Transcript

Christine

Hello, I’m Christine, welcome to Insight Brilliance, all about internal communication. Today we’re going to be talking about the role of music in communication and how it can transcend language barriers, cultural barriers, and really, truly connect with people. And I’m very chuffed right now to be sitting with Jane, who is a client director at H&H.

Jane

Hi Christine, thank you so much. I’m really excited to be here, if not a little nervous, but hey, first podcast, first time for everything isn’t there?

Christine

There is. And we’re starting with, a winner, I think, because we’re going to be talking about music and the role of music and comms.

Jane

Right. Let’s go.

Christine

What interests me is that to use music in communications, you don’t need necessarily to have any technical expertise in music.

Jane

Absolutely. I think that’s one of the joys about it. I think when I was approached to do this podcast, at first there was this sort of … the word expert was floated past, and that kind of made me cringe a little bit because it’s anything but that at all. It’s just something that I think is part of who we are, a part of us as people, a part of how we tell stories. And it’s using that as a powerful tool. It’s not about being an expert at it at all.

Christine

Yeah. You said something recently that really struck a chord with me, that music is storytelling.

Jane

I’ve learned that much more as kind of, my experience of my career has kind of been introduced to different skill sets, you know, as we’ve gone. So I guess where I started was with words. Words were always my tool, you know, and then through words, then became interested in illustration and visual and how visual then weaves onto that.

And then you layer on the sound, and then music comes in and it’s that finishing touch that can make or break something, really. And I think I’ve realised more and more the power of music in actually completing that story and making it so incredible.

Christine

Would you say then it’s more about intuition, it’s more about intuitively seeing and hearing and learning what works rather than applying any technical musical knowledge?

Jane

Well, it would be, in my case, good. I’ve got little to no technical knowledge. I mean, that’s the thing, isn’t it? I mean, wow, the experiences I’ve had, working with professional musicians is, is something else. Seeing them in their craft and what they do. It’s just wonderful and amazing to see.

But I do think that there is that element of intuition, of knowing when something is right. I mean, it’s subjective. You know, not always does everyone agree and but that was what I love … The incredible amount of debate that can end up being around just a 22-second piece of music. 20 seconds, 10 seconds, even five seconds.

And that can be full-on debates going on. So yes, I do. I do think that there is a level of intuition that happens, and that’s what’s lovely about it, because you just feel it don’t you?

Christine

Yeah, yeah. It’s about the feeling. Well okay. So that’s the idea around it. Let’s just talk a few nuts and bolts when you, putting together, for example, a video for a client or an animation and you want to choose music, would you just download a piece of music and buy it, or do you have to have somebody who composes it specially?

Jane

Oh, I’d love to have someone compose it especially. But budget doesn’t allow. Budget doesn’t allow. So most of the time we, you know, we buy online, and there are some incredible sites out there for it and some wonderful things. And there’s some, you know, the kind of varying degrees of that. There are some where people, you can actually ask them to compose for you as well, which is something we’re exploring a little bit more now because it’s becoming more affordable.

But we have also, to be fair, we have actually used someone before as a composer, which was, I think you’ll remember that, Christine, that was an experience for us. It was a very exciting opportunity. And we had this phenomenal, phenomenal musician. I mean, she was a local artist, but she just had a way of kind of combining folk music with technical sound.

I mean, you can tell I’m an expert, but the way I’m describing it! But we loved it, but the client didn’t, so what can you do? That one is sitting in a drawer somewhere, hopefully going to be resurfaced at some point.

Christine

Oh, shame. Can you tell me a little bit about that, about what it was for? And we’re not going to talk about the, name the client specifically, but maybe what the piece of music. Yeah. What the piece of music was all about.

Jane

It was really interesting, and this is where you know, the elements of helping using music to say what words just can’t cut it. It was really exploring psychological safety. And it was exploring it in the concept of that feeling of uncertainty and feeling inside. Yeah. Or those, those doubts and questions and things that might hold us back.

And this was specifically in the context of safety at work. And I’m talking about real safety. It’s a very high-risk industry for this particular client. And we wanted to convey the essence of what psychological safety gives you is that calm both inside and out.

