How does music and emotion help create substantial quality for the moving image? How do they do so without the aid of any representational qualities attached to the image’s object in question? By referring to the theory of dérive from Guy Debord, as well as the theory of absolute film, this text investigates emotional experiences in relation to music and everyday life. In order to properly explore these concepts and their application to what is called visual music (musical structures visualized in abstract imagery via tempo, pitch, etc.), a method known as graphic notation (visual representation of sound via symbols) was used to conduct experimental fieldwork in order to determine what sounds link to certain emotions. Furthermore, by using resources such as Guy Debord’s essays in the Situationist International Anthology, Oskar Fischinger: 1900 – 1967; Experiments in Cinematic Abstraction, Jacky Bowring’s A Field Guide to Melancholy, and Michael P. Steinberg’s Music and Melancholy, there will be an established juxtaposition expressed between the idea of “moving wallpaper” and visual music in discussing non-representational art and animation in relation to music. This will potentially help spectators unfamiliar with this medium to understand and perhaps look more critically at what experimental and abstract moving images have to offer in terms of substantial quality in content.