Music as a Satiric Element in Editing Political Speeches in YouTube: The Use of AutoTune

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Eduardo Viñuela Suárez

Abstract

Prosumers are constantly generating new audiovisual phenomena since the development of Web 2.0 by using audio and video software in their personal computers. Music is playing a relevant part in many of these phenomena; its interaction with other media, such as visual and verbal languages, is expanding the signifying possibilities of these videos, supporting or challenging the individual meaning of each media. In this paper we approach the use of the plug-in AutoTune in order to undermine with a satiric purpose the meaning of speeches made by politicians in public events. This is a prosumer practice that has been established all over the world in the last years, being a new category in the list of new audiovisual phenomena. AutoTuning demonstrates how music has an enormous power and it is constantly used to challenge the meaning of verbal texts in politic speeches. Thus, music becomes an essential element and a powerful ideological media in most of the audiovisual contents of polintertainment. I am concerned with the parameters that define the musicality of verbal language and the way they are essential in converting these speeches into music by using AutoTune. In order to study this process I analyze the AutoTuning of the speech of Rita Barberá (major of Valencia) during the opening ceremony of Fallas in February 2015, a piece made by IvánLagarto, which is the most viewed AutoTune video in Spain up to the present day.

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How to Cite
Viñuela Suárez, Eduardo. 2015. “Music as a Satiric Element in Editing Political Speeches in YouTube: The Use of AutoTune”. Revista de Comunicación de la SEECI, no. 37 (September):268-98. https://doi.org/10.15198/seeci.2015.37.268-298.
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Articles
Author Biography

Eduardo Viñuela Suárez, Universidad de Oviedo

Eduardo Viñuela Doctor en Historia y Ciencias de la Música por la Universidad de Oviedo y profesor del Departamento de Historia del Arte y Musicología en dicha universidad. Ha realizado estancias de investigación en las universidades de Liverpool (2007) y Oxford (2014), y ha sido profesor de semiótica de la publicidad y semiótica de la cultura de masas en la Universidad de Alicante (2008-2010). Su labor investigadora se centra en la relación de la música con los medios audiovisuales y en las músicas populares urbanas dentro del grupo de investigación Diapente XXI.

Destaca su obra El videoclip en España (1980-1995): gesto audiovisual, discurso y mercado (ICCMU, 2009) y ha coeditado el dossier “Recent approaches to sound and music in Spanish audiovisual media” (Music Sound and the Moving Image, 2010), Diccionario crítico de directoras de cine europeas (Cátedra, 2011), La música en el lenguaje audiovisual: Aproximaciones multidisciplinares a una comunicación mediática (Arcibel, 2012) y Rock around Spain: historia, industria, escenas y medios de comunicación (Universidad de Lleida y Alicante, 2013).

Ha sido presidente de IASPM-España (2009-2014), rama española de la International Association for the Study of Popular Music, y actualmente es Vicepresidente de SIBE – Sociedad de Etnomusicología y director del Aula de Música Pop Rock de la Universidad de Oviedo. Desde el año 2012 colabora como crítico musical en el diario de prensa escrita La Nueva España.

 

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