Kyle Stedman

            This audio essay performs two key issues concerning the intersection of music and language: how background music affects rhetorical situations, and how the intertextual, remixed nature of music complicates different audiences’ interpretations of musical messages. Underlying both issues are the broad questions: “How does music speak? What kinds of things can it say? How is it rhetorically deployed, and how do audiences understand it?”

            To approach these questions, listeners experience an audio smorgasbord of samples from music and scholarship, inviting them to consider how background music, context, and remixes affect meaning. Beginning with examples and remixes of the ubiquitous main theme of Super Mario Bros., listeners are asked to consider the different ways that images and sounds “speak,” the importance of emotions when analyzing any kind of musical language, and the in particular the ways that sound is deployed in film. The silent film Metropolis and the early talkie Things to Come are used as sites for analysis. The connective tissue between these two films is the city—the question of how our  relationships with technology and seemingly inevitable urban future will affect the human spirit. Thus, the city represents a recurring motif in the audio essay, as a noisy space where individuals are separated by their iPods but connected through a single soundscape that serves as the urban “background music” to city-dwellers. This paradox of music as both personal and social carries into a discussion of the remix, a genre that reminds us that sounds are both personally associative—this sound means something to me because I associate it with something from my life—and collectively meaningful—this sound means something to a group to which I belong.

            What, then, does the messiness of musical communication mean for rhetoricians studying the composition and delivery of multimodal texts? How can we playfully employ the associative and layered illocutionary power of music, in both our composing and teaching?  Click on the Mp3 player imbedded here to begin the audio essay.  It will continue to play as you scroll down for a full transcript, a time-stamped list of clips and a works sampled list.

Transcript

You’re playing Super Mario Bros. on your old Nintendo Entertainment System. Everything is normal—you’ve played it a million times. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the music changes. You keep playing, but it feels different. You want to run a little faster, and maybe you can jump a pit that you weren’t able to before. But then it changes again, and it feels different again. What is it about background music that changes how we perceive our actions and how we emotionally engage?

Now the scene changes. You’re walking down a city street, and it’s noisy.

If we listen more closely to the ambient architecture of the streetscape we become sensitised to music and sounds that affect how we live. (Atkinson 3)

 

Images and reality are continuously responding to each other, at a frantic pace. (Lombardo 195)

You walk by a store, and you hear familiar sound coming from it. You walk closer, and it’s the familiar theme from Super Mario Bros.! You look up at the store name, but you don’t recognize it; it just seems to be some sort of clothing store. But you go in anyway, drawn by the ethos of the place. You read the store differently now, as a place that gets it, that understands the role of video games in your life and what they’ve always meant to you—at least, it sort of feels that way, but you don’t really put all that into words.

So what’s the point? Music affects how we live. It changes . . . wait wait wait, this isn’t right. [The background music changes.] That’s better. Music changes the emotions that accompany our day, our sense of adventure or expectation or pathos or hopefulness—or whatever. We engage with our surroundings in a different way depending on the sounds surrounding us. Think of an iPod user walking down the street listening to music: she’s separated from the rest of the world in a sense, but she’s also more connected to the sounds that are around her, hearing everything with a new level of meaning.

 

This is to say that when listening to music through mobile music reproduction devices whilst moving through cityspaces, we do not experience this music outside of, or in departure from, the experience of the city or its aural ecology. Mobile listeners are part of it. (Beer 862)

 

In a sense, then, music is a language. It speaks. And as such, it’s rhetorically deployed by people who have specific things they want to say with it. And I don’t just mean music with lyrics: instrumental music can speak too, just like music with lyrics can “speak”—but its messages are inherently different. Here’s Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder writing about instrumental music at the end of the 18th century:

 

What do they want, these timorous and doubting sophists, who ask to have hundreds and hundreds of musical works elucidated in words and yet who cannot acknowledge that not every one of these works has a nameable meaning like a painting? Do they strive to measure the richer language by means of the weaker and solve with words that which disdains words? Or have they never felt without words? Have they stuffed their hollow hearts with only descriptions of emotions? Have they never perceived in their souls the mute singing, the mummer's dance of unseen spirits? or do they not believe in fairy-tales? (Wackenroder, qtd. in Bonds 176)

 

So how does music speak? What kinds of things does it say?

