Music and series: the verbalizing role of soundtrack lyrics from TV series to user-generated narrations

Abstract

In 1984, the creators of Miami Vice — a famous NBC detective drama — added pop and rock hits to the original themes of the soundtrack. This new use of music, later defined as ‘MTV-inspired’, has progressively increased in the last 10 years and has now become one of the widely accepted standards for music and image integration in US TV series and movies. Recently, it has also been fully exploited by users of social networking platforms in creating their own contents. In this article, the author examines how lyrics are used to ‘design’ meaning in both TV series and user-generated narrations, by applying the methodological framework of multimodality outlined by Kress, Van Leeuwen and Jewitt and, in particular, the system network of semiotic resources of sound elaborated by Van Leeuwen.

Keywords

lyrics meaning-making MTV-style editing multimodality soundtracks TV series user-generated narrations

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Brown, J. ( 2001) ‘Ally McBeal’s Postmodern Soundtrack’ , Journal of the Royal Musical Association 126(2): 275-303.

Buxton, D. ( 1990) From The Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and Ideology in Television Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Collins, P. ( 1981) ‘In the Air Tonight’, Face Value.

Fiske, J. ( 1987) Television Culture. London: Routledge.

Gregory, C. ( 1997) Be Seeing You … Decoding The Prisoner. Luton: University of Luton Press.

Iedema, R.A.M. ( 2001) ‘Analysing Film and Television: A Social Semiotic Account of Hospital: An Unhealthy Business’, in C. Jewitt and T. van Leeuwen (eds) The Handbook of Visual Analysis. London: Sage.

Iedema, R.A.M. ( 2003) ‘Multimodality, Resemiotization: Extending the Analysis of Discourse as Multi-semiotic Practice’, Visual Communication 2(1): 29-57.

Jenkins, H. ( 2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Jenkins, H. ( 2007) Transmedia Storytelling 101. URL (consulted Jan. 2010): http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html

10.

Jewitt, C. and Van Leeuwen T. (2001) (eds) The Handbook of Visual Analysis . London: Sage.

11.

Kaplan, E.A. ( 1987) Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture. New York: Methuen.

12.

Kress, G. ( 2003) Literacy in the New Media Age. London : Routledge.

13.

Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. ( 1996) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge.

14.

Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen T. ( 2001) Multimodal Discourse. London: Arnold.

15.

Lemke, J. ( 1989) ‘Semantics and Social Values’, Word 40: 37-50.

16.

McRobbie, A. ( 1994) Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London: Routledge.

17.

O’Day, M. ( 2001) ‘Postmodernism and Television’, in S. Sim (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, pp. 112-20. London: Routledge .

18.

Stilwell, R. ( 1995) "‘In the Air Tonight": Text, Intertextuality and the Construction of Meaning’, Popular Music and Society 19(4): 67-103.

19.

Van Leeuwen, T. ( 1999) Speech, Music, Sound. London: Macmillan.

20.

Zemler, E. ( 2005) ‘The O.C. Effect’, PopMatters , 14 January. URL (consulted Jan. 2010): http://www.popmatters.com/music/features/050114-indiesoundtracks.shtml

21.

Zoglin, R. ( 1985) ‘Cool Cops: Hot Show’, Time Magazine, 16 September.