yeonipark

Since I’m from South Korea, I visit my country once a year or more than it. The interesting thing is that whenever i go there, i see how the society and trend has changed. One of the examples is that the spending habits among MZ generation changed a lot. I saw a lot of articles in South Korea and it shows 20-30 people buy luxury goods as a gift for themselves and to treat them well, which can be a self-care. The problem is that they spend too much money for it to show off even though they can’t afford it. So when I came back to South Korea, my old friends see me weird, not buying designer brands products. However I’m wondering if it is a proper way to do self-care.

During the group discussion in the class, I came up with an idea that we can use the social media format for our counter map. There are a lot of elements that influence people's self care, especially when you use the social media. For example, you can see other's lives and based on this data, people are exposed to advertisements. This leads people to create their own self-care unconsciously. Our group want to point out this fact, rather than sending an educational message, such as "In this way, you can finally create YOUR OWN self-care". For me, expressing "self-care" is not easy, because there are a lot of way to care, even myself. Therefore, I did visual researches. I found some inspirations that describe various objects, not one specific.

In this process, our team members agreed on making a video. I thought that I can make a music of self-care. Sound is a great tool that makes audiences curious and concentrate on the video. And even though the self-care for individuals are different, it is true that self-care is created from one, "capitalism".

After the decision to work on music, it intrigued me to do research self-care that deals with sounds relating to capitalism within the context of shopping as ‘retail therapy’ as well as how certain bpm affect the brain. It was interesting how music influences consumption. Apparently slow music makes people to spend much money than fast music. For example, in the restaurant, people eat very fast and leave there with fast tempo music. In contrast, they tend to stay longer and it leads them to order more drinks and food. These articles helped me to choose certain bpm to work with, 60 bpm.

Since this is my first time to work on composing a music, I had to spend a lot of time to research on tools. I found a website that I can create my own beat. During the D&D week, I did experiment to make 2 different beats through Splice sound. I also made a short melody, using garage band on my phone. I wanted to use both beats for our final work, but I decided to use only second one to make it clear. For the rest of capitalism sounds, (time ticking, printing receipt, rolling coins and scanning bar code), I collected them on Youtube.

https://cloudcovermusic.com/music-psychology/purchasing-effects/

https://www.promotion.tech/blog/how-music-affects-shopping-behaviors

https://thinkgrowth.org/stores-are-using-music-to-make-you-spend-more-d6c85974b20b#:~:text=The%20best%20tempo%2Fmode%20combination,songs%20playing%20in%20the%20background

https://www.psychologistworld.com/behavior/ambient-music-retail-psychological-arousal-customers

http://blog.motivemetrics.com/The-Psychology-of-Music-Why-Music-Plays-a-Big-Role-in-What-You-Buy

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/minds-business/background-music-influences-buyer-behavior.html

My goal was to describe various intangible self-care, using dynamic different sounds, rather than showing one specific self-care. The background sound starts with a very relaxed atmosphere in order to show typical self-care. As the capitalism sounds added, dynamic beat is overlapped as a climax. Before I start working on composing, I did simple idea sketches to imagine the atmosphere of the music.

In the class on 25th May, my team showed our process so far and got the tutor feedback. For the sound part, we got the feedback that we should think about "what is the sound of capitalism?". According to them, it seems too cliche, since I only used typical sounds, such as "rolling coins", "printing receipts" etc. This feedback made me focus on searching for more daily life sounds.

In order to change the elements of the sound, I did a mind map that I can remind of "capitalism" in our lives. Using those less cliche sounds are more interesting because I could imagine how the main character is doing in certain sound. For the final sound, I selected a few catchy sounds that I can make melody with.