Semiosis in the Film Soundtrack: Aural Perspective and Social Distance in 'The Queen' Film Trailer

Abstract

The emergence of digital technologies has changed the design of texts and literate practices so that now texts which have written, visual, audio and spatial dimensions for making meaning are interpreted and constructed. Contemporary digital texts such as television advertisements, film trailers, video and television programs increasingly privilege sound features (speech, music, sound effects) to 'design' meanings and to 'position' listeners towards the interests of the composers of multimodal texts. Sound now takes a significant place alongside language and visual images in the digital texts of our multimodal landscape. This article discusses the educational imperative for schools to begin developing students' knowledge about sound as an integral communicative mode in contemporary digital texts. The article also argues the need for research that builds a rigorous basis for theorising the modal resources of sound, and informs pedagogical practice. One such research perspective in relation to sound is examined in this paper. van Leeuwen's theoretical modelling of sound as a social semiotic, as presented in his book Speech, Music, Sound is outlined, and it informs the exploratory research design reported in the final section of this paper. van Leeuwen's assertion that the conceptual and technical description of semiotic resources of sound facilitates the interpretation of meaning is investigated. Using 'The Queen film trailer' as a model, van Leeuwen's methodology is applied to analyse the semiotic resource of loudness, and interpret the meaning of loudness. The educational implications of this investigation are discussed.