Is music merely a sonic experience?

Are there no other senses affected by the makers of sound?

Of course there is. Let’s start with the Visual.

The artists themselves, the live gig experience, the visual feast at a club, music videos, video blogs of unsigned acts, TV music shows and more.

For many of a certain age, the most regular visual reference for them would have been the album cover.

For some, the cover was the closest they got to the love of their life. It helped to create the dream. Hugging David Cassidy, kissing Marvin Gaye, holding Debbie Harry, drooling over Clare Grogan of Altered Images.

For others, it would be to gaze upon their heroes, their idols, those who speak up for them.
The Hendrix pose, the Coltrane nobility, Patti Smith’s strength, Morrisey’s poetry, Marley rightousness, Bowie otherness and many more…

Sometimes it was a chance to escape into the realms of a sci-fi dream world, or a confirmation of their own life.

The album cover could provide a continual reminder to many budding musicians that ‘these people look like me…I could be them’.

Now that we have moved on from the analogue past, where does the Visual component of music rest in the digital present?

The CD art work is too small, too flimsy and too easily thrown away to warrant any comparison to the visual power of the album cover. So many great covers of the CD generation have been undervalued due to the materials it was showcased in.

Online, we have images on iTunes (if you are lucky), that can hide behind your thumb.

From 12 inches to 12mm…has the initial Visual Impact of music come to this?

Or have we now replaced the visual experience of music with a social one?

What Blue Note is to Jazz, Fania is to Salsa.. The back catalogue is
being re-released by those lovely people at emusica/v2 for our listening pleasure, so I am a happy man.

Yet it is also going to be great to feast my eyes on the blissful album cover art of Izzy Sanabria again.
. Not only a classic, but the late Ray Barretto’s Acid album was a visual masterpiece.

Been contemplating this little blog for a while. Rather than pontificate about why, let’s just get on with it.

This is a blog about sound, about music, about my personal pet sonic loves and hates, and about the business contribution that sound makes to brands.

So there will be pieces about sonic brand strategies, about why there is a focus on the visual rather than the sonic by most companies.

We will also natter about about the power of music to strengthen consumer trust, stuff on music & the digital arena, as well as sound in the retail space.

There will inevitably be bits on favourite tunes and sonic masters.

After all, someone once wrote “If music be the food of love, play on”.

And Gary Bartz once sang “Music is my Santuary, Music is my Life”…