I've been thinking about titles. What are they for, how to design them, and most importantly: why do so many of them suck? Through the rigorous method of "just thinking about it", I've come up with some conclusions to these queries, which may spark your imagination the next time you create art, and maybe, just maybe, you'll spend more than five seconds deciding on a name.
(By the way, the title to this essay is a very obscure reference to the fabled Food series featuring chef Jonathan Lonathan.)
So: what are titles, anyway? Why do they exist? It's a common trend in the modern visual arts to title your pieces "Untitled", sometimes with a number afterwards, which begs the question: why should we require artists to give titles in the first place? Well, that number given afterwards gives us a clue as to the first purpose: identification, categorization, metadata. Titles are useful simply for quick and convenient reference of a particular piece, similarly to file names in computers, or actual names of real people. Instead of saying: "the portrait of a woman on a green and yellow background smiling mysteriously, painted by a very recognizable Italian artist in the 16th century", you can say: "the Mona Lisa". Useful, eh?
This style of naming has been used since the dawn of the written word, up to today. Up until the Romanticism period, almost all pieces of music were named Concerto for Violin in D minor and so forth; art was named Lady with an Ermine or Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear... and today, if you look at amateur (and even professional) soundtracks, you'll see titles like Main Theme, Ending Theme, Green Hills... Not very creative, but useful for quickly finding the track you're thinking of – more on that later.
But titles aren't just tags used to assign art in the endless conveyor belt of human creativity; they can also work in tandem with the content of the work itself. I call this style of title the "description", which can be more factual or more artistic. This is the main purpose I talked about in my ancient video essay on naming tracks, in which I encouraged creators to use more abstract and artsy-fartsy names (Lost Signal, The Sculpture, Skittle) rather than factual, identificatory ones (Shriek and Ori, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, Southern Horizons).
Titles are, after all, what builds our expectations before we start to engage with a piece. If the title is lame or too clear-cut in its definition, it can distort our perception of the piece – much like after playing a game, we tend to perceive its soundtrack solely through the lens of that game (especially if it's story-focused).
The third and most elusive type of title is the one which appears to be at odds with the content of the piece itself – not a clear black-and-white contrast, but something that makes the title feel like it doesn't quite fit. And yes, sometimes it's because the artist is an amateur and can't come up with good titles, but sometimes it's because the connection of the title to the piece is so deep that only the artist could really understand it. This is my favorite kind of title, because it reminds me that there is always more to be found in art, even if you've already seen or heard it a thousand times.
So these are the three types or purposes of titles I have come up with, but in reality, I think I'd put them all on a spectrum rather than a classification: a spectrum of description going from most factual and cold to most emotional and personal. Have a peek at this scientific chart:
I think this shows that the main purpose of titles, in general, is description of the piece itself, a sort of tag or very short summary of what it's about. As it gets more artsy, it refers to less and less specific details about the piece; a perfect title would summarize the quintessence of a piece, whatever that may be, without referencing any kind of surface-level context (as with soundtracks, for example). But let's look at the pros and cons of each of these stages.
Starting with the most boring kind of title: the statistical listing. I think this niche category is only worth considering either if you're confident that you don't want any titles (which is when you do the "Untitled" spiel), or you're going for a special effect with your titlelessness (the "art on an endless conveyor belt" image I brought up earlier). Either way, you know what you're doing; most amateurs don't even consider this kind of title. The classic example for this type of title is modern art, but it was also used to some extent in the past, e.g. each of Bach's pieces has a unique "BWV" number for the purpose of classification. (However, it wasn't included in the original titles given by the composer, so I'm not sure if it counts.)
Interestingly, while the "enumerated title" does technically make it trivial for computers to find and keep track of pieces of art, it does also make it very hard for humans to remember. There's a reason we use names and not numbers to recognize people, towns, objects. But it looks like Sony still hasn't learned this.
The next stage is factual descriptions – pretty much all titles before the Romanticism period were like this. They're very useful, just like the statistical listing, for quickly finding the piece you're thinking of, just in a more human-friendly way (with pieces of music it's a bit more difficult unless you have perfect pitch, and those titles usually include numbers anyway; this shows how it's really quite impossible to fully differentiate these 'stages of titles' and I'm just doing it for the sake of structure).
