Surgical muzak
March 24, 2009 § 2 Comments
This is a randomly picked video from the search result for “surgery” on YouTube. A nice enough run-through of a gastric bypass, but what’s with the cheesy background music? Did the guy record his voice overs in an hotel elevator?
I think as much as 80% of all surgical videos I watch has some sort of background music. Most tracks are cheesy and seems to have been picked from some outdated royalty free CD that happened to be lying around. The reason people put this music in their videos must be that they feel they need some sort of filler, for fear of being boring. Don’t they believe in the potential of their video material? You want the viewers to concentrate on the surgery and the explanation, but this muzak grabs all the attention!
Ever since I started making videos of surgery I have stayed away from this kind of background music. Used with finesse, I guess it could have its purpose, but like in motion pictures – the best music is the one you don’t notice. On a couple of videos of more aesthetic qualities, I have used some tracks from the Matmos album “A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure”, which features samples from surgery – to set the “tone”. But then just in parts of the video and not as a big woolly wall-to-wall carpet.
But that’s my opinion. What do you think?
The Sterile Eye 
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