Musical content as a media text

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MUSICAL CONTENT AS A MEDIA TEXT

Lviv Polytechnic National University, PhD, associate professor, head departments of journalism and mass communication

Oleksandr Kondrashov

Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC Canada Faculty of Education and Socail Work PhD, MSW, MEd Assistant Professor

The relevance of the chosen subject area is determined primarily by the complexity of structural, semantic and communicative organization of the media text phenomenon due to its sign character, plurality of sign systems, correlation of the author and his audience in terms of understanding and decoding textual information, lying in the planes of different approaches to defining the media text concept as well as its analysis.

From the viewpoint of modern semiotics, each sign holds a special meaning, is used to store and transmit information, functions in a sign situation, interacts with other elements of the sign system, has clearly defined boundaries, which allows it to be separated from other signs, while musical content is a system of signs expressed by notes that reflect the pitch and duration of the sound, where the note (from Latin, nota, «sign») is a conventional graphic sign, located on the note state and indicating the pitch and relative duration of any sound (in some cases it is also a playback method). Musical semiotics emerged later than other areas of semiotics. The researchers are still debating whether music is a means of transmitting, storing and processing information.

Nowadays, musical content as a media text constitutes an integral part of the sound space, in which the role of music does not fundamentally change, as it continues to fulfill a specific function of conveying artistic information that can be emotionally and intellectually consumed, processed and compiled by using modern media technology. Although any media text has a clear focus on the given audience and the specific result, which leaves no room for perception options, it still induces changes in the individual worldview precisely because of the impact on the recipient's emotions. The only peculiarity of the sound of musical content in the media is that it usually ceases to look like an integral work, and often has a quotation form to influence the viewer or listener as much as possible, in order to form a positive/negative perception of visual/audio object. The variety of modern media makes it possible to broadcast autonomous music (integral, complete musical works, primacy) and applied (discrete, secondary, compiled and subordinate to the text), which carries artistic information, models behavior and influences emotions.

Key words: musical content, musical work, media text, musical semiotics, media music

Зоряна Галаджун, Олександр Кондрашов

МУЗИЧНИЙ КОНТЕНТ ЯК МЕДІАТЕКСТ

З погляду сучасної семіотики, де кожен знак несе особливе значення, використовується для зберігання і передачі інформації, функціонує в знаковій ситуації, взаємодіє з іншими елементами системи знаків, кордони його чітко виділені, що дозволяє йому бути відокремленим від інших знаків, музичний матеріал є системою знаків, виражених нотами, які відображають висоту звуку і його тривалість, де нота - (лат. nota, «знак») - умовний графічний знак, що розташовується на нотному стані та вказує висоту і відносну тривалість якого-небудь звуку (в окремих випадках також і спосіб відтворення). Музична семіотика виникла пізніше інших напрямів семіотики. Дослідники досі сперечаються про те, чи є музика засобом передачі, зберігання і обробки інформації.

Problem statement

N.O. Shubenko in his work «Media music as an art form», which is devoted to the study of various means of media music, has aptly noted that «trends that take place in the environment replete with media language and media texts, can be described as mediatization of society, which is a process of forming a new type of information space being distinguished by symbolism, virtuality, a wide range of audiovisual information» [4, Art. 78]. As a result, electronic mass media, which use audiovisual tools of content generation, where music is an integral part of the message and an element of image formation, become the leaders of information provision. The relevance of the chosen subject area is determined primarily by the complexity of structural, semantic and communicative organization of media text phenomenon due to its symbolic nature, plurality of sign systems, correlation of the author and his audience in terms of understanding and decoding textual information, lying in the planes of different approaches to defining the media text concept as well as its analysis. According to the researcher T. Shack, the latter is positioned both as a form of existence of media art works and as a system of elements that are revealed in time and space, and structurally organized based on hierarchical subordination, communicative functionality and semantic interpretation. Since the concept of structure requires the system unity of its components, the indispensable constituents of modern media text are sound (verbal, musical, noise) and visual components.

Having their own language and semantics, they intersect and interact, leading to the emergence of new meanings. Since modern audiovisual genre forms of media presentation (television, webpages of newspapers, magazines, radio, etc.) are multispecies and multi-genre, they need to be studied and understood within interscientific research [3, p. 3]. Historically, there have been several approaches to the study of media text, including sociolinguistic, culturological, journalistic, pedagogical and others. Within these approaches, various aspects of media text are covered and its role in solving modern scientific and practical problems is interpreted ambiguously, which means that generalized practice of viewing media text in the field of social sciences has not been formed yet.

