The evolution of music video

Throughout my dissertation and my project I will be looking at the evolution of the music video as a medium; where it came from; the conditions around which it emerged; and also what the future possibly holds for it. I will be looking at music video from a holistic perspective. I have produced this dissertation from an array of sources including; texts, journals, web sites, videos and general knowledge to challenge media theories and ecologies with an overview of music video history. Multimedia Design BA James Lashmar 2012

Contents
01. 02. Introduction ..............................................................................................................................3 The Emergence of the Music Video ......................................................................................3

Unity ....................................................................................................................................................... 3 Sound Film ............................................................................................................................................. 3 Soundies and Scopitones .................................................................................................................... 4 Diversity in Unity..................................................................................................................................... 5 ................................................................................................................................................................ 5 Elvis ......................................................................................................................................................... 5 The Ed Sullivan Show ......................................................................................................................... 5 Satellite Broadcasting ....................................................................................................................... 6 03. MTV ...........................................................................................................................................6

The Birth of MTV ..................................................................................................................................... 6 The Death of Music Video on MTV...................................................................................................... 7 04. The music video, a hot or cold medium? .............................................................................8

The myopic view ................................................................................................................................... 8 A new perspective ............................................................................................................................... 8 Hot or cold? .......................................................................................................................................... 9 05. Dissemination of the Music Video ........................................................................................10

Media hara-kiri .................................................................................................................................... 10 The web ............................................................................................................................................... 10 Mobile .................................................................................................................................................. 10 Crowdsourcing ................................................................................................................................... 11 06. Media Ecologies, Holism & Dubstep ....................................................................................11

Media Ecology.................................................................................................................................... 11 Pirate Radio & Dubstep ..................................................................................................................... 12 07. Conclusion..............................................................................................................................12

Reference List ....................................................................................................................................14 Figures .................................................................................................................................................15 Figure 2-1.......................................................................................................................................... 15 Figure 2-2.......................................................................................................................................... 15 Figure 2-3.......................................................................................................................................... 15 Figure 2-4.......................................................................................................................................... 15 Figure 5-1.......................................................................................................................................... 15 Figure 5-2.......................................................................................................................................... 15 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................................16

The evolution of music video

James Lashmar

The evolution of music video

James Lashmar

The evolution of music video

01. Introduction
Throughout my dissertation and my project I will be looking at the evolution of the music video as a medium; where it came from; the conditions around which it emerged; and also what the future possibly holds for it. I will be looking at music video from a holistic perspective. Holism according to the Oxford Dictionary is the theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole, or cannot be understood without reference to the whole, which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts. Holism is often applied to mental states, language, and ecology (Oxford Dictionaries n.d.). I find holism fascinating and regarding my dissertation, I see two exemplar instances of holism, the internet and nature; these are not too dissimilar either. We can study the mind in computational terms. More lately, some artificial intelligence (AI) has overtly adopted the language of unity, maintaining that intelligent behaviour emerges from the complex interaction of many simple subsystems, taking to heart the adage of systems theory that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts (Coyne 1999). Later I will be looking at the future of the evolution of the music video; this is where the internet and the web become distinctly important.

02. The Emergence of the Music Video

Unity
Music, design and technology are for most, a big part of modern life in some way or another. Despite technology becoming ever more seamless, connected and integrated in to our lives, sometimes it can divide us. As people spend more of their life online, some of us appear to become somehow disconnected with each other. This is the medias effect on our perception of reality and the world. In the media-laden world we experience something called "the death of the real"; we live our lives in the realm of hyperreality, connecting more and more deeply to things like television sitcoms, music videos, virtual reality games, or Disneyland; things that merely simulate reality (Baudrillard, 1994). As McLuhan identified the era of preliterate culture as a golden age (McLuhan, 1962, cited in Coyne, 1999, p.2) in which humankind was one with itself and with nature. Speaking and listening in the absence of writing involved highly interactive exchanges that come close to directly sharing thoughts. Aural culture was tribal, engaged, practical and unitary. Then followed the age of literacy. When we write, we lay things out in order and divide the world (Coyne 1999). Holisms fundamental is about unity and the whole and that is why unity is so important within culture, music and communication.

