Music fixes the chasm mental illness leaves. It fixes the errors in our soul, our hearts, our minds, and even though it lasts only as long as it resonates within your ears, it embeds itself right where weâre most vulnerable. Music is change. Music changes us. And because it changes us, it can ultimately become a very dangerous existence. Hence, in my artwork Mood Guitar, I have modified an important body of music â the âguitarâ, and âengineeredâ it to a form that embodies the true nature of music, and thus also reflects on the fragility of the human psyche as humanityâs dependency on music is illuminated. Our minds are so weak that we willingly become puppets hung on the string of each musical note, dancing to the rhythm of our own fantasies as we lose ourselves and sink into a denial of reality. We are stuck in a loop of fixing our emotions over and over again. Music becomes the drug, but without the drug. Yet is musical therapy really better? When we undergo music therapy, do we become machines controlled by the turn of a note â just waiting to glitch out?
The idea initially stemmed from my confusion between human, desire, and glitch, and which topic I should pick to focus on. Yet I gradually realised they were all one and the same, and they are much stronger when joined into one. The humanity of emotions, the desire to feel happy, and the error of our mentality â the merging of all three into one was what brought forth my concept of music therapy, as I joined my interest in music as well as mental illness into one as well. When I pondered on desire, a thought occurred to me that instead of Gilles Deleuzeâs view of desire as a constructive force, the impulses inflicted by mental illness is more of a destructive force, especially on the matter of OCD. Such an illness, as a whole, might accumulate to something positive on the outside (e.g. extra hygiene), but will eventually and inevitably scrape away at and destroy a personâs mentality. It reminded me of the short film âMOREâ by Mark Osborne, and how the weary inventor craved happiness, and as he gained more and more, he realised even more will never be enough. Yet, he can only still want even more and more in the lack of any other methods to dispel such an intrinsically engrained human desire for happiness. Thus, I drew from the idea of unstoppable impulses and turned it into an unstoppable desire to keep playing the Mood Guitar, which in some way, is a parallel to the happiness drug within that short film. I finally arrived on centering it all around glitch when I realised how truly messed up humanity is in such desires.
By cutting up a piece of paper into multiple 2.5 x 0.7cm strips, colouring them in either yellow, blue, purple, or black using connector pens, then gluing them meticulously onto each section of each fret so that it colour codes each individual note of the guitar to a particular emotion. Yellow represented happiness, blue was sadness, purple was confusion, and black was emptiness. The emotional tone colour of each note took a long time to figure out, as eventually, when you listen to consecutive notes so close together, emotions start to merge. What was sadness anymore? What was happiness? I found myself asking these questions in my quest to identify the emotions, to the point where it gave me a headache. This process was very central to my realisation of just how fragile the human mentality and comprehension of feelings were, as I subjected myself to experience it first hand through this project. I wanted to convey this vagueness of feeling to the audience in part two of my artwork, which was a documentation of my usage of the Mood Guitar. But the person within the video does not represent me, but is a symbol of all humanity. All humanity in their full desperation to reach their desired state of mind. The shifting black frame and the transforming dimensions of the video itself as it pans around the screen is a visual depiction of the state of the girlâs mind, and in the end, subtly, you realise that the girl has ended up in her initial spot on the screen to the left, and all has been for naught. It is inevitable that this search of a fix to our mental glitch will never end in its loop. You can try, but you can only try again.
We are addicted to this loop of breakage and repair.
Bibliography:
Nogrady, B. (2015). Mental Health Myths: Are Antidepressants Overprescribed? Retrieved September 10, 2015, from http://www.abc.net.au/health/features/stories/2014/09/18/4087816.htm
What is Music Therapy? (2012). Retrieved September 10, 2015, from http://www.austmta.org.au/content/what-music-therapy
Binaural Beats. (2009). Retrieved September 10, 2015, from http://gethighnow.com/binaural-beats
Suttie, J. (2015, January 12). Different Notes for Different Folks: How Music Makes the Brain Happy. Retrieved September 12, 2015, from http://www.sott.net/article/291763-Different-notes-for-different-folks-How-music-makes-the-brain-happy
Osborne, M. (Director). (2004). More [Motion picture]. United States: Despair.
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