Recent research and publications analysis

The text as a product of journalistic creative work in the science of social communications has been and is the subject of scientific research of many domestic researchers, including V. Zdorovega, A. Mamalyha, O. Ponomarev, B. Potiatynyk, V. Rizun, K. Serazhym. The analysis of the scientific literature suggests that the definition of the theoretical foundations of media linguistics, the study of mass media text, its structure and typology, methods of its study were carried out in the works of the following domestic and foreign linguists, psycholinguists, culturologists, mass media theorists: S. Bernstein, T. Dobrosklonska, V. Kostomarova, I. Lysakov, G. Solhanyk, S. Trieskov, D. Shmeliov, A. Bell, J. Herbner, M. Montgomery, R. Fowler, N. Feuerklaff, T. Shack and others.

Presentation of basic material of the research. The origin of the science that studies the structure and functioning of various sign systems - semiotics (from Greek, «sign») is associated with the name of the linguist F. de Saussure, who is nowadays considered to be the founder of linguosemiotics. According to its postulates, a sign is a material object perceived by human senses that acts in the process of cognition and communication as a substitute (representative) of another object and is used to receive, store, transform and transmit information, and has certain characteristics: materiality or sensory perception (has a physical form); denoting something that is outside it (an object marked by a sign is called a denotation, or referent); absence of natural (causal) connection with the denoted object; informational value (ability to carry certain information and be used for communicative purposes); systematicity (a sign gets its meaning only if it enters a sign system of a certain type) [1].

Today there are different classifications of signs: classification by type of relationship between the material form of the sign and the denoted object (indexical signs, copy signs, signal signs and symbolic signs) (Ch. Pierce); classification based on the function and structure of signs (symptoms/signals, appeals/semantic, images/arbitrary signals, single-class/pre-class, non-phonemic/phonemic (language)) (T. Milevsky); classification in terms of physical nature (natural and artificial) (A. Schaff); classification by method and their reception (acoustic, optical, tactile, olfactory, taste) (T. Milevsky).

From the viewpoint of modern semiotics, each sign holds a special meaning, is used to store and transmit information, functions in a sign situation, interacts with other elements of the sign system, its boundaries are clearly defined, which allows it to be separated from other signs. Therefore, musical content is a system of signs expressed by notes that reflect the pitch and duration of the sound, where the note (from Latin, nota, «sign») is a conditional graphic sign, located on the note state and indicating the pitch and relative duration of the sound (in some cases it is also the method of reproduction).

Music semiotics emerged later than other areas of semiotics

One of the first to use linguosemiotic methods in music was the composer and theorist P. Boulez (XX-XXI centuries), who studied the rhythm of the ballet «The Rite of Spring» by I. Stravinsky. Among the researchers who made a significant contribution into the development of music semiotics, it is also worth mentioning K. Levi-Strauss, M. Rueve and J.-J. Nattiez. Thus, K. Levi-Strauss believed that music and language are very deeply connected with each other, because «music is a language minus sense» N. Rueve believed that most of the linguistic terms can be used in the study of music and its characteristic features. And J.-J. Nattiez is the creator of the three-dimensional concept that includes the main components of music: the creation of the work, its performance and perception, scientific analysis, which allows including all the participants of the musical process into the research: composer, performer, listener and musicologist.

However, currently there is no unified answer among the researchers to the question of the relationship between linguistics and music. Researchers are debating whether music is a means of transmitting, storing and processing information. The difficulty of answering this question is that each sign of another language has a certain meaning, and music only affects our emotional state. A musician reads notes in the same way as we read words in a text, but the musical notation consists not of letters but of notes, although music was originally written in signs of the letter system, using the Greek alphabet, and only in the VI century was it replaced by Latin. In English, the word «note» has several meanings, including a symbol denoting a musical sign and a written statement. However, if a note is a short letter to someone, then a musical note is a symbol that tells the musician what sound to extract. Just like letters and words, notes differ as well. They show what the sound should be - long or short.

However, we understand that the semiotics of music differs from the semiotics of natural language in at least a few ways, among which we would like to note the following: the nature of signs and ways of their functioning; in musical language it is possible to perform several notes at the same time, which is impossible with the help of phonemes in verbal language; in verbal language there is a phenomenon of equality between two elements that are interchangeable (for example, «the day is sunny» - «it is a sunny day», where the meaning of the sentence does not change as a result of permutation), which is impossible in music semiotics (for example, the piano chord «mi-sol» produces a minor third, but if you switch places of these two notes, you will play a major sixth); in verbal language, the word carries more meaning than the phonemes of which it consists, whereas the semiotics of the whole piece of music is minimal, although it consists of a large number of notes. In addition, all well-structured musical works have a certain structure - introduction, main part (theme), ending. It may be said that a musical work is characterized by the repetition of a theme or themes throughout the performance of the work, which is unacceptable for journalistic material, but is common in literature, poetry, oral folklore, cinema etc.