Sound Film
Music and theatre has been integrated into civilisation for centuries. However, the combination of music and visuals on film, and now digitally, is relatively new. Something
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Figure 2-1 3 Frames from the Dickenson Sound Film.

James Lashmar

however, is the Dickson Experimental Sound Film created in 1894 (see Figure 2-1). This involved William K.L. Dickson standing next to a sound horn that was connected to a phonograph recorder made by Thomas Edison, whilst playing the violin. There were also two men dancing in the foreground. This sound film was made to showcase another of Edisons machines, the Kinetophone. The latter technology never caught on and the sound film was never publicly available. Also, until 2002 the sound had been lost. Walter Murch repaired the audio and resynced it (IMDB n.d.). It wasnt until 1913 that Edison had revised his Kinetophone which he then released to the public. According to the Library of Congress (n.d.), This time, the sound was made to synchronize with a motion picture projected onto a screen. A celluloid cylinder record measuring 5 1/2" in diameter was used for the phonograph. Synchronization was achieved by connecting the projector at one end of the theater and the phonograph at the other end with a long pulley. This new version of Edisons Kinetophone also failed to take off due to stipulations with projectionists and also patent issues. By the late 1930s sound cinema was in its infancy of commercialisation and the reliability of the technology and the synchronisation of the sound to the picture had greatly improved. These sound films were also known as talking pictures or more commonly, talkies. Warner Bros was one of the leading sound film production companies at the time, creating talkies using its Vitaphone sound-on-disc technology. Vitaphone was actually the process used and phonographs amongst other disc technologies were used within this process.

Soundies and Scopitones

In regards to pre music video, post sound film, came Soundies. Soundies came about in the 1940s and featured such stars as Louis Armstrong; they were single song musical movies that had to be played in special jukeboxes. These jukeboxes were also known as Panorams and contained 16mm rear projectors; they were also coin operated. According to soundies.net, Eight Soundies, featuring a variety of musical performances, were generally spliced together on a reel which ran in a continuous loop. The Panoram, a complicated and unique machine, later served as the basis for the RCA 16mm projector. Figure 2-2 shows two frames from Fats Wallers Your Feets Too Big. Soundies proved to be unsuccessful financially but again pushed things forward that little bit more, showing that there was potential for something that was different to feature length films and would be driven entirely by music. A very similar format to that of the Panorams; which faded away in 1947, the Scopitone was released in the early 1960s, but by this Figure 2-2 time television was already somewhat established. Despite A clip from a soundie; similarities in the technologies between them, Panorams and their Fats Waller Your Feets Too Big. Soundies were from the U.S. whereas the Scopitone came from France. In talking about the Scopitone in the sixties, Herzog (2007) writes Popular music, too, underwent significant transformations in terms of marketing, audience, and style. The Scopitone jukebox thus differed from the Panoram in terms of format, aesthetics, and social function. At the same time, the Scopitone producers were careful to distinguish their films from the televised musical programming. I would like to dive in to the cultural aspects surrounding the emergence of the Soundie and in particular the Scopitone in comparison to Television. However, this is something that is quite complicated coupled with a dearth of information surrounding aspects of the productions in this time. I will return to this later when talking about the rise of the Music Video.

The evolution of music video

James Lashmar

Diversity in Unity
To realise holism fully we have to take a look deeper in the whole at the systems and individuals within. It is this diversity that is fundamental to the whole and its existence. As a music lover in todays world, sometimes I can get lost in music genres. There is such diversity in music. On a day to day basis, I can listen to anything from minimal techno to ghetto bass to disco house, to name a brief few. These are all sub-genres of larger genres that were perhaps the first of their kind. Four commonly accepted dance music genres would be trance; house; drum and bass; and techno. These can then be expanded vastly to show sub-genres. Two years ago I created a project that I called Music Figure 2-3 Evolution. The brief for this project was simply Sub genres of house music two words, Taxonomy Folksonomy. My aim of the project was to illustrate the shift and evolution in music from 1990 onwards in a visual sense. My research of music genres proved infinitely complex (see Figure 2-4) and as a result I had to simplify things and use only 20 genres (see Figure 2-4). This was just for electronic dance music alone! With new music genres appearing all the time, I dont think that there is any accepted standing list of music genres to date as the subject is so intricately complex and continually expands. In Reconsidering Difference (May & Deleuze 1997), Deleuze speaks about contingent holism. If we were to look at a person as a system and the global population of earth as a whole, then contingent holism would be the universe with different global populations within it, almost like pockets of holism. I believe contingent holism is evident within music and music videos and has been for at least the past four decades. These pockets that we call genres all have different conditions surrounding how they emerged and where they were born.