This is also the category of titles where I'd put in most song, book, movie and game titles: What Is Love, Macbeth, Psychonauts, Joker all basically describe themselves: songs take the most memorable phrase or word from the refrain, whereas other media take the name of the protagonist, central location, central plot point etc. – whatever is most recognizable and indicative of the piece as a whole. For instance, in Psychonauts, the main character Raz joins a summer camp for psychonauts to become a psychonaut. Hence the title.
I suppose the main use for this kind of title, apart from identification, is a very brief description of what the work is about; however, I think it can also be used in a different way for abstractification and decontextualization (I may have made those words up) – with the "baroque music" example, Concerto for Violin in A minor says nearly nothing about the emotion and human element of the piece, what the author was going through, or any of that annoying "context" stuff. It's similar to the Untitled craze, in a way – it completely lets the piece speak for itself.
Next up: the "slightly emotional description". What do I mean by this? Well, take the example in the diagram above: instead of calling the track Southern Areas Theme, or something to that tone, it's called Southern Horizons – it's just abstract enough that if you haven't played The Talos Principle 2, you won't know when it's meant to play; but if you have, it's really obvious. This kind of title is the one I like to criticize the most, especially in soundtracks, because it shows that the author put in just a couple milliseconds of thought into the titles, but not nearly enough to actually make something thought-provoking or meaningful. It's painfully mediocre.
Here's also where I'd put the strange category of titles which are just quotes – this applies mostly to soundtracks, and specifically the Talos Principle soundtracks. Damjan must really have zero creativity for titles... the ones in the TTP1 OST were strange enough, especially with the two consecutive tracks A Land Of Great Beauty and A Land Of Ruins, which, apart from sounding very similar and referring to the same area, have titles which start with the same three words. What were you thinking?
But okay, this quote-inspired naming scheme can work well if it's done correctly – not like in the TTP2 OST – that one is kind of a train wreck. The worst cases are the "main" tracks for the four areas – Is That a Puzzle, Our Ancestors, Southern Horizons and The Scale of It All. The third one is fine, I guess, but the rest? Among the sea of similar weird names, you're forced to listen through the tracks one by one to find them. And these four tracks are maybe the most memorable out of the whole soundtrack, given how often you hear them, and they're all excellent as well.
Let's do a little case study of the last example – The Scale of It All. It plays in the fourth area of the game, the west, where – apart from West-1, which is ugly and boring – you see huge and breathtaking structures: a plateau high up in the sky and a cliffy area, both with huge statues seemingly baked into the landscape. Given the story context and what we know about Athena, what happened to Byron and our crew's opinions on the whole mission: the slow, melancholy tunes played by some kind of lute or guitar at 1:21 and 3:37 really bring mixed feelings. They certainly didn't make me think of Mayor Hermanubis' quote: "The scale of it all is truly breathtaking"; that would rather fit an epic orchestral piece. Rather, it made me think of the quiet, informed and indescribable kind of reflection that Athena is presumably trying to instill within us. Perhaps the title alludes to how Herman doesn't seem to get the point of the whole adventure, but that's a bit of a stretch for me.
So, Mr. Wiseguy, what would you name this amazing track? That's a great question, and an exercise I will attempt at the end of this essay.
Following from the Mediocrity Zone, we have the "very artsy description". This is my personal favorite and the one I was encouraging in that video essay; basically, you use a phrase or a word that is only loosely connected to the themes of the work itself, more on a "deep emotional" level than the factual, obvious level we were looking at before. My example of choice here is unambiguously James Bennett's soundtracks to Fred Wood's LOVE game series (also named with the "very artsy description" mindset, since on a surface level, the games have absolutely nothing to do with love). Bennett has a very cool tradition of naming each track with a single word to describe it – and, somehow, all of them fit, despite seeming like random words.
I'd give an example, but to be honest, all of these titles are so good that you better just look at the LOVE 3 OST, Kuso OST Vol. 1 and Kuso OST Vol. 2, listen to some of the tracks and see how you feel about their titles. You've got Nucleus sounding like the blazing hot engine at the core of a giant facility, the stylish sweepy-sounding percussion and dance tune of Tuxedo, the clean, rhythmic percussion of Metric reminding me of metric checkered paper for graphs, the quiet, mosaic-like reflection of Omni... there's really no way to properly describe the relationship of these titles with their works, they just fit.
And if you want to make titles like this but don't know how (and my previous description probably didn't help), don't worry – wait for the exercise at the end.
And finally, we end up in the very sparse territory of titles which seem not to make any sense – but the thing is, they do. They do, to the author, and a few people who really understand what the work is truly about. (Of course, the extent of understanding differs greatly between viewers of the work in question, so shift the boundaries of my title-scale accordingly. Maybe LOVE's track titles fall into this category for you.)
