Music, Transtextuality, and the World Wide Web

Abstract

This article sketches the significance of aurality in hypermedia, notes that the field of English studies is constructing the World Wide Web as a verbal and visual medium, and proposes a transtextual framework to aid technical communicators in designing musical hypermedia. Because the study of music on the World Wide Web is nascent, this article includes references to art and film music, whose theories and practices are substantially developed.

Notes

^aBorchardt's (1998) audio scheme.

^b Kumpf (2000). Jerving (2008) suggests different though also potentially useful elements, loosely: choice of subject, highlighting, aestheticization, cultural context, physical context, framing, camera distance, camera angle, lighting, point of view, genre, metadiscourse.

^c Vande Kopple (1988).

^dIn film, these elements refer mainly to speech, which has an aural presence and for which the aural metadiscourse markers noted in this table are also relevant. In hypermedia, these elements refer mainly to written text although the sound of the human voice as an aspect of aurality is heard increasingly.

^aU.S. Postal Service 2007.

^bU.S. Postal Service 2005a.

^cU.S. Postal Service 2005b.

^dU.S. Postal Service n.d.

^ePiece can be accessed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound/list

^fPiece (performance by Tuck Andress) can be accessed at http://www.rhapsody.com/playlistcentral/playlistdetail?playlistId=12448903

^gAlthough widely misunderstood to be a thoroughgoing nonrepresentational language, music has the potential to make more-than arbitrary connections to objects; at the same time, its ability to generate meaning on the symbolic level by effecting arbitrary connections between sign and object is underappreciated generally. For instance, through constant repetition, the melody of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” is now associated with the Christmas season in the minds of many U.S. consumers.

^hPiece can be accessed, in part, on http://www.amazon.com/Prima-Voce-Marian-Anderson-Shaw/dp/B0000037L2

ⁱPiece can be accessed, in part, at http://www.amazon.com/Window-Andes-Inkuyo/dp/B00000C2OC/ref=pd_krex_fa_t/104-0371929-0729549

^jPiece (performance by Paul Copeland) can be accessed at http://www.mp3.com.au/track.asp?id=96404#