Sign of the times?

Om musikvideo och populärmusikens semiotik

Abstract

During the last decade music video has developed into one of the dominating media for the dissemination of popular music. The object of this article is to give an outline of theories and methods for semiotic analysis of popular music and of the relationships between musical and visual structure specific to contemporary music video, and to illustrate how these relationships work in practice towards the production of meaning in music video. The existing literature on music video is characterized by biases towards ”product analysis” rather than investigation of the actual use of music video, and towards analysis of visual rather than musical structure and content. Theories on the structures and functions of film music are also of limited value to a musico-semiotic analysis of the form; this analysis should instead be related to theories on the semiotics of popular music. The production of meaning in music may be differentiated into ”primary signification”, directly related to musical structure, and ”secondary signification” or ”connotation”, which may operate on a number of structural levels (Middleton). Semiotic-analytical studies on
popular music include Middleton’s, Willis’ and Shepherd’s works on musical-cultural homologies, Tagg’s musematic analyses, the analyses by Hebdige and Laing based on post-structural semiotics, and the analyses of relationships between verbal and musical
meaning carried out by Laing and others. All of these analytical approaches may be potentially fruitful to the analysis of music video. The semiotics of music video are related to syntactical characteristics of contemporary popular music. Music in general, and modern popular music in particular, is remarkably repetitiously structured. Pop/rock music is also mainly characterized by intensional modes of construction, in contrast with the distinctly ”narrative” musical structures of extensionally constructed functional tonal music. The ”semantic information density” (Moles) is also lower in contemporary pop/rock music than in Western European art music tradition and popular styles based on this tradition. This is an important explanation of the ”post-modern” character of music video: visual processes homologous to such types of musical syntax have a high degree of structural narrative redundancy, while visualization of the ”aesthetic information dimension” allows for a great freedom of choice as regards visual content. The experiential qualities of beat and sound prominent in pop/rock music are visually ”translated” in the rapid motions and high cutting density of music video. The musical-visual interaction in music video is particularly manifest with regard to
the dimension of time on various levels: total duration, segmentation into formal sections and, particularly, on the temporal micro-level of pulse, meter and basic rhythmic gestures. Manifest visualization of tonal processes of tension and release is considerably less frequent; greater emphasis is laid on more directly sound-related musical parameters, by way of various types of synaesthetic visualization of timbral qualities and dynamic changes. Visualization is often also in various ways based on the song’s verbal lyrics.
Existing models of genre differentiation in music video is mainly based on visual structure and content; there is thus a need for complementary genre analyses based on musical style and genre. The study of music video is musicologically important because of its potential contributions to the semiotics of popular music; however, the musical-analytical perspective also constitutes an important element in the multidisciplinary approach which a thorough analysis of this multidimensional signifying practice requires, but which so far has largely been lacking.