All music, any organization of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality. It is what links a power center to its subjects…-Jacques Attali 2 1 I am grateful to my fellow presenters Dana Gorzelany-Mostak, Joanna Love, and Michael Saffle for their assistance in the preparation of this paper and to Carleton University graduate student assistants Agnes Malkinson for her work on the formatting and reference list and Mariam Al-Naser and Lora Bidner for their preparation of Tables A2 and A3.
In the introductory chapter, the editors for The Oxford Handbook of Music and Advertising provide the foundation for the three main sections of the volume, in accordance with three stages of communicating the advertising message established by Wharton (2015): “Production,” “Text,” and “Reception.” The discussion of “Production” considers the contexts for the creation of audiovisual advertising, first as studied in the scholarly literature, and then according to practices and producers. Also under examination is the cultural work music performs for advertising, with special emphasis on branding. The section on “Text” focuses on the various forms and functions of music in advertising media. Text analysis in multimedia formats include discussions of how music combines with visual images and speech to convey an emotion, meaning, or ethos to an ad. Also under discussion in this part of the chapter is how music functions in commercials, both as foregrounded text and as background. Finally, the section addressing “Reception” discusses specific challenges facing researchers undertaking empirical studies on music and advertising, explores the psychological underpinnings of theory and research in this area, and points to the opportunity for more cross-fertilization of ideas between fields and greater interdisciplinary collaboration.
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