Popular music is far more than just songs we listen to; its meanings are also in album covers, lyrics, subcultures, voices and video soundscapes. Like language these elements can be used to communicate complex cultural ideas, values, concepts and identities.
Analysing Popular Music is a lively look at the semiotic resources found in the sounds, visuals and words that comprise the ′code book′ of popular music. It explains exactly how popular music comes to mean so much. Packed with examples, exercises and a glossary, this book provides the reader with the knowledge and skills they need to carry out their own analyses of songs, soundtracks, lyrics and album covers.
Written for students with no prior musical knowledge, Analysing Popular Music is the perfect toolkit for students in sociology, media and communication studies to analyse, understand – and celebrate – popular music.
Table of Content
Introduction
Discourses of Popular Music
Album Iconography: Postures, Objects, Settings
Visual Composition: Typeface and Colour
Analyzing Lyrics: Values, Participants, Agency
Semiotic Resources in Sound: Pitch, Melody and Phrasing
Sound Qualities: Arrangement and Rhythm
Analyzing Genre: The Sounds of Britpop
Analyzing Music in Film
Analyzing Music in Video and Television
Conclusion
About the author
David Machin is Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. He is co-editor of the journal Social Semiotics and has written five other books, including Introduction to Multimodal Analysis (Hodder, 2007), and News Production (Routledge, 2006), as well as co-editing the Media Audiences major work with Barrie Gunter.
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