Semiotics of music videos

Semiotics of music videos is the observation of symbolism used within 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, wherein interacting signifiers form a meaningful whole. Music videos are also considered a multimodal genre 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. By incorporating the two modalities, sound and image, we can interpret 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 as a schizophrenic string of isolated, discontinued signifiers, failing to link up into a coherent sequence, thus 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) refers to what film editors use to almost decode a song's message for the audience through narrative actions. Daniel Chandler's example from famous film editor Ralph Rosenblum describes this progression: "a man awakens suddenly in the middle of the night, bolts up in bed, stares ahead intensely, and twitches his nose.