So we wanted to use music to create that discord to show how, what we’re thinking, what we’re feeling. They don’t always go side by side. They can clash. We can have that anxiety and angst going on inside of us, and then this lovely sense of how actually, through psychological safety and feeling safe with each other, there can be this lovely calm.

So we just use the music to kind of create that and then sort of move you into a space of calm. And it was so beautiful, but it was just maybe too clever for our own good in that particular instance. And I think the client chose a piece of music like Apocalypse Now. What can you do?

Christine

What can you do?

Jane

What can you do? Again, it’s about the feelings that the music evokes in in the audience, isn’t it? Because it just didn’t evoke the right feelings for this particular person.

Christine

And so how do you go about choosing a piece of music? So for an animation to convey what’s important about their new strategy, where do you start?

Jane

It’s an interesting question. And I would say that I’ve learned a lot. Let’s just say I approach things very differently now. It used to be this kind of when I first started in, this was the sort of idea that first of all, you look at the words, what do you want to say?

And then, you look at the visual and then music is your add-on at the end. And I really think that over the last few years we’ve been changing that approach and considering the whole so it’s almost how do we do this? It’s almost like you need to think about the tone of what the words are.

At the same time, you start then thinking, right, what is the music? What’s the music going to add to this? What’s it going to tell? And again, saying it, but it’s this critical part of the storytelling. And then at the same time, considering the visuals. So it’s almost like if you use clashing colours, you will use clashing music.

Everything just kind of all weaves together. So what we do is we work with whichever skill sets, the different skill sets to come together, and we discuss all of these things, and then basically we go and listen, listen and listen and listen to loads and loads and loads and loads of tracks.

Compare, compare, think, ask, come back, search some more, and sometimes we have to apply it and then you listen to it and you’re like, that’s not right. Sounded right in principle, but it’s not right. And then we go back to the drawing board and start again. I often think the client isn’t quite so aware of the amount of time that we put into actually finding the right track of music for a piece.

Christine

Yeah.

Jane

And when it’s right, you know that it’s right. You get that feeling that it connects.

And I use the term music actually, because I was thinking about, I was remembering the other day some pieces of work we did for mental health, domestic violence and also actually climate change, quite tough, tough subjects, you know, and somehow, somehow, music didn’t feel right. A pretty soundtrack or an upbeat kind of rhythm.

It just didn’t work. And so what we did is we actually did like sort of sound textures almost, I want to call them, we kind of layered sounds. You spoke about birdsong earlier, you know, and we actually did in some of them, we applied birdsong. You apply sounds of the world going by and you can just layer these things together and in a sense that creates the soundscape that is so wonderful.

So even there we talk about music, but actually it’s everything, it’s even the sound effects that you apply to things to layer on and make it sound so rich and wonderful.

Christine

And when we’ve talked about how you choose music to go together with a piece that we’ve already created, like a video or an animation, there are other ways that we’ve used music. I wonder if you’d be able to tell us about this in particular, a global programme about safety in the workplace, which used music and movement together to connect people across different cultures, different languages.

Jane

That was an amazing experience. Yeah. It’s interesting, we’ve been really lucky to work on that programme now for many years. And it’s a wonderful thing that because each time you learn from what you did before, and even though there is a kind of, a slight anxiety about having to do something bigger or better, we kind of see that every year we’ve learned something new.

And so why I’m saying that is actually the inspiration for this was the year before we’d done quite a complicated programme, and there are lots of parts and lots of complicated elements to it. And as communicators, we need to simplify that as much as possible. But even then, there were many moving parts and one of the employees at a particular place made up a song to remember them.

And it was something so inspiring about that, it just suddenly made us all think, yeah, that’s it. That’s one way to remember things. You know, music is another way. And writing songs to kind of get something to sink in. And we decided to do, kind of, this was a values programme, and it was all about recognising that none of the values work in isolation.

You’ve got to do them together. And how do we convey that message? By creating a bonkers idea. We got some a phenomenal percussionist involved, and he created these independent rhythms. And I think he calls himself a movement artist. We’d done a, I’d met him doing a Ted X, actually, so it was really lovely, having known what he was capable of doing and getting these people together and saying, right, this is what we want to do.

Trying to sell it in was quite tough.

