A Systemic-Functional Approach to Music, Meaning and Multimodal Transposition

The present study aims to make a contribution to multimodal studies adopting a systemic-functional framework to build a theoretical device that allows analysing music in multimodal constructions. Our proposal is based on Kress van Leeuwen's model for image analysis (2005). Several categories proposed by these authors have been re-elaborated to fit a musical approach and new categories have been added following McKerrell (2015) and van Leeuwen (1999) perspectives. Our working hypothesis is that meaning in music is socially conventionalised and associated with meaningful constructions in other modes. Thus absolute music conceptualizations access multimodal levels of discourse as part of representations constituted by associated meanings in the different modes.