Figure 2-4 A simplified electronic mus ic genre map

Elvis
The Ed Sullivan Show However, in the 1950s things were simple, pop and rock music were the main genres to exist at this time. Elvis was arguably one of the most iconic music figures of the fifties and is often referred to as The King of Rock n Roll. There are two reasons why I would like to talk about Elvis, the first being in relation to the gendering of rock discourse. Ed Sullivan once said that he would never have Elvis on his show. This was something that he would later have to relent on due to pressure from other shows at the time featuring Elvis along with huge ratings at the time. Elvis went on to feature on the show three times in total. In todays media rich world, there isnt much that shocks us, weve seen it all and are bordering on the unshockable; something quite contrary to the reserved and
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conservative nature of the fifties. Elvis took the world by storm in the fifties, with his music and with his performances, so much so that his gyrating hips attracted much controversy. In possibly the most famous act of censorship in television history, Elvis agreed to be photographed from the waist up on Ed Sullivans Show on January 6th 1957, despite the fact that his first two appearances on the show, Elvis was shot from the ground up. This was something that was played down and still is today. It is Elviss third appearance on the show that is so poignant. As Coates (2007) states that it is commonly accepted as the birth-and the death-of rock and roll on network television. Rock and roll mythology deemphasizes Presleys many other appearances on television variety programs in 1956. Coates also points out Elviss third appearance on the Ed Sullivan show is invoked to immediately position rock and roll music and culture in opposition to conservative and feminized mass culture, represented in this case by television. This is undoubtedly controversial and not only in regards to the aforementioned opinion. Gillett (1970) wrote one of the most respected accounts of rock and roll history and she illustrated this same point. The reason why this event was so controversial in history is that there is visual evidence contradicting this account on video anthologies and cable channels. Satellite Broadcasting During the 1960s and 70s with Hawaii recently being made one of the new States of America, Elvis made Hawaii his second home. So much so that several of his tracks are revered in Hawaiis musical history and are often covered. It was likely that it was at the time of filming Blue Hawaii that Elvis came to fall in love with the paradise island. During the sixties and seventies satellite technology grew with the help of NASA, enabling a whole new worldwide audience. In 1973, the Elvis concert, Aloha from Hawaii was broadcast live to over 40 countries worldwide. It is this concert that potentially popularised the format and according to Parks and McCartney (2007), should be considered as part of a broader genealogy of global music television because it helped to establish the technical infrastructure, consumer markets, and discursive parameters for programming formats that are often misunderstood as emanating solely from MTV. It was in the seventies and eighties that the live via satellite format became lucratively explicit. This technology also generated a recording, something which was self-promoted by the broadcast itself.