To answer that question, let’s go back to the first Mario Brothers example—when the background music changed. This change is reminiscent of the sound design of movies, where the presence of music changes our experience of the visual message, whether we consciously notice it or not.

 

Indeed, theater designers have systematically followed Hollywood's tendency to dissimulate technology inside the theater (even though it is often touted on the marquee outside), so much so that most spectators have literally never even seen a cinema speaker (other than the surrounds). (Altman)

 

And basically, you know, writing music for film is about, help sustain a certain type of emotional response from the audience, in a particular scene. . . . [The background music changes as the following line is repeated.] A certain type of emotional response from the audience. . . . A certain type of emotional response from the audience. . . . A certain type of emotional response from the audience. (Owen)

 

That second quote was from an interview with film composer Ron Owen. It was recorded with a cheap digital recorder in a crowded Cuban deli while we ate sandwiches and plantains. What does the presence of background noise and the quality of the recording say about the message? Does that change if I draw attention to it?

In 1938, Rudolf Arnheim wrote about his preference for silent films over talkies, a claim that touches on our discussion of how sound affects the meaning a viewer makes of images:

 

In the universal silence of the image, the fragments of a broken vase could “talk” exactly the way a character talked to his neighbor, and a person approaching on a road and visible on the horizon as a mere dot “talked” as someone acting in close-up. This homogeneity, which is completely foreign to the theater but familiar to painting, is destroyed by the talking film: it endows the actor with speech, and since only he can have it, all other things are pushed into the background. (Arnheim 186)

 

Images, it seems, speak with a different sort of “volume” than a person does.

 

The value of [a] non-discursive text . . . is that it thrives and derives its meaning-making from the complexity and ambiguity of its medium. (Murray 5)

 

Different audiences are bound to have different levels of desire for the blatantly discursive and the ambiguously nondiscursive when receiving communication—I might rather not think about the music in my Mario game, thank you very much—rather than to have it drawn to my attention, where I’m forced to wonder what it’s doing there, what it’s supposed to mean.

Writing about Things to Come, H.G. Wells’s 1936 science fiction film, critic Elizabeth Bowen touched on these different kinds of messages in film:

 

The dialogue beside the impressive action sounds trivial and once or twice grotesque. Colloquially didactic, almost all sentimental, much of the talk is cackle and I wish he had cut it. . . . [I]n the best sequences sound and images fuse, heightening the rhythm. Some of the shots are beautiful; significant in the high poetic sense. The film might well be seen for these alone; they woo the imagination instead of bludgeoning it. (Bowen 44)

 

Passworthy: Oh God! Is there never to be an age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?

 

Cabal: Rest enough for the individual man. Too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for Man no rest and no ending. He must go on—conquest beyond conquest. (Things to Come)

 

Did you notice the music in that clip? It, like the music you’re hearing now, was composed by Arthur Bliss, who had an unusual amount of close collaboration with H.G. Wells during the production of Things to Come. The film was actually cut to time with the score, as opposed to the other way around. And that music is clearly trying to say something: it’s backing up the characters’ speech, but also amplifying it. In this scene, London is being bombed, and the music is heightening our sense of terror.

Now let’s think about the second Mario example, when you heard the theme playing from a storefront in the city. The intertextual nature of music means that people’s emotional reactions to music will vary based on their previous exposure to it—or in the case of a remix, their previous exposure to the pieces making it up.

Consider the original score of Metropolis, another early science fiction film showing urban cityscapes. It’s a silent film, released in 1927. Gottfried Huppertz composed the score, relying in part on the music of classical composers Wagner and Strauss; it was common practice then for films to be scored to a hodgepodge of pieces from the classical repertoire. You’re listening to part of score right now that relies on the Dies Irae, an early chant melody that is part of the Catholic Requiem, a mass for the dead. Here’s the chant version.

 

The question is: how is the experience of the scene changed when the listener knows the origins of this musical theme? Even trickier: how does the composer plan for these varying levels of recognition in an audience?

 

In the 21st century, remix artist Girl Talk uses so many clips from pop songs in varying genres that it’s hard not to recognize something, giving practically any audience that little thrill of recognition, the knowledge that this song has a personal meaning for me, which is affected by all the emotion-tinged memories I have with relation to that piece.