Not with the communicators and the kind of employee engagement people, but senior leaders were like, what do you want us to do? He wants us to dance? And it was like, yeah, I want you to dance. We want you to take this rhythm and just see, because if you have one of them on their own, it doesn’t work when you put them all together.

Look what happens now. It is a global programme. And let’s be honest, certain cultures are more open to movement and getting out of their comfort zone than others. So it went almost global, but it was the most wonderful thing to see, you know, huge crowds of people just having fun and doing this.

And it was the energy levels that came with it that was so wonderful. But we got to do it, we made it happen.

Christine

Could you just talk through how that worked? It was at events, several events around the world?

Jane

Yeah. They have like a global day where, everybody kind of comes together and talks about safety and kind of explores what it means, and what’s really important. And they recognise each other. And it’s a wonderful opportunity to have so many people in a space. But yeah, so that was really just this opportunity of getting people to do it. And it was amazing to see they did it.

Christine

So we had people on stage, like showing the moves.

Jane

People on stage showing the moves. What we also did, which is actually really good fun, we had a studio in London and it was one of these white on white studios. So this I mean, there’s a proper technical term for them, but as I said, I never can remember these things. And we got some dancers. It’s a really great team. So there were basically, six values and six rhythms. And of those six rhythms, we filmed them doing the moves and with the rhythm going, and we also did them with instruments as well, just in case people didn’t want to actually dance. They could do the rhythm.

And then we kind of created a karaoke-style video where we helped using graphics that kind of came up above everyone’s heads. We created this wonderful sort of karaoke video sense, and you could just watch the video and you would say, right, you guys go, and then they would watch the dancer or the musician do it.

And it worked wonderfully well. It was these great big screens of people doing it. So there are many ways to skin a cat, as they say. So we tried all approaches for that. But what was really lovely is that, they did actually also hire dancers in some instances. And there was a wonderful group, in Singapore actually, of all places, that just went mad.

And it was such fun because they actually built on what we’d done. We’d almost gone so simple that, you know, so it would be really straightforward, but they went and just built on it and built on it and just was wonderful. The result was fabulous.

Christine

And this was getting senior leaders dancing, people who worked on the front line, people who worked in offices, everybody together, danced the values movements. So one sound and movement for each of the values.

Jane

Absolutely. And I remember, one of the days we got some, just to sort of sell this, we got people from the head office to come down to the studio at the same place. So we obviously had the dancers that were professional, and then we got a sort of a lovely group of volunteers. I think some were willing volunteers and some were potentially dragged to the location to have a go at this!

And a very, very serious man came up to me and said, I don’t really want to be here. Please, whatever happens, could you put me somewhere very simple? You know, it was quite like, yeah, at the back, basically at the back. So I kind of like gave him the simplest of the moves, which was one of the first ones.

And the dancer was a great guy. He was a really relaxed guy from Durban, if I remember, because it was quite nice because obviously I’m South African and, anyway, he started, by the end, his shirt was unbuttoned and his tie was gone and he was just having the time of his life. And it was so wonderful to watch. It really was wonderful to see how everyone just actually really did enjoy it.

Christine

It was wonderful. Well, it’s a universal language, isn’t it? You don’t need to speak the same words in the same way. Music is the universal language, but it’s not universally popular when you introduce it into the workplace. However, when you mention that some people are not as ready to join in with the dancing and the movement if they get involved, like this guy who had his tie off and his shirt open, maybe they would have bought into it.

Jane

I think so, yeah, I think so. But even those, do you know, it’s one of those things where even if people don’t get involved, it’s memorable and it’s sometimes just exciting to take that risk. And just even if someone’s standing in the background going, this is ridiculous, I’m not going to do this, it’s like, at least I’ll remember.

I’ll be doing something, we’ll sing something, we’ll sing it. Because it was interesting. Yesterday, a client was saying to us about the inevitable challenge we often face around branding, internal-external brand, what we show outside the external and brand is a precious thing, but then what happens internally?

