The power of music: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of music in audiovisual advertising

Cara, Stefano

The power of music: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of music in audiovisual advertising

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Cara, S. The power of music: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of music in audiovisual advertising. 2017. handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10230/35993

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Abstract

This investigation draws from Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies and aims to analyze the social meanings communicated by musical discourse in audiovisual advertising with different types of target. The corpus we collected and studied is composed of ten YouTube advertisements of fashion brands’ masculine and feminine perfumes launched during last year. A multidisciplinary qualitative approach was applied to study the interaction between visuals and soundtracks in the construction of a multimodal persuasive narrative. After examining and correlating the semiotics of images and music, we compared the data gathered between the male and the female subcorpus. Results show that the tendency in advertisements for men is to use instrumental music with relevant expressive features, while music in female commercials tends to contain lyrics and to bear symbolic meanings. We argue that such differentiation might reveal the need for cultural endorsement through musical discourse in women’s fashion products advertising.