03. MTV
The Birth of MTV
1981 was the year that Music Television (MTV) channel made its debut and was part of the advertiser supported cable service networks that was owned by Viacom. MTV started out with a target audience that was between 12-34 years of age. By 1984, in just three years MTV had changed the dynamics of the music industry. MTV managed to do this so much so, that even leading artists took MTV greatly in to consideration when making their music videos and albums and sometimes even produced material specifically with MTV in mind. Whilst in its rise, MTV encouraged and concentrated on youth centric programs; these included home videos and consumer products and books that featured MTV personalities and programming. As radio ratings continued to dwindle at this time with such formats migrating to TV, MTVs focus was always dedicated to selling, whether the products advertised were recorded music or other (Allan, 1990). MTV managed to captivate its audience due to the format being structured with small segments, usually under five minutes long. As Ellis notes (1982, cited in Allan, 1990, pg.08), TV is a medium of the glance, not the gaze, allowing for its audience to remain fixed without having to concentrate for any noticeable length of time as also Kaplan (1987) states The overall commercial framework
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of MTV (as if all television) requires, as weve seen, locking the spectator into the hypnotized state of impending satisfaction; centering must take place for short periods if the requisite consumption mechanism is to work. Following its policy of Think Globally, Act Locally, MTV launched MTV Europe, MTV Brazil, MTV Australia, MTV Asia, MTV Latin America and MTV Russia. It was MTVs next decision however that would prove to aid its success when the channel decided to enter India on the STAR platform when the market opened up for foreign satellite TV channels in the early nineties.

The Death of Music Video on MTV

Could it be MTVs failure to realise diversity in unity that lead to the death of the music video on its channel? Along with MTVs 24 hour flow of non-stop music video came with it a lack of positioning, deemphasising perhaps at the time, the importance of certain genres, in favour of broadcasting pop. One thing that MTV did was take different genres (and sometimes their sub-genres) and popularise, trivialise and flatten them in order to produce this non-stop flow of music video. As a consequence of this, the viewer (the target audience) becomes unaware of the specific genre of what he or she is watching and its historical value, thus allowing the target audience to blur into a whole. This 24 hour flow became the mainstream, governed by MTV. Despite rock music still having a massive following, looking at MTV you could be forgiven for thinking that it was near the end of its time. MTV became about its own ideology, creating a new era of style. It is this filtered mainstream that the mass culture choose to accept as it is fed to us, alleviating us of the trouble of having to go out and find our own alternative tastes. The paradox of popular music in the mid 1980s was this while there had apparently been no time in recent memory when the institutions of celebrity and glamour seemed so crucial to it, the individual performers identity was much less important as a guarantee of successful records than at any time in the last decade. The career patterns of Culture Club, The Human League and ABC demonstrate this: initial successful records were followed by clear failures. The explanation that this was due to over saturation and burnout, and that this was now part of the permanent condition of celebrity in North American societies, missed the underlying structural reason for this phenomenon: that the record industry now functioned on the basis of songs and their turnover rather than an interest in artists and their unfolding biographies or careers (Goodwin and Grossberg, 1993). The past decade has seen MTV change and restructure again. It is this flux that has kept MTV popular. However in its most noticeable move ever, it has become a removed entity from the music video to strictly become music television with a new program structure. The new structure involved MTV moving more towards regular televisual programming leaving music videos for the quieter parts of the schedule. MTV even acknowledged abandoning the music video in 1994. Beebe and Middleton (2007) state that 1994 saw the release of a series of ads for MTV2, one of the Viacom owned sister networks of the music television pioneer, that proclaimed MTV2: Where the musics at. Thus conceding implicitly that MTV was no longer music television. Ironically enough, within months of this ad campaign, MTV2 itself abandoned its all-video format, instead opting to devote a substantial portion of its daily schedule to rerunning programs from MTV.

The evolution of music video

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04. The music video, a hot or cold medium?

