Music has the fantastic quality of being able to preserve and make emotions and memories present at any time. You play a favourite song and you immediately start a chain of associations of beautiful and difficult situations connected with music.
It's even so captivating that the comments below the music videos on YouTube are full of very intimate personal memories that seem rather out of place in the flood of other comments. Lonely, desperate, they're such cries in the dark. And reading them, it's a bit like not being able to tear yourself away from the personal conversation of fellow passengers on a train. It's not meant for you, but it's impossible not to perceive it.
Web artist Chiara Amisola creates a fascinating universe of poetic web projects around her, exploring the boundaries of intimacy and privacy within the somewhat anonymous yet brutally open world of internet sharing. And naturally, the phenomenon of YouTube comments under music has not escaped her attention.
Chiara has read the comments under hundreds of love songs and created a thesoundof.love library of extremely deep personal accounts of every conceivable form of love - fulfilled, unfulfilled, tragic and euphoric. People you don't know and who don't even know each other open their hearts to you here in one spectacular forum. Each text is of course accompanied by a music track.
While you read the heartfelt commentary of a girl who didn't get to tell the boy of her heart that she loves him and he's now dead, his favorite songs play to accompany it. Chiara has thus given a more dignified setting to the memories and emotions of strangers. She stripped them of their inappropriateness, gave them a place and a context. Here and now, Chiara proclaims on the web, listen quietly to the sounds of love.
More to read
Emotional Sentiment in People’s YouTube Channel Comments
Emotions under Discussion: Gender, Status and Communication in Online Collaboration
Analysing Emotional Sentiment in People’s YouTube Channel Comments
This text originally appeared in the Czech edition of the daily Metro, where I write a monthly feature on the increasingly fleeting context of human coexistence with technology.