6th
On brain-searing
BoA: Beat of Angel (권보아)
So I’m cutting a commercial and there’s a guy in the next bay over cutting a music video for pretty Korean lady who goes by the name of BoA, for “Beat of Angel”. Which is funny to me for two reasons.
The second reason is that I can’t help but think of Bank of America, what with her capitalization scheme. Maybe only funny to me.
The music is not good and even worse seared into the side of a brain over the course of three days, 2 1/2-second looped sections at a time.
I’m by no means a pro, or even all that good at it, but I’ve done a fair amount of A/V editing for various work and personal projects, and “seared into the side of a brain” is far more apt than one might think.
My elementary school was down the street from an old lady who had gone deaf and couldn’t remember to disarm her burglar alarm when she got out of bed, so the siren was almost always going off during recess. It was a piercing tone that smoothly descended a fourth or so and then sawtoothed back up two times a second. But if you listened to it steadily for a few minutes, something would come loose in your auditory perceptual system and you’d start to hear the frequencies out of order. Now, as a fully adult-resembling person, when I hear that type of siren, it sounds broken to me. I have to concentrate to hear it properly.
That’s what editing is like.
It’s worse if it’s a song you enjoy—which if you selected it or if you’re editing your own performance, it probably is. At the beginning of the project, you’re excited because you can see how you want everything to flow, and as you piece it together you start to see your idea coming to life. Occasionally you’re surprised when a sequence works better than you thought it would, and those are the great moments.
But sooner or later, somewhere around the 300th pass over that one section that just refuses to tighten up, cracks start to form. You stop hearing the music, and the component tones and harmonies stop complementing each other and start sounding like ridiculous noise. You’ve scrubbed over one particular measure 20 or 30 times, trying to pinpoint the exact syllable of the vocal track that lines up with the edge of that snare hit, and now you’re unable to hear anything else. After a while, you can’t figure out why you ever liked this song in the first place. By holding it too closely, you’ve smothered something you loved.
Adam, I don’t know how you can stand it.
(For a perfect illustration of how repetition screws with perception, listen to the first five minutes or so of the Musical Language episode of Radio Lab. The “sometimes behave so strangely” part. It had been a year since I last heard this episode and that damn loop was still encoded in my brain.)