The example I gave in my graph above is Touch Sensitive's Before U Met My Body. I'd love to delve deeper into explaining this title, like I did before, but I sadly cannot – simply because I do not understand it at all. Another example that I can elaborate on some more is Ursula K. Le Guin's sci-fi story The Left Hand of Darkness (which is really cool, by the way). I won't be summarizing the plot here, but just know that it's about a human male arriving at a planet with hermaphrodite humans, who can assume a male or female gender at each mating cycle. The explorer travels around this world and at the climax is forced to travel on a huge, barren block of ice for 80 days with his hermaphrodite companion. Here is where the story's title takes its origin, a poem recited by this companion:
Light is the left hand of darkness,
and darkness the right hand of light. [...]
Putting this poem into the title really emphasizes that this dualism, and the equality between light and darkness, is the central theme of the work – something that I would probably not have realized otherwise. Thus, this title that at first seems out of place taught me, a reader, more about what the work is trying to say. It's a kind of description that really only the author themself could truly understand; but whether this is the best kind of title, I don't know.
(I'd also like to comment here that this example shows how using quotes can be, indeed, a very effective title-making strategy. Especially if it's the title to something like a video game, movie or book – finding that quote later on in the text, especially if it's at such a critical moment like here, and getting to know the context of that quote, can be very rewarding and "ooohhh"-ing.)
Now, for some practical advice on title-making: firstly, what point in the description spectrum to use in the first place:
I'd say use stage 1 only if you really know what you're doing and achieving a special effect.
Use stage 2 if you have absolutely zero ideas, or are creating a work which is made to be more structured and less emotional.
Stage 3 is where the vast majority of mediocre titles fall into. If you're sure you want your work to be playful and not really focus on any profound emotional impact (e.g. the Bloo Kid 2 OST), use it;
But if you're sensing potential profoundness, I suggest moving on to stage 4.
Stage 5 is really only for the pros who realize that the title is just more free real estate to impact the viewer with.
And now, the experiment I promised earlier: The Scale of It All's new title.
To me, the "central theme" of this track is quintessentially represented by the theme at 1:21 – its melancholy, hope, ponderment, and, most intriguingly, the link back to the musical themes of TTP1 (The Dance of Eternity comes to mind) with a similar lute-like instrument, albeit with an audibly lower timbre. This last element suggests the track's focus on the history of New Jerusalemians (i.e. robots) and how it's inadvertently linked with their judgment and perception of the world.
Taking into consideration all of these elements which, in my opinion, form the emotional foundation of this piece, I thought of something to the tune of "What have we come to", "Where are we now" or "How far have we gone", since this piece encompasses reflection on history as well as foresight of the possible futures, both positive and negative. I settled for Where Have We Gone as a title, and I think it's absolutely superior to the wimpy, random, surface-level The Scale of It All.
So, really, when it comes to title-making, there's no better method than experimentation, playing with words, aided by a little breakdown of the main themes you want to emphasize in your work. (By the way, this is also a great method for dissecting existing titles which seem confusing – they might just be suggesting something in the work itself that you missed.)
And if I'm already writing an essay about titles, there's just no way not to mention my favorite masterpiece of a title – invented by me, of course. When re-releasing misotanni's Mordent soundtrack and some other piano improvisations for Fermata, I gave myself the task of inventing new, better titles, to separate the tracks from their simple origins and give them lives of their own.
By far my favorite track of the whole album is the one originally named Sunken Dungeon, because, well, that's the area in-game where it played. But apart from the fluid, moist chords and passages due to the piano's pedal being held down, the improvisation contains a multitude of shifting emotions, from immobilizing melancholy at 5:28 to a brave "last-stand" feeling at 8:31, even to blissful happiness at 8:12. It feels like a long and final goodbye.
But, linking it with the themes of Fermata (mild spoilers: the universe is in a trillion-year-long cycle and you break it) and adding even more grandeur to the feeling of the piece, I came up with a title which focuses not on the goodbye of a single person, or a single family or group or even nation, but of an entire species. I mean, imagine that an entire universe's worth of existence is to disappear forever – really forever, not to even live on in archaeology or memory. Our days as a species are coming to an end.
And what's fun about titles like these is that I can use the "title-quote" trick in reverse and put this text into the mouth of one of the characters in Fermata. It would be really fitting, in fact.
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