Sound Strategy — How to Talk Music For Non-Musicians
Unsure how to talk about music and sound? Marina Kagan from Antfood offers expert tips on conveying concepts, emotions, and feedback for audio — no musical background required.
Making bespoke music that tells stories, evokes emotion and drives campaigns is a rewarding experience. However, if you aren’t a musician, you might feel at a disadvantage when talking about music and sound. As there are a lot of abstractions, communicating how your idea translates into a final product can be difficult. Thankfully, this shouldn’t need to be a barrier to communication. There are plenty of ways to communicate your needs - even without technical knowledge or a vast musical vocabulary.
Marina Kagan, Producer at Antfood Amsterdam, worked in film production before joining Antfood three years ago. She communicates with and mediates for composers, agencies and clients about audio on a daily basis and is well-positioned to share advice about communicating about music to those without a technical background.
Explain The Context
Explaining the broader campaign message helps frame the context and purpose for the music and sound in an ad. It also gives us important information about how to shape the musical brief.
Marina pretending to make music
Convey Actual & Target Emotions
Often, the goal of ads is to have the product or service trigger an emotional response from the viewer, and music is an invaluable tool for achieving this. When building a brief, describe the emotions you want the music to convey. Our composers can translate these into musical cues for the viewer. Next time you listen to music, think about how it achieves an emotional response: building dynamics can increase the intensity of a piece, a minor key suggests seriousness, whilst raising the tempo can create suspense.
Be Specific & Use References
Be specific when explaining your requirements for a track. Using reference tracks offers a more concrete way to express your needs and helps ensure everybody, the composers, production team and client, are on the same page.
Pay attention to the elements that make up a sound, including the genre, instruments or vocal talents. This will help you identify what is right for your composition, and so will help you construct feedback more easily. For example, you might like the use of drums and the energy of a song but not the guitar.
Ultimately, a producer’s role is to ‘translate’ the concepts communicated by the client into a brief that guides the musicians’ process - and vice versa. Use the language you know and feel comfortable with to communicate about audio and sound, and remember - we’re here to help!
