The Music Video Reader. Sound, Image and Social Space: Music Video and Media Reconstruction
• In watching a video, the visual plane tends to dominate our attention right away, simply by arresting our eyes, by being (on) television. Television seems to absorb the musical matrix effortlessly and irrevocably into its visual field, to confirm the now commonplace knowledge that music television has reshaped the music industry irrevocably.
• Music video draws our attention simultaneously to the song and away from it, positing itself in the place of what it represents.
• Music video has swept the music world, stamping musical discourse with an endlessly varied/endlessly repeating choreography of sociable paranoia and resolute self-enactment. The Song is seen. The image is irresistible.
3) Susan J. Douglas, Listening in
Introduction
• people who grew up with radio still pine for the old radio days, for their intimate relationship with the box in their living room or bedroom, for a culture without television. They miss the simplicity of those times, the directness of the medium itself. But what they miss the most is the ornamentation of the radio broadcast by means of their vivid imagination. These people miss their role in completing the picture, in giving individual meaning to something that went out to a mass audience. They miss the mental activity, the engagement, the do-it-yourself nature of radio listening, the radio’s invisibility.
• Listening to the radio has become such an embedded taken for granted feature of everyday life.
• Even today, in the age of TV and internet, people have learned to turn to the radio to alter or sustain particular emotional states, to elevate their mood, to soothe themselves.
• Even as mere background noise, radio provides people with a sense of security that silence does not, which is why they actively turn to it, even if they are not actively listening.
• nowadays it is assumed that an event is more complete when the listening aspect goes along with images. We now constantly see the same types and scenes over and over. The room our own imaginings is given, shrinks. Own imaginings become irrelevant
The Zen of Listening
• Most of us know that feeling, driving alone on a road, traveling to your place of destination or doing your homework by listening to the radio. It is the voice and the music of the radio that provides the anti-solitary feeling, distraction or concentration we need. We cling to it to stay afloat, sometimes letting our thoughts drift off, sometimes belting out some song at the top of our lungs. Relief and pleasure comes from not having to work at making a conversation, from not being obliged to talk back and even from not having to pay complete attention. We are taking g out of ourselves through radio, yet paradoxically hurled into our innermost thoughts. We feel that radio is an affirmation of the self and a loss of the self. Is music television able to do the same? Is music television the new radio? Or did music television change the concept and cultural practice of listening to music?
• There is something very primal about hearing itself, about listening, that makes the radio as a medium so prone to being wrapped up in the gauze of nostalgia. Radio stimulates the imagination.
• Reasons why people are so nostalgic for radio. People love radio because, as cognitive psychologists have shown, humans find it useful and pleasurable to use their brains to create their own images. Studies have shown that people tend to remember word sequences they have generated themselves much better than those that have been spoon-fed to them, because such ‘active engagement’ proves memory.
• Obviously, people’s visual imaging is richest when they aren’t being bombarded by interference from externally produced images.
• People draw more imaginative pictures when they hear a story on the radio. Imaginativeness is a skill that radio enhances
• How radio taught us to listen. Think of the different listening modes we might inhabit in one day alone, and how we often actively seek out those modes, with the pleasurable anticipation of the way they will make us feel and where they might takes us, cognitively and emotionally.
• How watching television, or going online, might be different from listening to the radio.
• Distinguishing between hearing and listening. We can passively hear, but we must actively listen. While much radio listening involves conscious attention to the program at hand, listeners can also shift cognitive gears and zone out into a more automatic, effortless mode.
• Passive hearing, which is a kind of automatic processing, rarely becomes intertwined with what the ‘I’ is thinking or doing: active listening almost always does. And with radio listening we are still making a choice to enter a particularly auditory realm. In fact, one of the pleasures of radio may come from the ability to move between such dramatically different states of awareness.
• The listening process is not the same for all of us.
• The magic in the act of listening comes from entering a world of sound and from using that sound to make your own vision, your own dream, your own world
• It is the absence of imagery that forms is a crucial part of the listening experience before the arrival of music television. It is the absence of imagery that is radio’s greatest strength, that allows people to bind themselves so powerfully to this device
• When sound is our only source of information, our imaginations milk it for all it’s worth, creating detailed tableaux that images preempt. No wonder that listening remains a primal experience fusing pleasure, activity and desire
• creating own mental images of how things look is as much more pleasurable and powerful cognitive activity.
• Radio carried people back into a mode of communication reliant on storytelling, listening and group memory.
• listening, without being able to see what or who goes with the sound, takes us back to a way of being in the world.
• the radio as a medium is less demanding when you are listening to music. You can do something else while listening, you don’t have to watch and you don’t have to concentrate, depending on what is on. Radio adjusts much more to physical circumstances (cooking, driving etc.) than any of the other media. We can continue with our lives while listening. This means that radio listening becomes interwoven with the ritualized routines of everyday life.