And one of the things she was actually saying, one of the things they’re struggling with is the fact that brand has put a sort of a rule that you have to use the same soundtrack on everything you do, every video, every intro, every outro. And the problem is that people have stopped listening because it’s become such a kind of … Think about elevator music. You know, it just merges into the background. So that’s another interesting thing, that some music can actually really numb your senses and actually kill something, whereas how do you also keep that going? How do you keep, you know, using music in a way that really is attention grabbing?

Christine

I wonder if in that kind of case, it’s something that reassures because if you don’t listen to it, you don’t notice it as such, but you know it’s there and it puts you into a kind of reassured, comfortable state where you’re ready to receive the messages.

Jane

We’re talking about some sort of hypnosis going on. Yeah, like a secret subliminal messaging going on. Oh, that’s a good point. Maybe he just said they were really bored, so I don’t know.

Christine

Well, I think it’s true that even if people don’t agree about music, music does have the power to rouse some quite strong opinions, strong emotions.

Jane

How many arguments have we all had about which music track? Eventually it comes down to votes. It’s kind of like, all right, all right, that’s fine. We step back and let’s go. Yeah.

Christine

I remember there’s a lovely piece that we were involved with for a client. It was during one of the lockdowns.

Jane

Yeah. That was absolutely wonderful. If I recall, it was using a popular song, a well-known popular song, but getting everybody to add their bit to it. But that was wonderful in the sense that actually it was almost, amateur musician experience because everybody kind of got involved with that, self-recorded themselves, but with their families as well.

And I remember there was a guy playing the piano, the guitar, there was a flute, a random saxophone somewhere. And then these wonderfully brave singers as well, you know, singing completely, what do they call it? A capella. Yeah. A capella, it was wonderful. It was such fun.

Christine

Music is for everybody. There shouldn’t be any gatekeeping in music. There is often music snobbery involved. When you talk too deeply about music and about the use of music and whether it’s too popular, whether it’s too mainstream. But there shouldn’t be any gatekeeping because its value is in the way that it belongs to everybody, not just those who happen to be very good at playing an instrument or very good at singing.

Jane

I agree completely, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do any of it and I wouldn’t be enjoying music at all. I was the back row of the choir, that’s for sure.

Christine

I think you’re very much in the front row of how we use music and sound and these things that we have inside us to really connect with people. And it’s a very powerful thing.

Jane

I’d love to be able to do more with it. You know, I really wish we had – we don’t work with big budgets, you know. But I’m kind of always thinking, how can we bring in musicians? Because when we did that one again for the rhythms, we went to the studio to record and we had ridiculously tight deadlines around turnaround times.

We had to do it in a day, and it was a long day. I think we were there for 24 hours type thing, recording in these tiny back studio of someone’s garage. Nothing glamorous in our industry at all. But, you know, they wanted to add some brass, just to give it a richness to the basic rhythms. That was something, you know, a lot of thought went into it as well.

And the instruments chosen for the various kind of rhythms were all chosen from the different parts of the world where this company operates. So there was some meaning there as well, in terms of the rhythms and again, that is global, isn’t it? Everywhere, you know, drums everywhere. So they brought in these young guys. There was a trombone player, a trumpeter and a saxophonist. I was in love with all three of them back in the day, no question. It was just wonderful to listen to them. And again, it was, you know, it was what was so fascinating about it. And that’s something I’ve always, I just admire so much about musicians is their ability to, to just jam.

You know, there were no rules there. There was no sheet music there. There’s nothing composed for them to play. You just saw what happened. Guys, just bring in a little bit of that. And that was fantastic. Totally fantastic.

Christine

So composition on the fly.

Jane

Total composition on the fly. And they were having such fun doing it. And maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s part of it. When something is a joy to do, it’s hard for that not to be infectious. Yeah.

Christine

Did it infect the client?

Jane

Oh, it was lovely, actually, because they became as passionate about the project as we were. So, yes, there was that, and I think a lot of people enjoyed it, I like to say they remember it.

Christine

I can’t imagine you’d forget that.

Jane

Gosh. Yeah, we could talk. I could talk about this for hours.

Christine

Jane, it’s been great fun. Thank you very much.

Jane

It’s been an absolute pleasure as well. It’s been really lovely just remembering all these things. You know, sometimes we forget what things we’ve been involved in. So thank you very much. I’ve really enjoyed going down memory lane about this insight.