So how music is delivered to us matters—and how it blends with the other visual or contextual input we’re receiving at the same time matters—and how the music gels with what we’ve heard before matters. What does this mean for rhetoricians studying the composition and delivery of multimodal texts?

First, it means that musical messages are especially good at saying more than they seem to say, depending on when and where they’re deployed. In other words, music has both its inherent meaning for an audience and the meanings it creates when affecting everything around it. Music is like a virus of meaning. And that shifting meaning is worthy of playful experimentation.

Second, it means that music, perhaps better than other kinds of messages, is messy! Everything we hear reminds us of something else we’ve heard; it’s all made of layered bits and pieces that are mashed together in ways that speak to some audiences more than others. This is exciting, but it operates nondiscursively, outside the realm of logic. It reminds composers that while their music can speak, what it says is tied up with what others have said before them. Musical composers can’t control how people understand their music once it’s been played.

A final quote, then, to remind us that music and sound certainly say something, even if none of us can agree on what it says:

 

The ancient paradox of musical semantics is simply this: music seems full of meaning to ordinary and often extraordinary listeners, yet no community of listeners can agree among themselves with any precision that comes close to natural language about the nature of that meaning. (Swain 45)

This recording was written, produced, and performed by Kyle Stedman. You also heard the voices of Joel Christie, Jamey Ray, Amy Selikoff, Nathan Selikoff, Margo Stedman, and Nneka Wicks.

 

Music and Sound Clips (Time Stamped to MP3 of Audio Essay)

(0:00) Kondo, Koji. “Overworld Theme.” Super Mario Bros. Nintendo, 1985. SuperMarioBrothers.org. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://www.supermariobrothers.org/mario-music.html>.

(0:10) A Scholar & A Physician, Binster, and richBRF. “Dirty Mix.” OverClocked ReMix. OverClocked ReMix, 22 June 2002. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00683/>.

(0:22) Mehawich, M.S. “TheItalianPlumber.” OverClocked ReMix. OverClocked ReMix, 7 Jan. 2001. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00493/>.

(0:34) sagetyrtle. “Citystreet3.wav.” The Freesound Project. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 27 June 2007. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.

(0:44) nixphoeni. “Record_scratch.wav.” The Freesound Project. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 3 Mar. 2006. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.

(0:45) Bach, J.S. “English Suite No. 4 in F Major, BWV 809: Prelude.” Perf. Bob Van Asperen. Bach Edition: English Suites BWV 806-808. Brilliant Classics, 2006. MP3 file.

(1:00) junggle. “Scratch23.wav.” The Freesound Project. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 28 Jan. 2007. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.

(1:07) djpretzel. “Jazz Plumber Trio.” OverClocked ReMix. OverClocked ReMix, 12 May 2000. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00055/>.

(1:35) Huppertz, Gottfried. “The Club of the Sons.” Metropolis: Complete Motion Picture Score. Digital Meltd0wn, Sept. 2010. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://digitalmeltd0wn.blogspot.com/2010/09/gottfried-huppertz-metropolis-complete.html>.

(1:40) Halleck. “Record_scratch_short.wav.” The Freesound Project. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 26 Jan. 2007. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.

(1:41) Huppertz, Gottfried. “The Metropolis Theme.” Metropolis: Complete Motion Picture Score. Digital Meltd0wn, Sept. 2010. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://digitalmeltd0wn.blogspot.com/2010/09/gottfried-huppertz-metropolis-complete.html>.

(2:10) Moby. “Shot in the Back of the Head.” Wait for Me. Mute, 2009. MP3 file.

(2:52) Haydn, Joseph. “Quartet op. 64 No. 4 in G Major: Allegro con brio.” Perf. Caspar da Salo Quartett. String Quartets op. 64 No. 4-6. Pilz, 1990. MP3 file.

(3:28) McVaffe. “Dancehall Ragga.” OverClocked ReMix. OverClocked ReMix, 28 Sept. 2000. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00126/>.

(3:45) dland. “To Hell With Vinyl.wav.” The Freesound Project. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 15 June 2009. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.

(3:46) Holiday, Billie. “Foolin’ Myself.” The Complete Billie Holiday. X5 Music Group, 2009. MP3 file.

