In which the sound and colour of dead grass makes me feel emotions

I love sound. There's something about it that captures so much. Grounding sounds like the wind through rustling grass, hot water being poured from a kettle, the way a tent zipper just sounds so distinctly like a tent zipper, there's the brush of fabric against something. I've always paid attention to the sensory details of things, which (obviously) everyone does too, it's just that it's not something we usually pay all that much attention to and I just wish people talked about it more. I want to hear people talking about the way milk swirls into their tea/coffee more. Or the sound of cars driving on a wet highway in the distance. The sound of snow being crushed beneath your feet.

The score of movies is used to give emotion. And those emotions build a story. Even in quick scenes. Although those quick scenes are what holds the grain of the whole movie together. Movies like M Night Shyamalan's The Village or Signs (I rewatched them recently so those ones are the scores that first come to mind)

There's sort of an ongoing loop in my head associating the emotion and the musicality with something to the sound, the texture and colours of something. For some reason the texture of something makes me think of sound, I know what that sound would be and therefore I attach an emotion, a music to something. Music gives me flashes of images. But those images give me textures, smells, colours and specific vibes, feelings, or emotion, which makes me think of music and do you see the kind of unending cycle I live in? There's some songs that I always smell cigarette smoke and think of garages and car metal when I hear it. It doesn't matter where I am, I'll smell cigarette smoke when I hear it. 

At the same time though, everyone does this to some degree. There's songs that feel like roadtrips at 3 a.m., there's songs that feel like waking up, there's songs that feel like you've climbed a mountain and you're getting to see the view, etc. All these images are built up of smaller things, like a roadtrip at 3 a.m. has so many little moving parts that make up what a roadtrip at 3 a.m. feels like, and yet it does it in just a flash. You don't even have to say or be aware what all those moving parts are or know why they matter. All you know is that you're listening to a song that makes you think of a roadtrip at 3 a.m.

For the climb, there's the feeling of wanting to climb, the struggle of it, the sweat, the dust, the wanting to give up, and then the open and sort of euphoric feeling of having seeing why it was worth it. 

 

Characters and stories (at least for me) are built up of these associations, the texture of that sweater they're wearing, the way that line of their suit sits like that, songs, feelings...it's why edit videos (and movies and shows and even books, you get the idea) are so perfect (at least the good ones are). Because they capture the emotion of a look, the silence of something, the connection of something through quick shots. They capture all the moving parts of what makes a song sound like a roadtrip at 3 a.m. if that makes any sense at all. That's why music is so intrinsic to writing or really just experiencing things for me. And sometimes the associations are more obvious than other times. Something fits, but you have no idea why it fits. It doesn't make any sense to anyone else, but there's something about it that works. It's because isn't really a 'why' to it, it's just a piece of something that happens to be there because it can't not be there. 

I think in songs the thing (as much as I adore lyrics) the thing I hear first is the sound and emotion of a song (be it sad, or upbeat) and then I sort without even trying have images or things I associate with the song and then I hear the lyrics. Lyrics are so good at building images or associations really quickly. The lyrics have to tell a story or something really quickly and the sound of the song fills in with everything the lyrics are trying to say or don't say. 

In The Village the melody for Ivy and Lucius sounds like the woods to me. (and it kind of reminds of the book The Scorpio Races and how Shawn and Puck sort of embody the island and the sea) 

There's a rhythm words too. There's some authors who write so seamlessly it feels a little bit like being caught up in the wind only to be brought back at the end. I find the way Ray Bradbury writes (particularly in Something Wicked This Way Comes) he has such a beautifully explosive sound to his writing. It's so...wild and visceral and it has pauses and the ram-rod-ish way he describes things makes something about his writing feel like a locomotive to me.

I don't wanna fall in love sounds like something quietly wild. And quietly wild in my head means the wind, breathing, frustration, anger, running, a sadness, reeds, and like a crash in a movie where all the sound stops and there's no music. There's so many flash images that I could say but there's some of those.

In Labyrinth there's a song called 'Within You' that David Bowie (who starred as the Goblin King and he wrote some of the songs for the movie) said was his favourite track. He has a quick description for each of the songs he wrote but there's something about his description of Within You that I think about way too much. He said 'Within You is my favourite track. I had to write something that sounded like stone walls and crumbling power. The overall effect, with Jim's visuals, is, I think, very tragic and slightly disturbing.' 

I think it's the idea that a song can sound like stone walls and not hearing stone walls literally that makes me excited. It's just to see somebody articulate something and be able to use it effectively that I've never been able to explain why (or that it was even a thing I could say coherently) felt a little groundbreaking to me. I've always felt like my mind works a bit in reverse. It knows the elements that make up the image of a word, but somehow forgets there's a word that embodies all the elements I've been trying to explain. Then someone says the word and I'm losing my mind because it was so easy.

For the song 'The World Falls Down' David Bowie was very intentional with using music theory to his advantage. He describes it has the prettiest song on the album. (Stealing this from Labyrinth the Ultimate Visual History). 'It's a romantic ballad, more straightfoward than many of the writer's other works. Sarah in a poisonous-peach-induced-haze, confused and lost as the song begins in a moderately fast 3/4 time. Then an electric bass modifies the rhythm as the sight of Jareth draws Sarah into the experience, gliding into a gentle 4/4. The bass line acts as a hook, with a constantly rising musical motif even though the lyric  keeps suggesting the mood should be going down.

While it's not something we're probably aware of on a technical level, it is intentional and it creates an instantly recognizable emotion and thus a reaction.  

I don't know if this post makes much sense. It's all so attached in my head but trying to say how it all fits together is hard. I guess what I'm trying to say is that sometimes the way dead grass looks, sounds, and feels makes me feel emotions. And I build things off of emotion and attach it to everything else in my brain. Just random building blocks that don't make sense together but there's always a running, sorting, undercurrent tying to together. So when I do something, it's personal and it's what gives it the feel that it is mine. Other people have the same thing. They have random things that are unconnected but they run things through all of it and it makes this undercurrent that affects everything they do. And it makes that underlying fingerprint of what makes their stuff theirs. It what makes you want to hear them say something even if you've heard it before because you want to hear how they would say it.

How about you guys? What are your associations with things? Do specific sounds (smells, how things feel) make you think of emotions? Do you guys get way too inspired by dead grass?