Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom.
Center for Interdisciplinary Women's and Gender Studies, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
PLoS One. 2024 Nov 6;19(11):e0311876. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0311876. eCollection 2024.
Literature in music theory and psychology shows that, even in isolation, musical sounds can reliably encode gender-loaded messages. Musical material can be imbued with many ideological dimensions and gender is just one of them. Nonetheless, studies of the gendering of music within multimodal communicative events are sparse and lack an encompassing theoretical framework. The present study attempts to address this literature gap by employing a critical quantitative analysis of music in gendered toy marketing, which integrated a content analytical approach with multimodal affective and music-focused perceptual responses. Ratings were collected on a set of 606 commercials spanning a ten-year time frame and strong gender polarization was observed in nearly all of the collected variables. Gendered music styles in toy commercials exhibit synergistic design choices, as music in masculine-targeted adverts was substantially more abrasive-louder, more inharmonious, and more distorted-than in feminine-targeted ones. Thus, toy advertising music appeared deliberately and consistently in line with traditional gender norms. In addition, music perceptual scales and voice-related content analytical variables explain quite well the heavily polarized affective ratings. This study presents a empirical understanding of the gendering of music as constructed within multimodal discourse, reiterating the importance of the sociocultural underpinnings of music cognition. We provided a public repository with all code and data necessary to reproduce the results of this study on github.com/marinelliluca/music-role-gender-marketing.
文献表明，即使在孤立的情况下，音乐声音也可以可靠地传达具有性别倾向的信息。音乐素材可以具有许多意识形态层面，而性别只是其中之一。尽管如此，对于多模态交际事件中音乐的性别化研究仍然很少，并且缺乏全面的理论框架。本研究通过对性别化玩具营销中的音乐进行批判性定量分析来尝试解决这一文献差距，该分析将内容分析方法与多模态情感和音乐焦点感知反应相结合。对跨越十年时间框架的 606 个广告进行了评分，几乎所有收集的变量都表现出强烈的性别两极化。玩具广告中的性别化音乐风格表现出协同的设计选择，因为针对男性的广告中的音乐明显比针对女性的广告更刺耳-更大声、更不和谐、更失真。因此，玩具广告音乐似乎是故意且一致地符合传统性别规范的。此外，音乐感知量表和与声音相关的内容分析变量很好地解释了高度两极分化的情感评分。本研究提供了对多模态话语中音乐性别化的实证理解，重申了音乐认知的社会文化基础的重要性。我们在 github.com/marinelliluca/music-role-gender-marketing 上提供了一个公共存储库，其中包含了重现本研究结果所需的所有代码和数据。