(4:22) Giacchino, Michael. “Monsters are Such Innnteresting People.” Lost Season 1: Original Television Soundtrack. Varèse Sarabande, 2006. MP3 file.

(4:25) Marianelli, Dario. “The Living Sculptures of Pemberley.” Pride & Prejudice: Music from the Original Motion Picture. Decca, 2005. MP3 file.

(4:28) Björk. “Ambergris March.” Drawing Restraint 9: Original Soundtrack. One Little Indian, 2005. MP3 file.

(4:50) Uematsu, Nobuo. “Spinach Rag.” Arranged Shirou Satou. Perf. Reiko Nomura. Final Fantasy VI Piano Collections. NTT Publishing, 2001. MP3 file.

(5:10) themfish. “Old_vinyl_record.wav.” The Freesound Project. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 30 Dec. 2007. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.

(5:46) Aphex Twin. “Tha.” Selected Ambient Works 85-92. Play it Again Sam, 1993. MP3 file.

(6:19) Debussy, Claude. “String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10: II. Assez vif et bien rythme.” Perf. Brooklyn Rider. Dominant Curve. In a Circle Records, 2010. MP3 file.

(7:14) Bliss, Arthur, composer. Things to Come. YouTube. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqGE21KqQO0>.

(7:49) Huppertz, Gottfried. “Freder in the Cathedral.” Metropolis: Complete Motion Picture Score. Digital Meltd0wn, Sept. 2010. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://digitalmeltd0wn.blogspot.com/2010/09/gottfried-huppertz-metropolis-complete.html>.

(8:46) Aurora Surgit, perf. “Dies Irae (Sequentia).” Ego sum Resurrectio: Gregorian Chant for the Dead. Naxos, 1996. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlr90NLDp-0&>.

(9:11) Girl Talk. “Here’s the Thing.” Feed the Animals. Illegal Art, 2008. MP3 file.

(10:03) Menkin, Alan. “To Be Free.” Aladdin: Original Soundtrack. Disney, 1992. MP3 file.

(10:24) Ostroushko, Peter. “Heart of the Heartland (Lewis’ Theme).” Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discover: Original Soundtrack. Sony, 2003. MP3 file.

(10:55) Heath, Tyler, and Zircon. “WhenAllHopeHasFaded.” OverClocked ReMix. OverClocked ReMix, 22 Oct. 2004. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01258/>.

 

Works Sampled

A Scholar & A Physician, Binster, and richBRF. “Dirty Mix.” OverClocked ReMix. OverClocked ReMix, 22 June 2002. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00683/>.

Altman, Rick. “The Sound of Sound.” Cineaste 21.1/2 (1995): 68-72. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.

Aphex Twin. “Tha.” Selected Ambient Works 85-92. Play it Again Sam, 1993. MP3 file.

Arnheim, Rudolf. “A New Laocoön: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film.” 1938. Film as Art. London: Faber and Faber, 1958. 164-189. Print.

Atkinson, Rowland. The Aural Ecology of the City: Sound, Noise, and Exclusion in the City. Occasional Paper for the Housing and Community Research Unit. University of Tasmania, 2006. Web. 3 Jan. 2011.

Aurora Surgit, perf. “Dies Irae (Sequentia).” Ego sum Resurrectio: Gregorian Chant for the Dead. Naxos, 1996. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlr90NLDp-0&>.

Bach, J.S. “English Suite No. 4 in F Major, BWV 809: Prelude.” Perf. Bob Van Asperen. Bach Edition: English Suites BWV 806-808. Brilliant Classics, 2006. MP3 file.

Beer, David. “Tune Out: Music, Soundscapes and the Urban Mise-en-Scène.” Information, Communication & Society 10.6 (2007): 846-66. Print.

Björk. “Ambergris March.” Drawing Restraint 9: Original Soundtrack. One Little Indian, 2005. MP3 file.

Bliss, Arthur, composer. Things to Come. YouTube. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqGE21KqQO0>.

Bonds, Mark Evan. Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. Print.

Bowen, Elizabeth. “Things to Come: A Critical Appreciation.” Rev. of Things to Come, by H. G. Wells. Sight and Sound 5.17 (1936): 10-12. Rpt. in Focus on the Science Fiction Film.  Ed. William Johnson. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972. 43-45. Print.

