A social semiotic account of music-movement correspondences

Abstract: In this thesis, I develop a comprehensive account of synergies between music and movement from a social semiotic perspective. This account includes an analytical framework, a cross-contextual case study and an assessment of the expansive scope of the social semiotic framework. This thesis also critically reviews previous multi-disciplinary studies that attempt to account for synergies between music and movement. Across nearly all of these studies is a recognition of a) the co-occurrence of music and movement (e.g., in music and dance, gestures and bodily movement that accompany musical performance, movements that create musical sound) and b) correspondences of perception and/or meaning between bodily movement and music. Many of these studies illustrate the importance of recognising the human body as a source from which meanings in music (and in other semiotic modes) are derived. However, the majority of these studies are acutely limited by their failure to recognise that meaning making (and every other aspect of their object of study) is an inherently social phenomenon. To address this shortfall, this thesis takes a social semiotic approach i.e. an interdisciplinary approach that combines formal and phenomenological analysis with analysis of social context. It develops an analytical framework that accounts for the use of movement qualities (that are apparent in bodily movement and in music) as signifiers with broad meaning potential narrowed by social context. An eclectic range of examples from different socio-cultural contexts are closely analysed to illustrate social semiotic principles, namely the widespread use of kinaesthetic metaphor in music across contexts, the combination and co-ordination of music and movement as complementary semiotic modes in multimodal semiotic events and products, the recontextualisation and resemiotisation of meaning from one social context and/or semiotic mode to another, and the use of one mode to ‘meta-semiotically’ make meanings about the other (e.g. in music educational contexts). From this cross-contextual study, several general semiotic themes are explicated. For instance, the meanings made based on this set of movement qualities are important for making identity and style meanings. Further, the study demonstrates how complementarities of conventionalised vs relatively free meaning making, and of discrete vs continuous semiotic systems and structures are important and that such complementary perspectives should be taken when analysing semiosis in any social context. These observations point towards a broad scope of potential applications and further study, in particular relating to semiotic innovation and applications that breach the boundaries of semiotics.