More than words: análise multimodal multidimensional da música popular em língua inglesa

Abstract

Popular music has been the object of several studies in various fields, such as Musicology (MIDDLETON, 1993; MOORE, 2021), Cultural Studies (WALL, 2013), Sociology (BENNETT, 2008), Semiotics (DUNBAR-HALL, 1991), and Corpus Linguistics (BARBOSA, 2012; BÉRTOLI DUTRA, 2010; BERTOLI-DUTRA, 2014; DELFINO, 2016; WERNER, 2012), among others. While there is great interest in the study of popular music, there are at least four general trends in the literature relevant to the present thesis. The first is the small number of empirical research on musical language, as there is a predominance of works of a theoretical nature. The second is reductionism, that is, the disconnection of the verbal component (the lyrics of songs) from the acoustic component (the melody). The third trend, among empirical studies, concerns the use of reduced data samples, formed by a few songs, which reduces the scope of the study and therefore the possibility of generalizing the results. Finally, the fourth trend is the correlation between the verbal and the acoustic modes of the songs. There are therefore four significant gaps in the previous literature, one concerning the scarcity of empirical studies, a second concerning the scarcity of studies involving both the verbal and acoustic components. The third concerning the scarcity of studies based on large data samples, and the last concerning the lack of a musical correlation that takes into account the linguistic characteristics of lyrics and the acoustic characteristics of musical production simultaneously. In view of these gaps, the present thesis aims at performing two multidimensional analyses, namely: a semantic analysis (verbal mode) and an acoustic analysis (acoustic mode), so that each song is measured along several dimensions simultaneously; another goal is to compute the correlation between the verbal and the acoustic modes through a canonical correlation analysis, a statistical procedure that relates canonical pairs of measurement sets, in this case the scores of each song on each of the semantic and acoustic dimensions. This correlation enabled the extraction of three multimodal musical dimensions: Dimension 1 - Musicality based on repetitive, vibrant rhythm, focused on bodily expression indoors, in conventional tempo, with a predominance of vocalization and verbosity, portraying the discourse of glorifying and/or criticizing materialism, wealth, luxury, ostentation futility, opulence, instant gratification, superficiality, appearance, the banal, the ephemeral, distancing itself from the supernatural, mystical, metaphysical, figurative, lyrical, poetic, transcendent (Musicality for dancing portraying the concrete materialist discourse and distancing itself from the xi mystical); Musical Dimension 2 - Musicality based on intensity, amplified instrumentation, extroversion, vigorous, powerful vocalization, with high volume, strength and fast movement, in accelerated rhythm, aimed primarily at engaging with the audience in live performance, with subjectivist discourse on the existence of the 'other', accounts of personal and interpersonal dramas resulting from suffering due to the impossibility of knowing the intimacy of the other, problems of communication and mutual understanding, description of internal mental processes, describing the world as supernatural, mystical, metaphysical, figurative, lyrical, poetic, transcendent (Intense musicality depicting the discourse of personal drama and the supernatural); Musical Dimension 3 - Musicality based on happier chords and higher tones, with a less emotional and less moody sound portraying the tragic-romantic discourse of the personal journey, the search for happiness and love, suffering through loneliness, reunion, the myth of the ideal home, love as a journey, the ceaseless search for happiness (Joyful musicality portraying the tragic-romantic discourse)