How Semiotics In Music Videos Affect People’s Emotions

This paper will be discussing how semiotics in musical videos affects audience emotions. Visual resources are nowadays very popular in the music industry because they add more meaning to artists work. Thanks to the technological revolution this great advance has been produced and since then, the artists use the visual media as a form of communication, so they use visual resources as an added feature. In mass communication, the written culture has been step by step superseded by an audio-visual culture. ‘Reading’ has increasingly weakened against ‘watching and listening’, and that´s why audio-visual language is currently a big part of people’s lives, the way they experience anything that surrounds them. They are a popular way for people to receive information and they are an innovative way for artists to transmit their ideas or to share experiences. They can also, use videos to promote themselves or to express their (invisible) messages. “The most powerful and meaningful messages are combined with words and pictures equally” (Lester, 2000: x).

Music videos then, have evolved to become its own industry because of the growing influence and success. They are reaching wider audiences, exploring different schemas, topics and transcend genres. The motivation to keep people entertained through new ideas and new ways of expressing knowledge, feelings or emotions have grown, and even now it could be considered as an art form.

Different literature has been reviewed with the idea of having a more deeply understanding of the topic chosen. Below, we can find useful information about how visual resources are having a big impact in people’s lives.

A researcher in the Department of Media and Communication Studies of the Martin Luther University of Halle in Germany, Anna´s Bartsch, worked on a study called “Meta-Emotion: How Films and Music Videos Communicate Emotions About Emotions” express the main idea of meta-emotions. As we know, meta-emotions are evaluative thoughts and feelings about emotions that are represented and/or elicited in the viewer. The concept of meta-emotion draws on the analogy with meta-cognition. That is to say, it states that people can have emotions about emotions much like they can have thoughts about thoughts (Bartsch, Vorderer, Mangold and Viehoff 2008; Mayer and Gaschke 1988; and Oliver 1993). On her paper, she analyses the communication of meta-emotions in two totally different movies: “The fight club” and “Frozen” and specifically looks for people´s emotions in both. She argues that audio-visual media has grown because films or music videos provide their audiences with an opportunity to indulge and enjoy emotions that they would rather avoid in everyday life, such as fear and sadness. An interesting finding on her research is that the communication of meta-cognitions in music videos is gender-specific because women experienced more positive meta-emotions while watching “Frozen” and in contrast, men experienced more positive-emotions while watching “The fight club”.

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Dezheng Feng and Kay L. O’Halloran paper called “The multimodal representation of emotion in film: integrating cognitive and semiotic approaches” focuses on how films evoke emotions. What these researchers did is to develop a multimodal framework in which the representation of emotions belongs to semiotic approaches as well as cognitive components of emotion. Thus, this is a study that provides a semiotic theory of how emotions are represented in films taking into account the structure and the techniques used. So, for instance, the use of color may be a factor that could make the audience feel somehow, but the music used does definitely increases their emotional response. Music has a massive power to have a big effect on people’s moods and emotions. Hence, music combined with video has then an extra power. Then, semiotic approach and the cognitive theory of the emotion structure can provide an understanding of how to use the better techniques to generate viewer emotions.

Cindy Hasio and Wei Chen made an investigation of how the creation of meaning is taking place over audio and visual elements. In their article called “Interpreting Visual Semiotics in Art Education” they describe how a music video can be analyzed through several semiotics abilities in art education. In this theory, they explain the concepts describing the music video “Man in the Mirror” from Michel Jackson, giving some illustrations about how the combined use of multiple semiotics within the audio and video intensifies and contrasts sections of the song and creates a new meaning context. Besides that, the context of the culture vision is consistently evolving; thus, the interpretations of any representation that people receive can also change (Freedman, 2003).

Nowadays the population is exposed to live in an extreme visually society with a globing astonished and exciting images everywhere. People are continuously and orderly being assaulted every day with a lot of media stimulation. It is almost incontrollable as there are images everywhere used for marketing goals. Alev Fatos Parsa, a researcher from Turkey, describes in her thesis “Visual Semiotics: How still images mean? Interpreting still images by using semiotic approaches”, an analysis to understand how images are used in ads to became meaningful by the use of semiotic approach. She makes clear how human beings always tried to find a signification of their surrounded images with signs and symbols and tries to use them as communication. This meaning appear of an interaction between the message and the audience, producing a reaction which is the result of myths, ideologies and some connotations installed into the images. Also, she explores the interpretation of the communicative visuals through semiotics in its effort to achieve the meaning and ideology, having in mind that mostly people are aware of the signs.

Overall, these articles relate the use of mechanisms to generate certain emotions with the visual media. So, they have helped to have a bit more knowledge about the different uses of musical videos and how artists incorporate the visual resources to transmit emotions.