Considering the fact that all the newest media use music in their messages, Russian scholars have proposed the term «media music». However, O. Chernyshov understands it as music specifically created for the sound arrangement of speech by electronic media, where it is not an independent art form, but a supplement to the video sequence [2]. T. Shack understands media music as one of the terms that define the audio component in media genres, recognizing the synonymy of the terms «applied music, functional, background, cinematography, compilatory and media music» and specifying the following levels of media music: the music BEFORE the media text, the music IN the media text and the music FROM the media text [3, p. 14]. The author claims that these terms do not always accurately reflect the essence of the given phenomenon, so to avoid terminological inaccuracies and contradictions, he suggests calling this type of music «the music in the media text» [3, p. 4; 3, c. 14]. N. Shubenko defines that media music as an art is the result of technical mediation of sound processes and the formation of media sound space, in which the role of music fundamentally changes [4]. It is worth agreeing with T. Shack that music in media text is divided into autonomous and applied. Autonomous music is characterized by compositional integrity, originality, centrality in the text, a large number of performance interpretations, unity of thematic material and means of performance, unity of functions, stylistic and genre unity. Applied music is characterized by discreteness of composition, recurrence and subordination in the text, contextual nature, genre heterogeneity, tends to citationality as an intonational source of thematic material.

In the context of the multicomponent nature of the scope of research, we consider it necessary to divide its study into two independent components:

1) musical content as a constituent of media text (applied music), which functions to intensify and express textual or visual information, achieve the desired emotional impact of content on the audience;

2) musical content as an independent media text (autonomous music) as exemplified by the broadcast of concerts, performances, social media channels, specializing in providing artistic information.

When referring to musical content as the component of the sound layer of media text, which can be representative or background (not thematic), which functions in shot or off screen, it is most often presented in the form of a musical quote or synthesis of quotes of famous melodies, which is connected with high context-addressed memory and the ability to place semantic accents into the storyline. Music in this version does not exist without video or audio sequence, but the form itself is selected for a specific musical content.

If we are referring to the functioning of musical content as an independent media text, that is a work reproduced using modern technical means that are typical of on-screen mass media, it is about broadcasting performance concerts using media technology, uploading integral musical works on various Internet platforms, such as YouTube, etc.

Nowadays, music as a part of the media text is present in the absolute number of all the programs in various forms of media - from audiovisual mass media to the newest forms of media presentation (social networks, YouTube, channels, blogs, etc.), and for some of them it is one of the formative elements along with visual or auditory information (YouTube, Tik Tok, etc.). Thus, as N. Shubenko points out, music ceases to exist in the form of a finished, formed by the system of musical notation and performed in accordance with the composer's design work of music culture. It forms and produces a sound media picture of the world, consisting of soundbites carrying artistic information, and determines the nature of the sound media environment at the intersection of autonomous and applied music [4, p. 84].

Conclusion. Nowadays, musical content as a media text constitutes an integral part of the sound space, in which the role of music does not fundamentally change, as it continues to fulfill a specific function of conveying artistic information that can be emotionally and intellectually consumed, processed and compiled by using modern media technology. Although any media text has a clear focus on the given audience and the specific result, which leaves no room for perception options, it still induces changes in the individual worldview precisely because of the impact on the recipient's emotions. The only peculiarity of the sound of musical content in the media is that it usually ceases to look like an integral work, and often has a quotation form to influence the viewer or listener as much as possible, in order to form a positive/negative perception of visual/audio object. The variety of modern media makes it possible to broadcast autonomous music (integral, complete musical works, primacy) and applied (discrete, secondary, compiled and subordinate to the text), which carries artistic information, models behavior and influences emotions.

Directions for future research

music artistic semiotic content

Musical content used by modem mass media needs further research primarily as a phenomenon of media socialization. Furthermore, due attention should be given to a comprehensive analysis of the content formed by visual, verbal and sound material in their subordination and interdependence, as well as the study of the context of the message that carries artistic information.

References

1. Harris R. (2013). Ferdinand de Saussure. Course in General Linguistics. London: Bloomsbury. 236 p. [in English].

2. Cherny'shov A. (2008). “Media music” as an academic discipline. Media education, 3, 74-84 [in English].

3. Shack T. (2010). Music within the structure of media text. Rostov-on-Don. 54 p. [in English].

4. Shubenko, N. (2015). Media music as an art form. Individual spirituality within the system of artistic education, 2. P. 78-85.

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