Debussy, Claude. “String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10: II. Assez vif et bien rythme.” Perf. Brooklyn Rider. Dominant Curve. In a Circle Records, 2010. MP3 file.

djpretzel. “Jazz Plumber Trio.” OverClocked ReMix. OverClocked ReMix, 12 May 2000. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00055/>.

dland. “To Hell With Vinyl.wav.” The Freesound Project. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 15 June 2009. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.

Giacchino, Michael. “Monsters are Such Innnteresting People.” Lost Season 1: Original Television Soundtrack. Varèse Sarabande, 2006. MP3 file.

Girl Talk. “Here’s the Thing.” Feed the Animals. Illegal Art, 2008. MP3 file.

Halleck. “Record_scratch_short.wav.” The Freesound Project. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 26 Jan. 2007. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.

Haydn, Joseph. “Quartet op. 64 No. 4 in G Major: Allegro con brio.” Perf. Caspar da Salo Quartett. String Quartets op. 64 No. 4-6. Pilz, 1990. MP3 file.

Heath, Tyler, and Zircon. “WhenAllHopeHasFaded.” OverClocked ReMix. OverClocked ReMix, 22 Oct. 2004. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01258/>.

Holiday, Billie. “Foolin’ Myself.” The Complete Billie Holiday. X5 Music Group, 2009. MP3 file.

Huppertz, Gottfried. “The Club of the Sons.” Metropolis: Complete Motion Picture Score. Digital Meltd0wn, Sept. 2010. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://digitalmeltd0wn.blogspot.com/2010/09/gottfried-huppertz-metropolis-complete.html>.

---. “Freder in the Cathedral.” Metropolis: Complete Motion Picture Score. Digital Meltd0wn, Sept. 2010. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://digitalmeltd0wn.blogspot.com/2010/09/gottfried-huppertz-metropolis-complete.html>.

---. “The Metropolis Theme.” Metropolis: Complete Motion Picture Score. Digital Meltd0wn, Sept. 2010. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://digitalmeltd0wn.blogspot.com/2010/09/gottfried-huppertz-metropolis-complete.html>.

junggle. “Scratch23.wav.” The Freesound Project. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 28 Jan. 2007. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.

Kondo, Koji. “Overworld Theme.” Super Mario Bros. Nintendo, 1985. SuperMarioBrothers.org. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://www.supermariobrothers.org/mario-music.html>.

Lombardo, Patrizia. Cities, Words and Images: From Poe to Scorsese. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print.

Marianelli, Dario. “The Living Sculptures of Pemberley.” Pride & Prejudice: Music from the Original Motion Picture. Decca, 2005. MP3 file.

McVaffe. “Dancehall Ragga.” OverClocked ReMix. OverClocked ReMix, 28 Sept. 2000. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00126/>.

Mehawich, M.S. “TheItalianPlumber.” OverClocked ReMix. OverClocked ReMix, 7 Jan. 2001. Web. 6 Jan. 2011. <http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00493/>.

Menkin, Alan. “To Be Free.” Aladdin: Original Soundtrack. Disney, 1992. MP3 file.

Moby. “Shot in the Back of the Head.” Wait for Me. Mute, 2009. MP3 file.

Murray, Joddy. Non-discursive Rhetoric: Image and Affect in Multimodal Composition. Albany: SUNY, 2009. Print.

nixphoeni. “Record_scratch.wav.” The Freesound Project. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 3 Mar. 2006. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.

Ostroushko, Peter. “Heart of the Heartland (Lewis’ Theme).” Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discover: Original Soundtrack. Sony, 2003. MP3 file.

Owen, Ron. Personal Interview. 8 Nov. 2010.

sagetyrtle. “Citystreet3.wav.” The Freesound Project. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 27 June 2007. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.

Swain, Joseph P. Musical Languages. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Print.

themfish. “Old_vinyl_record.wav.” The Freesound Project. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 30 Dec. 2007. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.

Things to Come. Dir. William Cameron Menzies. Screenplay by H.G. Wells. London Film Productions, 1936. YouTube. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.

Uematsu, Nobuo. “Spinach Rag.” Arranged Shirou Satou. Perf. Reiko Nomura. Final Fantasy VI Piano Collections. NTT Publishing, 2001. MP3 file.