There was an interesting article in the New York Times a few days ago called Music of the Hemispheres. It's about Daniel Levitin, a researcher who is working on understanding how music triggers our emotions.
Apparently, while scientists in the past have looked at how the brain processes music, they've looked at music narrowly as a collection of sounds. Surprisingly little research has been done as to how and why music can create powerful emotional responses and create deep memories. That is Levitin's focus - before getting his PhD, he was a musician and a record producer, so he comes at the subject both as a music lover and as a scientist.
I think his work is really important for us. We've been thinking a lot here about music recently, and we're actually organizing a conference later this year about the role of music in communication. If successful communications is increasingly about creating powerful emotional responses, we all need to understand better how things like music can contribute to that. And maybe while we're at it, we should stop bastardizing well-loved song lyrics. In music, like in everything else in marketing, we tend
to think too narrowly and only from a marketer's point of view: we use music to capture attention or get a
message across, without thinking about whether we've made something that anyone would actually choose to spend time with; without asking whether we've created something of value for the viewer, or just for ourselves.
But when music is done right it can be magical. Here are two of my favourite examples, both from video game ads. I love that this Playstation ad uses a 120-year old piece of music, Fauré's Requiem:
And I get chills from this recent Xbox Gears of War ad using the Gary Jules cover of Mad World (found via Lee):
The music takes each of those ads to a completely different place. It's what makes them work, makes them different, and makes them worth watching. And I'd like understand that process better.
As a side note, the Times article was written by Clive Thompson, who is quickly becoming one of my favourite writers. He writes on science, technology, and culture for the Times, Wired, Fast Company, and Discover in a Malcolm Gladwell/Steven Johnson kind of style. I recently realized that 4 different things I was reading or had put aside to go back to were all written by him. His blog is good too.
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