The myopic view
One could be forgiven for confusing music television for the music video, this is something that I like to call the myopic view. All music television, not just MTV, Fuse; MuchMusic; Black Entertainment Television (BET); VH1 and Digital Suite, to name a few, are responsible for bringing the media of the music video in to our homes, but they are simply just providers of this medium; they are not the medium itself. Michael Chion, writing on the distinction between film and television, argues that the differencelies not so much in the visual specificity of their images, as in the different roles of sound in each (Chion, 1994, cited in Beebe and Middleton, 2007, pg.30). Herzog (2007) further expands on this stating that Chion describes the medium as driven by sound, speech, and music. The Image in television and video serves to supplement the sound, which bears the primary burden of conveying meaning. The examples that Chion draws upon (televised sporting events, video art, and the music video) all share this quality; the soundtrack tells us what is happening while the images are added on. The specific nature of this addition is, of course, vastly different ranging from the illustrative images cut into a newscasters report to the visual fluttering of a music video or video game. For the most part, I believe Chion to be right. However, I believe that the music video doesnt just have to be a visual addition to the sound, it can work with it, furthermore enhancing and complimenting it. Deborah H. Holdstein valuably compares music video and the musical through their protagonists and stars, and their functions within narrative structure, but treats videos as miniature films rather than as television. Other writers have aimed to establish music video as an autonomous form of contemporary cultural production. Kaplan, for example, describes the reliance of music videos on Hollywood genre cinema for iconography, visual style, or narrative situation, but in terms of parody or pastiche, not broader terms of function or form pertaining to the genre (Allan, 1990). Here Holdstein is looking at the music video based on celebrity status. This is assuming that all music videos are accompanying pop music, which has long been a thing of the past. Music videos can be produced for any if not all music genres, whether they are mainstream or underground. I would like to believe that the music video is a further artistic extension of an otherwise creative form, in this case music, and not just another marketing tool for a mainstream culture brought to us by the media.

A new perspective
The music video to me is much more than television; it can be the ultimate unity between sound and vision. Throughout my research, it is apparent that the music video as a media has eluded many peoples ability to pigeonhole it, and as a result, this has led to a televisual and filmic perspective. I believe that it is something new and something that continues to be new as it evolves with time, culture and technology as does (Goodwin 1993), It has become commonplace to note that music video clips tend to defy the familiar regimes of narrative structure that have been an object of criticism in Marxist, psychoanalytic, and film theory for the last twenty years as does (Grossberg 1998, cited in Beebe & Middleton 2007, pg.05), stating that popular music studies has yet to develop its own particular theoretical tools and concepts in the way that film studies, and subsequently television studies, have done. New directions of artistic expression are multidimensional, integrating sound; vision; speech; touch; gesture and body movement. Artists, traditionally educated in one mode of creative expression, such as music, theatre or the visual arts, are now exploring and experimenting with art forms that weave media together to reflect the complexity of the human experience. Aesthetic sensibility emerges in the artistic expression of ideas and feelings, permeating any media the artist chooses.
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Historically, there have been artists, musicians and writers who have crossed the boundaries of their traditional media to incorporate their experiences in other media. They were innovative pioneers of an integrated creativity in which multiple modes of creative expression are combined. Today, the computer can provide a unique interdisciplinary studio in which artists and designers create with forms that involve differing dimensions of human experience. Using computers, artists and designers create sonic, vocal and musical compositions that integrate drawings, typography, photographs and animation. Integrated creativity is a multifaceted process in which contemporary artists can work fluently with visual images, sound images and animated images, as the boundaries between modes of expression blur (Truckenbrod, 1992).

Hot or cold?
Baudrillard once referred to Television as the new, cold universe of communication, with its profound changes in the relationship of subject to image (cited in, Kaplan, 1987, pg.50), see table 4-1. McLuhan (2003) also refers to television as being a cold medium and yet radio as a hot medium. McLuhans definition states, A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in high definition. High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, high definition. A cartoon is low definition, simply because very little visual information is provided and also that any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one. It is worth noting that the culture in which a hot or cold medium is placed can affect how it will be digested, for example a hot medium will not work in a cold culture. MTV did respectively project the music video as a cold medium in placing music videos in its 24 hour flow programming; essentially a sequence of short clips with very little participation required whilst giving the viewer little in return. Considering MTV admitted to abandoning the music video in 1994; the birth of the internet circa 1995; the DVD just ten years later; and this new perspective, I believe that the music video has proven to be a very hot media. This could be for a whole host of reasons and factors. The internet has turned the world in to a globally interconnected, always on culture in a sense, with which we participate with every single day. This essentially makes for a global hot culture, something that McLuhan once perceived this as a global village. It is the dissemination of the music video that is accountable in many respects for making the medium hot.

