Structural relationships of music and images in music video

Abstract

In the course of the last decade, the body of writing on music video has grown to sizeable proportions. The reason for the present addition to this bulk of literature, in spite of the subject seemingly approaching the state of exhaustion, is that musical semiotics are still rarely applied to the field. It is a fact that pop and rock music have always been heavily infused with socially determined meaning such that an autonomous musical aesthetics appears clearly insufficient to explain their significance; however, to what extent and how this significance is linked in with particular musical structures as such is still largely uninvestigated. In my view, music video may perhaps be less interesting as a phenomenon in itself than as source material for an ‘empirical semiotics’ of popular music, shedding light on signification processes of a more general applicability. Furthermore, the distinctive features of music video may arguably be better explained on the basis of an understanding of the syntactical characteristics of popular music than by prevalent theories of postmodernism; the latter appear problematic not only due to their speculative and unsubstantiated nature with regard to media reception processes (cf. Frith and Horne 1987, p. 11), but their explanatory value as regards syntactic features of music video also seems to be limited (cf. Frith 1988, p. 207).

Tv-reklamens musik i et tekstanalytisk perspektiv [The music of television commercials from a text analytical perspective]

“…Figur 3 repraesenterer i det perspektiv et forsøg på en systematisering af allerede foreliggende bidrag, isaer Goodwin, 1992 (heri specielt kapitel 3); Björnberg, 2000;Vernallis, 2004…”

Putting the Music Back into Michael Jackson Studies

“…One important exception is provided by Björnberg (1994), which article includes a brief analysis of Jackson's music video for the lesser-known "Remember the Time" from Dangerous (pp. 64-6).…”

Review of Richard Middleton ed., Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music (Oxford University Press, 2000)

“…(2) Thus, Alf Björnberg: "It is a fact that pop and rock music have always been heavily infused with socially determined meaning such that an autonomous musical aesthetics appears clearly insufficient to explain their significance." (3) In his own chapter, Middleton grasps at cultural studies, linguistics, genetic theory, and even the electro-chemical nature of neural circuits to explain the nature of a gesture, because for him meaning is to be found not among musical relations but in the music's relationship to its surroundings. (4) To this reviewer, such an entanglement of music with its context seems almost less "necessary" than ever, in an age when a reference to the text of Abbey Road should mean exactly the same thing to everyone the world over-the collection of 478.5 megabytes appearing on a compact disc that contains in every case the same stereo mix of a recording fixed in 1969.…”