Eva remembers the first time she and her brother had to kill a chicken to feed her family. She didn't want to kill the chook but understood that the 'horrible' action was necessary.
For a storytelling activity Eva chose to share an emotional memory from her childhood. Press play on the video above to hear her story.
You may have noticed that Eva's story has a music soundtrack. How did the music make you feel?
Movies, games, radio, TV shows and ABC Open videos often use music to set the mood of the story or to support the emotional tone of what the viewer sees and hears.
ABC Open storytellers living in north Qld wanted to understand how to use music to help capture the emotions of their stories, so we came up with the following activity.
Record the memory of an emotional moment in our lives and find music that would support the emotions felt to help tell the story.
It's fun to imagine what our memories would be like if accompanied by a music soundtrack and even more fun to make it happen.
Starting with Eva's story we'll be sharing our emotional memories on ABC Open so keep an eye on the website.
It was intriguing to experiment with different music to accompany our stories. Mismatches, such as a happy piece of music combined with a sad story sounded odd, and vice-versa.
We discovered that with good combinations the music became invisible and the context of the story more powerful. We found ourselves absorbed by the storyteller's voice while feeling the emotion of the music.
We also found that if we listened to the music first it would affect the tone in our voice when we told our stories; happy music meant a bright and bubbly telling of the story, sad music meant a slower more sombre telling of the story.
Music changed our mood! No wonder gyms play pumped up doof doof or rock music. Dull music in the gym would probably not work.
Therefore, we learned that music dictates the mood of the listener even before the story (voice) begins. This means we could start our stories with a piece of music to get our viewers and listeners in the mood we would like them to feel.
Sometimes music is not required. The peaceful atmosphere caused by natural sounds in a video postcard about cute river animals would be lessened if music was used, and sometimes the natural tones of people's voices are emotional enough to portray emotion in the story.
For this storytelling activity we kept the task simple by selecting one piece of music to accompany the memory. Next time we may try multiple pieces of music as the tone changes throughout the story, or even add sound effects!
A sound of an axe and a chicken in Eva's story would be quite dramatic.
We've been having fun selecting music for memories. But what about real-time?
If I had a composer writing music for my life it would be in the style of Beethoven or maybe Hans Zimmer with a little acoustic rock thrown in, and maybe Seinfeld-style guitar riffs to segue between moments in my day.
What style of music would accompany your life?
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