Table 01 Chart summarising Baudrillards and Calloiss scheme Old hot universe New cold universe

Investment Desire Passion Seduction

Expression Competition

Hazard Chance Vertigo

Ecstasy Obscenity Fascination Communication

Processes of hysteria (female) And paranoia (male)

Processes of schizophrenia, elimination of boundaries, exteriorization of the interior

Table 4-1

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05. Dissemination of the Music Video

Media hara-kiri
As McLuhan (2003) once considered, if the formative power in the media is the media itself, then this brings with it a whole host of things to consider. As technological media becomes ever more prevalent, areas of it are becoming staples as of that of natural resources. As a society that relies, even feeds on media, it is fair to say that there are going to be obvious consequences Figure 5-1 given that the media decides what we see. These cultural effects could provide a whole dissertation in themselves. One point I would like to make however, is that with the birth of web 2.0, digital media, and more recently the emergence of social networks, came something new. This was user generated content. The media suddenly didnt have the same hold on the content that we watch, we did. Undoubtably, this serves as one of those obvious consquences.

The web
In another evolutionary leap delinieated in the history of the music video, adding yet another dimension and exponential potential, is interactivity. Although still unfinalised as standards, html5, css3 and webGL are all amazing technologies with extremely powerful capabilities. According to Mashable (n.d.), a reputable site featuring up date news about social media, culture, tech and the like, with Arcade Fires new music video The Wilderness Downtown (see Figure 5-1), Chris Milk and Google managed to set a new gold standard. What makes this special is the ability to personalise the viewers experience. The site asks for your childhood address and tailors a movie around you using Google Maps. The experience of watching this highly personalized video is not easily described, but basically the story of childhood ending as time rapidly slips away becomes your own as trees shoot up out of nowhere on your old street, culminating in an opportunity to write a letter to a younger you. Suddenly the possibility of trying to analyse the music video using classic film or TV frameworks is obliterated. It is also even more reason, given this new multidimensional, interactive experience that the music video can offer, emphasises the fact that music video is indefinitely now a hot medium.

Mobile
In the past 5 years, the mobile phone has been revolutionised, becoming and amalgam of technologies, marrying cameras; 3G; Wifi; QR codes; the internet; and new powerful mobile operating systems to harness this hardware and connectivity. It is the combination of these devices and the new content rich web that has become a revolution in media, further brought to life by the ever connected youth of today amongst other netizens . Cordeiro (2010) also believes this, stating, The Internet and mobile phones have become the mainstays of promoting bands; at the
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same time, digital technologies of production and delivery have enriched music videos with a new cultural dynamic by allowing the expression of creativity on a small budget. This had led to two noticable and interesting trends. The first being open crowdsourcing and the second being low budget and self made music videos. Recently Apple launched their new iPhone 4S, bringing 1080p quality to the phone. The Turnback recently (Oct 14th 2011) filmed the first official music video entirely using two iPhone 4Ss for their single Cellophane Sky scheduled by band member Tod. The audio was recorded in the studio using ProTools and then added to the edit all with Final Cut Pro, a process that could be performed by a vast number of people. To simplify it further, this could even be done using Adobes Soundbooth and Premiere Pro, which are very affordable and easy to learn, allowing anyone the opportunity to go out, be creative, and film a music video for their band or dj or otherwise; a possibility far from imaginable or affordable even five years ago.

Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is a process that has been around for some time now whereby the public are invited to contribute to a project, something which is normally conducted by professionals in studios. When done well, this process can yield amazing, otherwise unthought-of results. One interesting fact however, is whilst searching for an example of a crowd sourced music video, I stumbled upon the Johnny Cash Project, coincidentally directed Chris Milk, the same person responsible for the aforementioned experiment with Arcade Fire. The Johnny Cash Project is a global collective art project, and we would love for you to participate. Through this website, we invite you to share your vision of Johnny Cash, as he lives on in your minds eye. Working with a single image as a template, and using a custom drawing tool, youll create a unique and personal portrait of Johnny. Your work will then be combined with art from participants around the world, and integrated into a collective whole: a music video for "Aint No Grave", rising from a sea of oneof-a-kind portraits. Strung together and played in sequence over the song, the portraits will create a moving, ever evolving homage to this beloved musical icon. Whats more, as new people discover and contribute to the project, this living portrait will continue to transform and grow, so its virtually never the same video twice.

