Semiotics of Music Videos

2. Semiotics of Music Videos

Wollen states that film and television use all three forms: icon (sound and image), symbol (speech and writing), and index (as the effect of what is filmed) (Wollen in Chandler, 2009: 35). Since music video is a form of short moving

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correlation of its moving image, lyric and music. Using Peirce‟s semiotics theory, to analyze the concept within it, the image and music are employed as the icon

while the lyric is employed as the symbol. The three essential parts in a music video are the moving image, the music and the lyric. The meaning is not only attained from how one part play a role in the music video but also from how those three aspects of music videos correlate each other. According to Carlsson, the imagery is gained from several flows of audio visual information including moving image, music, lyric and sometimes sound effect in the beginning or end of music video. These flows interact that the resultant meaning is perceived as one complete whole, created by both the ears and eyes.

a. Moving Image

Moving image on the music video basically has the same elements with film. According to Christian Metz, shot is the smallest element in a film which is comparable to words in language, scenes as sentences and sequence as the paragraph (Metz in Monaco, 2000: 160). It means that shot in a movie which physically defined as a single piece of film without breaking the continuity of film, functions as a sign to represent the meaning behind. Other pictorial

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: location (place), sound stage (a built locale in which every variable of light and sound can be calculated to simulate whatever environment a filmmaker wishes to create)

- Lighting : it functions as a property dealing with the control of light in a scene to establish mood and direct attention to detail. It also helps the viewers to understand setting as well as characters within that setting. Lighting is divided into three parts:

Key light

: it provides the primary key of a light so urce, tends to illuminate most strongly the shot‟s subject and also cast the strongest shadows. Key light is still divided into high key and low key light. It can be said as high key if there is a little contrast between bright and dark obtains soft and revealing of details. While low key tend to

be in high contrast, harsh and hard. It is usually found in horror and mystery movie.

Fill light

: it is usually positioned near the camera roughly 120° or thereabouts from the key light which functions is to soften the illumination upon the subject and its surrounding area.

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Back light

: it comes from behind the subject and separates the subject from the background, counter- balancing the brightness of the key light.

- Costume : it relates to the wardrobe worn by the characters which functions to strengthen the characterization on a film based on its genre.

- Hair & Make Up : similar with costume, hair and make up

function to strengthen the characterization on a film. - Properties

: it helps to amplify the mood and gives the

further definition to a setting in a film. - Figure Behavior

: it means to describe the movement, expressions of the actors and other figures (animals, animated figures, etc) within a given shot.

Besides the elements of mise-en-scene, it is needed to notice on the elements of cinematography which basically encompasses everything to do with the camera:

- Camera Framing : generally it deals with the placement of the camera which can be analyzed in terms of the distance between the camera and its subject. It is described by: • Extreme long shot (ELS)

: in which one can barely distinguish the human figure

• Long shot (LS)

in

which

humans are distinguishable but remain dwarfed by the background;

• Medium long shot (MLS) : in which the human is framed from

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• Medium shot (MS)

: in which human is framed from the waist up

• Medium close-up (MCU) : in which the human is framed from

the chest up

• Close-up (CU)

: in which isolates a portion of a human (the face, most prominently)

• Extreme close-up (ECU)

: in which a mere portion of the face (an eye, the lips) is framed.

- Camera Angle : it deals with the angle of the camera in

relation to that which it records. - Camera Movement

: the movements of the camera during a single shot including tilting, panning, tracking and so on. However, there is a distinction between moving images of a music video with the moving images of a film. The visual form of a music video is close to the musical form since it is made for an already existing tune. By manipulating color, motive setting, story footage clothing and so forth, the music video director creates a couple of idea which are repeated and varied (Carlsson, 1999: 3). This concept is used to rearrange visual motifs so that it forms a whole work. The visual motifs of music video are merging form of the three traditions of moving images: singing performance, visual story-telling or narrative and the non-narration of modern art.

- Singing performance Singing performance which is also close to concert performance usually use the traditional basic formula of taking a popular singing performer and place him or her in a setting influenced by the musical

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- Visual story-telling or narrative Visual story-telling or narrative is carried by the lyric or the visual images, sometimes featuring a guest star and turning music video into mini film with specific generic identification (e.g. horror, gangster film, screwball comedy, western, noir, melodrama, women‟s picture)

making the visual easier to remember and providing the spectator with

a fabricated day dream with varying degree of space left for personal elaboration (Kinder, 1984: 4-5)

- The non-narration of modern art As the opposition of the traditional singing performance, the non- narration of modern art has been developed by the representatives of the 20-th century art forms and created experimental movies. In a non- narration of modern art music videos, clip collages, paraphrases, animated abstract art computer graphics and unexpected combination of pictures may appear (Carlsson, 1999: 4)

b. Element of Music

Basically, music video is composed by adding images to music. Sometimes, the musical elements shape the moving pictures. For instance,

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Since Emo is a subgenre of rock music, it is needed to know the elements of rock music to reveal the meanings behind. Like another music genre, rock consists of musical sound properties including pitch, dynamic, tone color and duration (Kamien, 2000: 4-69).

- Pitch Pitch is determined by the frequency of vibration. - Dynamic Dynamic of music is separated into the of loudness and softness in the relation to the amplitude of the vibration that produces the sound. - Rhythm Rhythm is the flow of music through time separated into three related aspects, beat, accent and tempo:

i. Beat Beat is a regular, recurrent pulsation that divides music into equals unit of time occurring every ¼ second and seldom happens every 1 ½ seconds.

ii. Accent or Syncopation

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iii. Tempo Tempo is the speed of the beat, the basic pace of the music. A

fast tempo shows the feeling of energy drive and excitement while the slower tempo contributes to a calm mood.

- Melody Melody is a series of single tones which begins moves and ends, also has direction shape and continuity. - Harmony Harmony refers to the way chords are constructed and how they follow each other. A chord is the combination of three or more tones sounded at once or group simultaneous tones. The harmony of rock is usually simple since it consists of three or four basic chords.

c. Lyric

Besides moving images and music, lyric is another element to help the visualization within the music video. Different with film, in music video, the meaning is mostly influenced by the correlation of music and lyric since those two elements are formerly exist. As Carlsson also points out:

In various music videos, the new meaning is added to the banal lyrics to metaphorical language…… the greater the leap between the content of the

lyrics and the imagery in this metaphorical joining, the more difficult for the viewers to understand and interpret the context. (Carlsson, 1999:3)

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“sad” or “alone” is repeated due to the theme of a song then the visualization of moving image will mostly adjust itself to the concept of lyric and music.

Lyric presented in the song is a linguistic sign with clear cut onsets. Their denotative semantic structure is completely determined by the autonomous linguistic meaning (Mazzola, 1997: 57). Hence, to understand the meaning of lyric in a music video, sometimes it is needed to notice on the semantic features of the lyric.

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