Semiotics of music videos

Semiotics in popular music, or mesomusica, is different from semiotics in other musical forms, because pop music denotes a cultural object. (Matusitz, 2004). Popular music has many signs in itself because it has many components and uses, but it also appeals to the emotions of a generation. Music is the “logical expression” of feelings, a “symbolic form”. Music videos are an example of syntagm, which interacting signifiers form a meaningful whole. Music videos are also considered multimodal genres because one semiotic system is joined syntagmatically to another semiotic system, which results in a signified indexical meaning. The process of music correlated with visuals can be described in terms of two basic mechanisms: temporal synchronicity and cross-modal homology. Incorporating the two modalities, sound and image, we can interpret it as a unified syntagm. Music videos are known to be visually secondary signified in combination with the semantic content of the lyrics. Semiotics in music videos is different from a pragmatic analysis because we can uphold that semiotics searches for meaning by considering sign production and progress, while pragmatics searches for meaning by considering the intentions of semantics and the context it has evolved in.

There are early critics of the importance of analyzing music videos as a semiotic system. Frederic Jameson's definition of music videos is a schizophrenic string of isolated, discontinued signifiers, failing to link up into a coherent sequence, as a string without a center.

Many semiotic analysts have examined music videos to decode messages that are being sent to viewers. Invisible editing, a semiotic term, that film editors use to almost decode the message for the audience using narrative actions. Daniel Chandler's example from famous film editor, Ralph Rosenblum, "a man awakens suddenly in the middle of the night, bolts up in bed, stares ahead intensely, and twitches his nose. Then the film directs towards a room where two people are desperately fighting a billowing blaze"(Chandler, pp. 166, 2007). Because of the actions of the actors, the audience is aware of the next scene before it is shown. An example of invisible editing in music videos would be in narrative style, which consist of a plot and storyline of events and charactersMichael Jackson's music video, Thriller is considered a narrative script, and it exceeds the song itself. In this case, the context of visual narrative semantically over-powers the meaning of the song itself. Many music videos use narrative style script, which is considered a more formal approach as the editing will add emphasis to the song's chorus, giving it a deeply ingrained musical archetype. Music videos that aren't formally organized usually have no segmentation markings that flow with the lyrics, and contain abstract images. Sledgehammer, by Peter Gabriel is an example of formally unorganized music videos. In general, music videos contain visuals that either represent the potential connotative meaning of the lyrics or the visuals can represent a semiotic system of its own. Although many analysts explain the music video as being a narrative structure, there are many videos that defy narrative conventions.

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