06. Media Ecologies, Holism & Dubstep

Media Ecology
First the only way to find things out about what happens when complex objects such as media systems interact is to carry out such interactionsit has to be done live, with no control sample. Objects here should also be understood to mean processes embodied as objects, as elements in a composition. Every element is an explosion, a passion or capacity settled temporarily into what passes for a stable state, (Fuller & Malina 2005). So what is a media ecology? These are two words that when put together are always busy with meaning and dynamism. I see a media ecology as a dynamic system in which any one part is always multiply connected, acting by virtue of those connections, and always variable, such that it can be regarded as a pattern rather than simply as an object. Music itself could be considered a media ecology as it is a living, breathing media that is always in flux, an ever changing sonic holism. Deleuze and Guattaris machinic phylum can provide a way of thinking how elements of complex medial systems cooperate to produce something more than the sum of their parts, in relation to music.

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Pirate Radio & Dubstep

As aforementioned in a Media hara-kiri, if the media controls what we see and hear, there are undoubtedly going to be some consequences. Pirate radio is a media ecology that could be referred to as another of these consequences prior to the social networks that we know today. It is the unwillingness of a chosen few who wish to push what they are doing to the people, rather than being fed something that the media pushes their way. It is this unwillingness from the people that allows for fresh, new and diverse cultured output. Pirate radio is famously responsible for a what was a new genre, known as jungle, just over a decade ago. This was a very important genre in regards to dance music history and one that possibly changed everything in a paradigm shift. It was this genre that most noticeably evolved and was responsible for many more genres that are alive today. Dubstep dates back to 1998 and stems from dub, 2-step garage, breakbeat and drum and bass. The latter two genres also stem back to jungle. Even despite dubstep being around now for 14 years, it only became commercially viable around 2-3 years ago in 2009/10. It was in this viability that dubstep created yet another paradigm shift, possibly even greater than that of its ancestor, jungle, due to it actually becoming a commercial genre, something that jungle never managed to do. It is this commercialisation that draws me back to the machinic phylum. The phylum of the taxonomist exists to differentiate between existing objects, things, processes, genres and such and in doing so allows us to track the evolution of those things. The conceptualisation of a pylogeny is the persistence and change of many individuals through time. De Landa provides a succinct image of the machinic phylum when he describes it as The overall set of self-organising processes in the universe.These include all processes in which a group of previously disconnected elements suddenly reaches a critical point at which they begin to cooperate to form a higher level entity, (Fuller & Malina 2005).

07. Conclusion
Throughout researching music video, I have been overwhelmed by the information surrounding the topic. From an outside perspective this information on the whole is perceived in only a few ways. Pre music videos have little information about the cultural aspects surrounding the emergence of them and what dictated something becoming popular against something failing. Early music videos were created using high budgets and limited technology for a limited amount of genres, usually pop music or rock music and so are usually biased toward one of the two genres. Medium Cool has been the greatest source of information and the greatest starting point to move on from throughout, taking in to account a whole array of aspects surrounding the topic, with a collection of views from varied unbiased authors arguing their own points around each aspect. I have presented my thoughts and points as I see fit after researching the subject heavily, in a linear manor, from The Dickinson Sound Film to current projects and current events. This is where I feel I have made a difference, covering the subject as a whole (from the beginning to current day) and taking very distinct and choice information from proven sources, providing a comprehensive snapshot about the music video and how it has evolved. So what have I learnt? It has been disputed that the music video is a mainstream popular culture medium that is a cold medium analysed using filmic and televisual studies and perspectives. Using Goodwin and McLuhan I have suggested that the music video cannot be analysed using these methods, especially considering my later research surrounding what is happening with music video in the present day, something that is not so heavily documented as the MTV era of music video. I have also built on McLuhans rules of hot and cold media using this newer research to argue that
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the music video is now a hot media and requires little participation (e.g. the Arcade Fire Experiment) and that it can provide what was the viewer but now user or participant, with a stimulating and rich experience by using technology to hit several senses and fully engage us in the experience. As long as music video exists, it will be a creative media, bringing with it a world of creative people who want to play with it and create something new. As technology advances so does the freedom to be creative and to make something new. Two things that greatly interest me are motion design and visual effects. Motion design is something new in itself and is also proving popular amongst designers and artists, attracting people with all sorts of skills and backgrounds, creating a new melting pot or pocket of creativity waiting to create something exciting and new. I believe that it is a combination of motion design and new interactive technologies such as augmented reality along with the web and mobile that will provide the immediate future for music video, however this is just my opinion. As I discussed in Pirate Radio & Dubstep there has been to my knowledge, two incredibly massive shifts in dance music. To some people, those involved in the pirate radio stations and the genres that it gave birth to these possibly wouldnt have been such massive shifts, as they were involved from the inception. However, to those that are part of the mainstream, this shift could have been something that happened overnight and from nowhere. It is this constant flux and dynamism of media ecologies, the evolution of technology, music and therefore music video that make it so unpredictable and volatile, with resilience to stay still, making it almost organic. We are continually identifying patterns in life that replicate nature, and if music is an organism, then it is something natural. After all, isnt nature the ideal form of holism? The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception. (McLuhan, 2003) Program and content analysis offer no clues to the magic of these media or to their subliminal charge. (McLuhan, 2003)

