Audience Theory

Encoding And Decoding Audience Theory

This is an active audience theory developed by Stuart Hall, which examines the relationship between a text and it's audience.

• Encoding- the process by which a text is constructed by it's producers.
• Decoding - the process by which the audience reads, understands and interprets a text.

Stuart Hall, states that all texts are polysemic, meaning they may be read differently by different people, depending on their identity, cultural knowledge and opinions.

In this video, I really like how is everything matching together, from the dance moves choreography, the black and white costumes,where even female's characters are wearing tuxedo's, just like males, which could be seen as they are all the same. All this match to the genre of the music song, which reminded me of 80's songs. Where we can hear the sound of funky, raw, little bit of jazz music techniques. It almost seems like the the song and the singer match together; containing soul and heart. This whole music video, is very unconventional;  containing the message to the audience, which is hard to understand or recognise, and some people might not understand it at all, and others will have completely different view on this music video. This links to Hall's audience theory, that all text are polysemic, and can be interpreted in different way. 
Within this music video, the singer Janelle Monae, portrays an inpatient that possesses the power to walk through walls and later she catches the 'crazy/dancing feet' with her friends. The video 'Tightrope' is setting in the place called the Palace of the Dogs. 

What impressed me was that at the beginning of the video, we are introduced into black screen with white graphics which says ''The Palace if the Dogs Asylum: Dancing has been forbidden for its subversive effects on the residents and its tendency to lead to illegal magical practises''. This is very unconventional, as I haven't seen anything like this before in music video. This can attract the audience attention, as well as it seems to me like introduction to something that this video will be about. Opening shot is a wide shot of two men wearing tuxedos; sitting against a white tiled wall. One is reading a book, and the other is playing with a small ball, which eventually drifts up and floats in the air, in this moment, the song start to play, and beat are faster, and faster.

What I like about this video is the fact that many people can interpret it in different ways. Here is an example of how the singer interpret her own song.

'' Tightrope is basically dealing with how in life it's important to keep your balance and not get too high or low about things during the time when you're either being praised pr being criticised ''. 

I have done a small research to shows that this theory is true. Here, you can see few examples of how people interpret this video. 

Chloe Blanch says :

I think the video is about somebody who's either in prison, or in a mental health hospital (because of the last who pushes the trolley with medicine on) and its about them having to walk a tightrope to either get out of prison or the mental hospital.

Steve Allwright says:

little confusing video but think its about people being controlled and not being aloud to do what they want.

Bethany Fox says:

In this video, they used quite dull mise-en-scene to create a dull medical atmospheric feeling,however, never really know whats gonna happen in life gotta live it to as full as possible pills and stuff hanging around willing nilly not really clean cut and done properly only one nurse and the the two black figures hanging around to bring her back to earth because shes in some fantasy world.

Jacob Fraser says:

I think that the story is about an asylum where dancing was banned due to connotations with music, but the people living in the asylum might be imagining it all since she is kept there.

Samantha Dixon says:

i think it's about no having much freedom and that whenever she feels good or bad she has to keep control of herself, also it looks as though she is in a hospital or asylum place? which could mean that the people around her think its wrong to dance/sing/have fun or what ever it is she does. they also have no face or no unique-ness which i think means that she isn't aloud to express her individuality.

Elizabeth Sinclair says:

It starts off with two people doing magic it then goes on to show the people in the mental hospital dancing.

From my research, I've found out that the most of those people were really confused and didn't know how to describe this music video, however, all of them think that it's about people living in mental health hospital because of the opening wide shot of institution.