Even though all twelve poems tackle two general topics – chronic pain, and battling with drug addiction, after carefully listening to each poem I was able to identify four major themes: pain, isolation, acceptance, and redemption. I recognized these themes as I’ve encountered them many times in literature. Even though completely unrelated to the foundation of this album, they reminded me of Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”. I realize that these are archetypal themes and that I should conduct more detailed research to avoid ending up with a generic-sounding piece of mediocrity.

I started with an article by Schäfer et al. (2013) titled “The psychological functions of music listening”. Even though it is believed that music evolved as a means of social cohesion and communication, the study conducted by the authors showed that regulation of arousal and mood, and achievement of self-awareness were deemed more important by most subjects. This information provided me with a pragmatic goal for this project, a foundation on which to build its idealistic objective of raising awareness for social issues like the corruption of the Romanian healthcare system or the archaic views and methods of the Romanian justice system vis-a-vis drug addiction. By knowing what my listeners are looking for when engaging with music I now have the means to capture their attention.

Listening to the lyrics I noticed that their colorful nature would easily stir my imagination and conjure vivid images and scenes within it. I then realized that I should indeed treat the poems as film scenes. Armed with this important piece of information I began looking for the tools to help me achieve this project’s aforementioned goals. Recommended by my tutor, Mr. Gareth Mitchell, Michel Chion’s “Audio-Vision” proved crucial in helping me navigate this project, with concepts like synchresis, and empathetic and anempathetic music playing a central role in the way I shaped and composed the music to accompany the spoken-word poems/scenes.