Emotion Resonance and Divergence: a semiotic analysis of music and sound in “The Lost Thing” an animated short film and “Elizabeth” a film trailer

ABSTRACT

Music and sound contributions of interpersonal meaning to film narratives may be different from or similar to meanings made by language and image, and dynamic interactions between several modalities may generate new story messages. Such interpretive potentials of music and voice sound in motion pictures are rarely considered in social semiotic investigations of intermodality. This paper therefore shares two semiotic studies of distinct and combined music, English speech and image systems in an animated short film and a promotional filmtrailer. The paper considers the impact of music and voice sound on interpretations of film narrative meanings. A music system relevant to the analysis of filmic emotion is proposed. Examples show how music and intonation contribute meaning to lexical, visual and gestural elements of the cinematic spaces. Also described are relations of divergence and resonance between emotion types in various couplings of music, intonation, words and images across story phases. The research is relevant to educational knowledge about sound, and semiotic studies of multimodality.

KEYWORDS:

• Music
• sound
• semiotics
• meaning
• multimodality
• emotion
• filmtrailer
• animated movie

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Michael Yezerski for permission to use his live score of the original soundtrack for the movie of The Lost Thing, and Murray Winton for permission to use his transcriptions of Elizabeth music.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Betty Noad is an academic affiliated with the University of New England, Australia, in early childhood, primary and secondary teacher education. Dr Noad has held various English and literacy consultancy positions for F-12 teacher professional learning across NSW schools, and practised as a classroom teacher. Her research interests are in the semantics of sound, multimodality, education semiotics, and multiliteracies pedagogy.

Georgina Barton is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern Queensland and lectures in English and literacy education for preservice teachers. She taught in schools for over 20 years prior to working in universities. Her research focuses on the arts and literacy including multimodality. She has over 60 publications in this area including a pending book titled: Developing the arts and literacy in schools with Routledge publishers.

Additional information

Funding

The doctoral thesis work on filmtrailers was supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award, currently known as an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.