Scratch Video a mutant hybrid of scratch DJ music and guerrilla TV

scratchvideo/theory/closure

We are naturally inclined to put together the sounds and images we see and hear. Turn on any piece of music and your television at the same time and you'll notice that TV images start to match up as a music video for the song you're listening to. Remember the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon supposedly matching up perfectly to the Wizard of Oz? Why does it work so well?

The answers may be based in the ideas of the Gestaltists, a movement of German psychologists who, among other things, believed that we see whole shapes as well as their component parts. When looking at a finished puzzle, we see both its individual pieces and the whole picture. The Gestaltists called this process closure, or how your brain fills in the blanks.

When you are watching TV and listening to an album at the same time, your brain starts assigning the sounds in the music to any movement on the screen, closing the two together to form a whole. If the music is packed with beats (like techno or drum and bass) and the images have a lot of movement and change rapidly, there are more opportunities for matches -- and the audience may start believing the two were meant to be played together.

Watching live scratch video, the audience does as much work as the VJ, by interpreting which sounds will match which images. The visuals on the screen just have to be close enough to the beats of the music and the audiences brains will finish the job, performing closure and making more perfect matching of image and sound. The more skilled the VJ at matching video to audio, the more the audience will notice subtleties in the mix. Scratch video albums flawlessly synch image and sound, allowing for an even higher degree of viewer participation.

Copyright 2000© Hart Snider