McLeod Group guest blog by John Cameron, Emmanuel Solomon and William Clarke, April 8, 2021
Picture an NGO promotional video with images of a child with a hesitant smile somewhere in the global South. Now close your eyes. What do you hear? What music and sounds accompany the images? What stories do the music and sound tell about global poverty and development and what stereotypes do they reinforce or challenge?
Advertisers, fundraisers, film makers, psychologists and musicians have all long understood that music can shape our emotions, behaviour and attitudes to people, products and ideas. Composers use different elements of music structure not just to represent emotions (joy, sadness, fear) but also to evoke those emotions in listeners.
For example, music can make us feel joy when it combines fast tempo, the major scale, loud or rising dynamics (crescendo), ascending melodic lines, short rhythmic values, and increased instrumentation. Music can us feel sad when it combines slow tempo, the minor scale, soft dynamics, descending melodic lines, long rhythmic values and sparse instrumentation.
When used strategically and especially in combination with video, these elements of music structure can form audio narratives about global poverty and development. For example, sad or tranquil music to accompany images of the global South followed by more joyful music to represent the interventions of an NGO can reinforce myths about NGOs as the key agents of change. Frightening music can reinforce the idea of the global South as dangerous and scary. Joyful music can highlight the dignity of people in the global South, but can also reinforce the “poor but happy” narrative. Close your eyes the next time you watch a fundraising video, and you will hear these strategies at work.
Despite the power of music and sound to shape our emotional responses to global issues, NGO Codes of Ethics on communications and fundraising as well as critical academic analysis focus overwhelmingly on what we can see: images, video, text.
Our analysis of the 30 most-watched international development fundraising videos on YouTube from Canada, the US and the UK reveals some disturbing patterns that should be cause for concern and reflection about how music and sound are used in development communication. The 30 videos are a small sample of the full spectrum of NGO communicate through music and sound, but together these videos have been watched over 100 million times, so they clearly have impact. Here’s what we found:
- Over half the videos (16/30) used music and sound that evokes negative emotions of sadness (9 videos) and fear (7 videos) to represent the global South.
- Over a third of the videos (11/30) used transitions from sad or serene music to represent the global South to happy music to represent the interventions of NGOs, reinforcing the idea that Northern NGOs are the key agents of change, bringing happiness to poor communities.
- Of the 28 videos that used music, 25 used Western music (pop, classical, jazz) to represent the global South and three used “world music” (i.e., elements of Western and non-Western musical structures combined).
- The spoken voices in the videos are overwhelmingly Western. Of the 22 videos with spoken voices, 18 feature voiceovers with Western-sounding accents speaking over images of people from the global South. Just four videos feature accents that seem to come from the global South and only one video allows people from the global South to speak for themselves in a language other than English (with subtitles).
From a marketing and communications perspective, there are compelling reasons to use familiar sounding music and accents to communicate with target audiences. However, using Western music and Western voices to represent the global South, while people from communities in the global South are seen but not allowed to speak for themselves, highlights colonial thinking that would be quickly condemned if it appeared in images or text.
NGO Codes of Ethics on communications and critical academic analysis of representations of global poverty and development need to pay more careful critical attention to music and sound as powerful communication tools and also encourage the use of music and sound to challenge rather than reproduce persistent stereotypes about poverty and development.
John Cameron teaches International Development Studies at Dalhousie University. Emmanuel Solomon and William Clarke are musicians who worked as research assistants on this project. The article on which this blog is based is available here. Photo: Getty Images.