Sometimes a music video has a scene going on, and the song’s volume will be reduced at some point and there will be dialogue and/or sound effects over the song. Is there a word designating this? Is it typically done to actually sell more copies of the unmodified song, or is it usually an artistic decision? Finally, list music videos like that:
Lady Gaga “Telephone”
Tenacious D “Tribute”
Michael Jackson “Thriller”
Tove Lo “Disco Tits”
Metallica “One”
Another one:
A Perfect Circle “The Outsider”
Daft Punk “One More Time”
Yes, the term you are looking for is “ducking” or “audio ducking.” It’s quite common. MST3K would often duck the movie sound during their comments.
Philip Bailey & Phil Collins “Easy Lover”
Megadeth “Peace Sells” (“I want to watch the news.” / “This is the news!”)
Considering that it’s a technique that has long predated striping audio from YouTube videos, I’m going with it’s an artistic decision to make the video more “cinematic”.
Thanks, I never watched either before. “Easy Lover” wins “best ducking editing” of the songs mentioned so far. It’s a great song, but I could see how the music video would have seemed boring without the ducking. The Phils must have sang while shooting footage for the video, and I guess someone got creative in the editing by mixing it in, to salvage the music video. Have any other music videos copied this formula? I dislodged two more from my memory, not very good songs, and the ducking makes them worse. Here I suspect the motivation for the ducking was “to sell more copies”:
Taylor Swift “New Romantics”
Britney Spears “Make Me…”
I thought this thread would have caught on like wildfire. I am surprised at the low number of responses.
One More Time is kind of a special case, as the video wasn’t really meant as a music video on the traditional sense - it’s part of a movie, Interstella 5555, which used Discovery as its soundtrack. (The first few videos from the album are the first few segments of I5555…the full movie was released a couple years later, alongside Daft Club.)
Daft Punk also have another special case, a couple years earlier, in Da Funk, where the song doesn’t just occasionally fade back - it’s basically background music to a scene of a dude (who happens to be an anthropomorphic bloodhound, for no discernible reason) wandering around and talking to people.
Til Tuesday - Voices Carry
Pat Benatar - Love is a Battlefield