What you hear is what you (don’t) see. Mario Wienerroither’s Foley art in Musicless Musicvideos

Abstract

Abstract Mario Wienerrother’s Musicless Musicvideos series have recently surfaced on the Internet and since 2006, they have gained millions of views as a humorous YouTube sensation. As a professional sound designer, he re-edits already released and often widely known music videos by depriving them of music and adding a different, entirely sonic audio track that he records himself. All of these reworkings seem to raise the same hypothetical question: what if these audio-visual excerpts were deprived of their most signifying aural expression, namely music? Would they still have the same meaning? Would they tell the same ‘story’? This article aims to explore Wienerroither’s practices and the effects they provoke on our understanding of the aesthetic conventions of the music video. As a first step, I will provide a detailed account of the process for realizing the Musicless Musicvideos by drawing on an interview I carried out with the author. Secondly, I will investigate a number of Wienerroither’s productions in relation to (1) the aesthetic conventions of music video and (2) the practical realm of Foley artistry. Through these comparisons, I will explore how the renewed sonic dimension in these videos matches the settings, objects and human figures we see on-screen and the extent to which this can change our understanding of the images themselves, through the production of a humorous effect and the construction of a sonic diegesis superimposed to the re-edited materials. The objective of the article is to demonstrate how, by relying on a sound-centred practice, Musicless Musicvideos undermine the overall balance between the visual and the aural elements in a typical music video.