Mastering musical meaning: images as interpretive resources in multimodal music texts

Abstract

In a Music listening examination in the final year of secondary schooling in New South Wales, Australia, successful students use a range of images – graphic notation, diagrams, tables and graphs – as well as language, to build meaning about the concepts of music. Little is known about the ways in which language and image can be deployed as interpretive resources to construct musical knowledge in this high stakes examination. To address this gap, theories of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis are utilised to make the disciplinary and semiotic requirements of this examination clearer. In this article, five types of images are described and classified, analysing ways in which images can construct disciplinary meanings about concepts of music, principles of composition, and providing a range of perspectives on musical time. Analysis of affordances of images and language, as well as intersemiosis, provides some insights into the hidden curriculum of Music as well as the value of images as a significant interpretive resource.

Writing about music: The selection and arrangement of notation in jazz students’ written texts

“…Weekes (2015a) summarises the main preoccupations of music literacy research: A survey of research related to ‘music' and ‘literacy' uncovers two main focus areas: how to teach music notation i.e., musical literacy (e.g., Lowe & Belcher, 2012) or how music education can build student capacity in reading or literacy across the curriculum (e.g., Gromko, 2005; Hansen & Milligan, 2012). (p. 205–206)In her own research, she highlights how high school music students can represent music in seven different ways, including graphic notation such as pitch contours, dynamics graph and structure and performing media tables in successful written responses to aural listening tasks within the Higher School Certificate examination in the final year of schooling in New South Wales (Weekes, 2015a, 2015b). This article, however, focuses on staff notation, which is more typical in tertiary jazz education.…”

Acid Patterns: How people are sharing a visual notation system for the Roland TB-303 to create and recreate acid house music

“…Research in music notation has called for open formats that acknowledge the contributions of the performer and the composer (Hope 2020). Other studies have explored the multiple relationships between sound and visual communication, how they impact, influence and contribute to each other (Sloboda 1976;Martin 2014;Enström, Dennis, Lynch and Schlei 2015;Weekes 2016).…”