Many popular songs are designated as “the soundtrack to people’s lives.” Songs evoke a certain age or period in your life, from “Baby Beluga” to “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” to “Uptown Funk.” When you hear a certain song, memories play across the movie screen of your mind and the song is the soundtrack - the music takes you back to those moments. Sometimes you can even catch the scent of the air and its temperature.
I wonder how this worked before film was created? In the 19th century, did memories flash like a movie across the mind’s eye when a childhood lullaby was heard? Was film invented to capture memories like this?
Paintings were historical records in the old days - renaissance portraits captured both the features and spirit of its subject (if the painting was good). Then, as society progressed and people had more wealth and leisure time, landscapes became more common. Then expressionism, modernism, post-modernism, etc. pushed creative boundaries further, moving images beyond historical documentation (since photography began to fill that role). Each artistic style built on the foundations that existing work had already laid.
Photography was a more democratic way to capture what portrait paintings had always done - it was cheaper, and increasingly more accessible. When photographers started pointing their lenses at things other than posed subjects, they were capturing moments rather than subjects, which could be shared for posterity. These images too became part of the fabric of people’s lives, separate from their own reality, and photography stretched technical and creative limits to express even broader ideas.
When “moving pictures” finally arrived, they were entertainment at first, but entertainment is still significant in the arc of an individual’s life. The potential of still and motion photography evolved into documentary, historical, journalistic, and artistic use. Moments were not just captured, but increasingly created and shared. The individual taste of the person behind the camera could be presented for the consideration of others, threading its way into their lives and experiences too. Individual taste, I would argue, is the core of artistry, and at its peak, there are few artistic mediums that are as compelling as the tasteful framing of human moments through a camera lens.
Of course, music accompanied moving pictures before even speech entered the picture - the earliest cinemas at least had piano players, and the larger theatres even had pipe organs. Even in these earlier moving-picture moments, music established tones and moods - the soundtrack of the moment.
The “soundtrack of your life” is always evolving. Songs appear, and reappear in a present context as a gauzy memory, a song on the radio, or a melody hummed by a stranger. Memories, images, human touches, dreams - they all come rushing in again when that tune enters your brain. Music draws out emotions that make the memories even stronger, and more real. The power of music to set tones and context is somehow fundamental to human experience. Music, like a movie or a memory, is time-based - songs have a beginning, an end, and an internal rhythm that can map themselves to sequential moments. Songs tie everything together.
The lesson for filmmakers is to be careful with song selection. Music matters. It can be an essential storytelling tool. And at its worst, it can be horribly distracting. For advertisers, things can get even dicier. It’s tempting to appropriate a person’s pleasant musical memories for the product’s benefit, but then you get a woman cleaning her house to a bastardized version of a beloved Devo song, and nobody wins.
There are thousands of examples of bad stock music that ruin an otherwise straightforward business video - bad drum machines and 80s synthesizers may have been appropriate in 1983, but dropping those sounds today will murder any sense of modernity and relevance for a brand that is trying to exist in the present.
While we’re on the topic of synthesis, one of my favourite words is synesthesia. This refers to the stimulation of one cognitive pathway that leads to automatic, involuntary experience in a second cognitive pathway (thanks Wikipedia!). If I say “Let it Be,” you can see certain colours. If I say “Let’s Get it On,” you may feel physical warmth. If I hum a jingle for a cleaning spray, you may recall the scent of the product. If I say “Enter Sandman,” your shoulders may set in a little more tightly. If I say “bagpipes,” you’ll anticipate a certain set of expectations - maybe nostalgia, maybe rage. Even before recording technology existed, a mother’s lullaby would stick with people forever, and elderly sailors will hum “Nearer My God to Thee” in their fading years, and won’t even question why. These “soundtracks to your life” are like colour palettes or words on a page, and they are fundamental to being human, Music sparks all sorts of emotional and physical responses that have nothing to do with hearing.
Music is not throwaway - for filmmakers and advertisers, it demands as much attention as your script, your setting, and your on-screen talent. For music-makers, your key job is to be emotionally engaging and as truthful as possible. Your work doesn’t always have to be “high art,” but it’s at its best when it connects on a personal level as the soundtrack to someone else’s experience. There’s a lot going on in people’s brains, and the soundtrack is the foundation for the moment, marking the time.
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