Sharing Music Vocabulary: Spotlighting Multimodal Narrative Songwriting

In this paper, we explore the synthesis of two PhD projects that address a gap in knowledge between industry songwriting practice and theorisations of songwriting. These projects explore patterns in modern songwriting through the contrasting lenses of cultural semantics and narratology. Both project methodologies involve large-scale corpus analysis and creative practice as proof of concept tested in industry. In synthesising these ideas, we present a multimodal narrative approach to songwriting that uses the concept of shared musical vocabularies to unify and extend existing models of praxis. We frame our argument with the assertion that songwriting is storytelling, storytelling is meaning making, and thus models for understanding and developing songwriting practice explore song narratives by recognising every component of song as semiotic resource. We demonstrate the efficacy of Multimodal Narrative Songwriting by applying it to the creation and analysis of a major label song release.