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Reference List
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Baudrillard, J., 1994. Simulacra and simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Beebe, R. & Middleton, J., 2007. Medium cool: music videos from soundies to cellphones, Durham NC: Duke University Press. Cordeiro, P., 2010. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Medium Cool: music videos from soundies to cellphones. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 30(1), pp.153154. Coyne, R., 1999. Technoromanticism: digital narrative, holism and the romance of the real., Leonardo. Fuller, M. & Malina, R.F., 2005. Media ecologies: materialist energies in art and technoculture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Goodwin, A., 1993. Dancing in the distraction factory: music television and popular culture, London: Routledge. Kaplan, E., 1987. Rocking around the clock: music television, postmodernism, and consumer culture, New York: Routledge. Mashable, Arcade Fires Experimental New Video Shows Whats Possible with HTML5. Available at: http://mashable.com/2010/08/30/arcade-fires-chrome-video/ [Accessed December 11, 2011]. May, T. & Deleuze, G., 1997. Reconsidering difference: Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze, University Park Penns.: Pennsylvania State University Press. McLuhan, M., 2003. Understanding media: the extensions of man Critical ed., Corte Madera CA: Gingko Press. Truckenbrod, J., 1992. Integrated Creativity: Transcending the Boundaries of Visual Art, Music and Literature. Leonardo Music Journal, 2(1), pp.8995.

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Figures
Figure 2-1 3 Frames from the Dickinson Sound Experiment Anon,

first.JPG (JPEG Image, 448115 pixels) Scaled (0%), Available http://www.filmsound.org/murch/first.JPG [Accessed November 19, 2011d].

at:

Figure 2-2 Two screenshots from http://www.stellarfilms.com/Fats.wmv

the

Fats

Waller

soundie

Figure 2-3 A simplified electronic music genres map, designed by myself. Figure 2-4 A mindmap showing the sub genres of house music, designed by myself. Figure 5-1 A screenshot of the http://thewildernessdowntown.com/ Figure 5-2 The iPhone 4S Anon, iPhone-4S-Camera-Specs.png (PNG Image, 476381 pixels) - Scaled (0%), Available at: http://www.redmondpie.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/iPhone-4S-Camera-Specs.png [Accessed December 11, 2011g].

Arcade

Fire

Google

experiment

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Jon Hodge, 1997. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 48(3), pp.435-438. Kaplan, E., 1987. Rocking around the clock: music television, postmodernism, and consumer culture, New York: Routledge. Krisztian, G., 2004. Visualising ideas: from scribbles to storyboards, London: Thames & Hudson. Laing, R.D., 1990. The politics of experience; and, The bird of paradise, Penguin. Lance, M.N., 2000. Reconsidering Difference: Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze by Todd May. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60(3), pp.721-723.
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