Audiovisuelle Metaphern und emotionales Design in Musikvideos

Like no other audiovisual genre, music videos use the emotional and sensorial dimensions of sound and images: integrating all forms and effects of audiovisual media, they create a dense composition of sounds and images that produce intense emotional and sensorial effects. In this paper I would like to demonstrate some aspects of this emotional design of music videos. The aesthetical forms should be shown in close relation to audiovisual perception, particularly to cross-modal perception. In the following I will show that the intense sensorial and affective experience of audiovisual aesthetics depends to a high degree on its analogy to cross-modal perception. Following recent studies in neurology and emotions, cross-modal perception regulates the sensorial and emotional experience to a high extent. The effectiveness of audiovisual media seems to rely first of all on its structural analogy to such primary processes of perception. Accordingly the paper focuses on the unconsciously, pre-symbolic and emotional aspects of audiovisual aesthetics.

In order to describe this interface between audiovisual aesthetics and perception I propose the notion of audiovisual metaphors. Following Lakoff / Johnson et al., cognitive metaphors represent an interface between perception and language: the semantic projection between two different domains of experience characterises main semantic processes of the linguistic articulation and perception. My aim is to transfer this argumentation to audiovisual perception and creation. This assumption will be discussed at the example of music videos, whose sensorial and emotional effects seem to depend on the complex metaphorical network of sounds and images.