Critical Analysis - Winnie Ngo

Winnie Ngo

English 110

20 April 2015

Will Knowing the Beauty of Music Make You want to learn it?

Every advertisement has a purpose and each one of them delivers a message in many different ways in order to persuade an audience to think a certain way or do something specific. A commercial film by Tosando Music Corporation advertises their music lessons through a short story that depicts the beauty of music; by demonstrating the beauty of music it can motivate a person to learn it for him or herself. By utilizing small details and organizing the scenes in a specific way to enhance the story, they provide the whole story in a short amount of time. In the commercial film, Tosando heavily uses pathos in order to gain the audience attention and make them feel and believe that music is wonderful hence they should learn it. Although pathos was executed extremely well in this film, it did lack ethos and logos, which would have made it more persuasive and effective.

Tosando Music is a corporation based in Japan that sells music related products such as instruments, books, and other musical goods while offering music lessons. In their advertisement, they focused on advertising their music lessons by showing a touching story that makes the audience understanding how amazing music can be and why it is something that consumers should consider learning.

Why would Tosando invest on a commercial specifically toward their music lessons instead of their musical supplies? The reasoning behind this would most likely be to bring more people into the music market. Knowing that musical goods are only significant to those who already know how to play music themselves, it is definitely a good idea to make the effort to expand the market in order to increase sales; if there are more people introduced into music then there will be more people buying musical goods or products. So not only does Tosando benefit from the profit from music lessons they also increase the market size to buy their products.

The commercial film begins with a scene that takes place at a wedding reception and the bride’s father steps up to play the piano. The bride appeared to be confused because according to what she knew about her father, he never knew how to play the piano. As the father plays a song, called Canon composed by Pachelbel, flashbacks are shown to indicate that the bride’s mother played this song when she was still alive and the bride was a still a little girl. After the mother’s death, the bride left the house after she became conflicted with her father; the family that was once happy and close had now completely fallen apart. The father decides to take piano lessons and diligently learns to play the song that the mother used to play. In between the flashbacks, scenes of the bride crying shows the painful past experience she had dealt with and the sense of the relationship between her and her father is renewed. Toward the end of the song she seemed to be very proud of her father and is more connected with him despite the conflicts of the past. The film ends by bringing back the scene with the whole family together leaving a warm good feeling.

Through the organization of the scenes and the little details shown in the commercial, Tosando was able to pack a ton of information or symbolism to tell a meaningful three-minute story. One example the shot of the music sheet with the name of the song on it while scene switched from her father to her mother playing the same piece. This allows the audience to quickly understand that this song wasn’t just a random song being played, but a meaningful one for the bride and the father. The order of the scenes played a significant role for the emotional part of the story telling. At first, as the bride was tearing up while watching her father, the flashbacks of the time she spent with her mother was shown, but when she couldn’t hold herself back from crying, the scene of her and her father either returning home from or going to the funeral followed. This enhances the audience’s understanding of the pain and agony she had go through. Another example would be the framed picture of the mother set on the piano by the father that was finally shown at the end. This symbolizes that the mother is watching over them and by having the family all together in one place like they did in the past –which is shown one last time at the end of the film–the family is reunited once again. Lastly, the father did not say a single word throughout the commercial film, but the bride understood her father’s intentions of bringing back the family together with the music alone. This provides the overall theme of the film that “Music transcends words” which is written out at the end before the last scene of the family being together.

Pathos is a great device that appeals to emotion and is very effective because it can creates or arouse a particular feeling that can lead the audience’s thoughts toward a certain attitude or belief. Tosando effectively uses pathos to gain their audience’s attention toward their music lessons. By using emotional messages to deliver the idea that music is a powerful, inspiring, and amazing form of art, the feelings of admiration toward music is grown after watching the commercial, leaving a heavy imprint on the audience’s mind. With the theme or the message that music is a sensational form of expression clearly depicted in the emotional film, people can associate music to something intimate, bonding, heartwarming, and beautiful from an overall perspective. These imprints should be strong enough to inspire or motivate people to start taking music lessons because they may want to obtain that ability to play and produce wonderful music.

Ethos, which is the appeal to ethics, is great for making claims appear more truthful by providing information about the person’s or organization’s level of experiences and success. By demonstrating the credibility of the advertiser, the claims would become more believable and the audience would feel more willing to accept the information about a product or service that is being advertised. Despite Tosando’s strong and powerful approach through pathos, the commercial lacked ethos to show how great the corporation is and why consumers should pick their service. They could presented the history of the company in order to shows the success and reliability of their service or products they are providing. Another way they could have approached it was by showing the experiences of their musical instructor to indicate that professional or highly experienced musicians would be teaching the course providing trustworthy and exceptional music lessons. By using ethos, the persuasiveness of the commercial film would have elevated to the next level.

Logos appeals to logic through facts allowing the audience to believe that the point being made is the truth and is right; these facts can be taken from statistics, history, and studies. In this particular commercial it is difficult to trace out any sort of logos being used because of Tosando’s strong emphasizes on the emotional connection people can have through or with music. Although it may not be necessary, adding logos would definitely be useful to attract the attention of those who are not so much appealed emotionally. Possible statements with logos could be about how knowing how to play music makes a person cooler because everyone enjoys listening to music or about the statistics on success rate of those who have taken their classes demonstrating that their lessons are the most effective and popular.

Tosando could have had logos and pathos in their commercial film to make it more appealing, but overall Tosando’s commercial was very effective in grabbing the audience’s attention and make them feel differently about music. With every detail and scenes carefully organized, the perspective of music now becomes something more special in an emotional way; therefore, sticks to the audience and may make them consider about learning how to play the piano or other instruments. By understanding the beauty of music and knowing how great it is, it would be difficult to say one wouldn’t want try to learn it.