• different listening styles and emotional responses depending on the programming and site of listening. Radio cultivated two broad categories of listening: linguistic and musical. Listening ranges from highly concentrated and serious to barely attentive as when radio provided beautiful background music.
• 3 major ways that listening to the radio activates: 1) relatively flat kind of listening (we are taking in names, dates, concepts, but are not asked to imagine much) 2) dimensional listening (we create 3-dimensional locales // this listening is work: you have to keep track of people and locations, but it is also gratifying because it is your own invention) 3) concentrated music listening (is dimensional as well // you enter the layers of music, which is dynamic, has patterns of harmonies and sequences, backgrounds and foregrounds that one can be moved between // memorizing lyrics and focusing on instrumentation)
• radio fore grounded certain modes of listening
• everywhere there are more and more pictures to help one re-imagine the world and one’s place in it. Seeing was regarded as the most important sense, the visual privileged over everything else. Seeing more, seeing farter, seeing better: this is what so much of the new technology of music television strives for.
4) Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory
A Musicology of the Image• music television images the music
• Synaesthesia, the intrapersonal process whereby sensory impressions are carried over from one sense to another, is the concept which is the key for understanding music television, since video clips build on the sound track’s visual associations.
• Though that music television dissolves the problem of the lack of music’s visual component is not true, because listeners of all times were able to construct and see images based on their own imagination
• music television can express the mood of the music
• the music videos on music TV provide visual experiences equivalent to musical ones
• Music videos present the rhythm of the song through the technique of cutting on the beat. Rhythm is emphasized by gestures and movement. Music videos employ imagery that mirrors the shift in melody within the given song. Lyrics of song may be illustrates by dance > there are a variety of techniques that demonstrate a close connection between visuals and musical elements in the video text, or the way how visuals support the music.
• the pleasures of listening are heightened through the submission of vision to the music.
• A good video clip is a clip that responds to the pleasures of music and in which that music is made visual, either in new ways or in ways that accentuate existing visual associations.
A Televisual Context
• “we are now seeing that TV becomes a component of the stereo system. It is ridiculous to think that you have two forms of entertainment –your stereo and TV- which have nothing to do with one another. What we are doing is marrying those two forms so that they work together in unison” > Robert Pittman, vice president of programming MTV.
• MTV is a form of visual radio, using the format of continuous flow associated with all music radio stations. “ In MTV, videos are analogously linked to the unfolding or programming; their beginnings often remain imprecise and they frequently do not quite end. As dj’s cross-fade music with similar beats to make a sound transition as nearly seamless as possible, so broadcasters use visual and sound techniques to bridge the end of one video into the start of the next”, Blaine Allan.
• VJ’s present the sound advance in which talk is used to redirect the viewer’s attention toward the screen by previewing the image that are about to be screened – a vital function for a televisual form that is especially open to distracted, sporadic viewing.
• “music TV is technically one of the most innovative and adventurous visual forms available on television. Yet is is also the one that permits you not to watch, but to listen continuously until you hear what you want to watch”, Blaine Allan.
5) Micheal Bull, Sounding Out the City
• the role technology (music television) plays in the auditory experience.
• technologies of sound affect our relation to the spaces we inhabit.
• Both radio and music television may give an added physical presence to a subject’s sense of interiority often achieved through physicality of the music and displacing sounds with the movements and activity of the everyday
• Used to block out thoughts, to go with the flow, as a background, a way of not being interrupted, way of dealing with mundane and repetitive conditions of everyday.
• place, time and management of daily experience are mediated through radio and music television
• auditory looking > users of radio refer to their own experiences as being cinematic of nature. Music alters perspective on things
6) Tia de Nora, Music as a Technology of the Self
• How music is used by individuals in their daily lives: memory, spiritual matters, sensorial matters, mood change, mood enhancement and activities.
• Ways in which music is appropriated by individuals as a resource for the ongoing constitution of themselves and their social psychological, physiological and emotional states.
• music is an active ingredient in the organization of self, the shifting of mood, energy level, conduct style, mode of attention and engagement with the world
• music as an active ingredient in the care of the self. Music is a device or resource to which people turn in order to regulate themselves as aesthetic agents, as feeling, thinking and acting beings in their daily lives.
7) Carole Fleming, The Radio Handbook
Radio Style
• Radio output is not just a random selection of programmes or segments but a carefully considered blend of audio designed with a particular audience in mind in a way that will meet the audience’s basic requirements fro information and entertainment without switching off. To achieve this radio stations attempt to match the pace, style and content of their radio programmes to the daily routines of their listeners.
8) Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past
Introduction
• People design and use technologies to enhance or promote certain activities and discourage others. Technologies are associated with habits, sometimes crystallizing them and sometimes enabling them. They embody in physical form particular dispositions and tendencies.
• To study technologies such as radio and music television in any meaningful sense requires a rich sense of their connection with human practice, habitat and habit. It requires attention to the fields of combined cultural, social and physical activity from which technologies emerge and of which they are part.
