i could be a kinetic anaphone too by an abstracted version of the same reasoning, A tactile anaphone is similar to a kinetic anaphone, but relates to touch instead of movement, The concept of a sound ‘feeling’ like something is deeply abstract, but fairly ubiquitous in descriptions of music. A sound could appear “soft” or ‘rough’. It could even evoke the feeling of a very specific surface pattem of bumps or holes. This is perhaps related to the degree and pattems of transience in a sound. “Another of Tagg’s concepts is the musical genre synecdoche. A synecdoche is a sign that represents something larger than itself, including itself. So, a genre syneedocke is a musical element in a piece that signifies a style other than the one the piece is in. An example could be an interval or two that seem out of place in the style ofthe piece, but would fit more appropriately in a piece of another specific style. Another example, that is relevant to the analysis of ‘Archangel’, i of samples of vocals taken from asong in an entirely different genre. It is with concepts like these that semiotics allows the analysis of popular music in ways that traditional music theory does not accommodate for. “Tagg also talks about episodic markers, which are essentially just musical sounds that indicate a significant transition. This is also a particularly useful device to analyse music in the dubstep style, given its focus on “drops” and the arbitrary signs that indicate them. Another of Tagg’s concepts is the style indicator, a music element or pattem of elements or structures thats typical of a particular style of music thatthe piece solidly belongs in, Style indicators ean be seen as related tothe genre syneedoche, but signifying a style the piece belongs to, rather than an alien style, “To demonstrate some of these concepts, an analysis of a short section of Burial’s < Archangel’ follows. In particular, this analysis will focus on the 8-seeond section beginning at 0:33. On the surface, there are many identical sections to this one and it doesn’t particularly matter which one is analysed, theugh there are some differences on the processual continuum that were already examined earlier inthis essay. So, to begin with itmakes sense to look atthe first obvious thin that is heard t this point - the onset of a sample of a choir recording, which serves as an episodic marker signifying the start of a new section. This onset is also sign on the generative continuum at the intra-opus level, since it always indfcates a change of aesthetic in thecatpled will affect the listener's understanding of the music. The meaning of any component of popular music depends on all other popular music, the relationships it has with all other components (including those in other music), the technology utilised to create it and any extra-musical information generated by discussion of i In November of 2007, Burial released his sophomore album, Untrue® It was produced quite rapidly in comparison to his first album’ and is generally classified as Dubstep*, [A predominant theme in Burial’s work, especially on Unirue, is the heavy use of campling, particularly of vocals. Taking lines ftom existing works and disassembling them, often word by word, Burial constructs different versions of what they could have been, He time-stretches, vocodes and pitch shifts them beyond recognition and weaves them together with an intricate mesh of syncopated percussion tracks and thoughtfully sourced textural samples. Its this appropriation and extensive manipulation of material that makes Burial's work interesting as a candidate for semiotic analysis. Inhis book, Studving Popular Music’, Richard Middleton described four concepts for analysis of music, or as Longhurst dseribes them, ‘dimensions along whieh music can be considered”, The frst of these isthe generative continuum, which refers to the ehationships between levels of structure in a piece, Generative grammar (ot transformational grammar) was initially conceived as a linguistic theory by Noam Chomsky", The idea is that a sentence can be considered a mapping of a deep structure, constituting the Semantic content of the words, onto a set of surface a structure conventions. Applying this theory to music, Middleton proposes four a generalised analytical levels for the generative continuum: - seo © Burial, Untrue, London, Hyperdub, 2007. 7 Burial, Burial, London, Hyperdub, 2006. is) ® p. Sherburne, ‘Untrue ~ Album Review’ Pitchfork, November 2007, . httos//pitchfork. com/reviews/albumns/10877-untrue/, (accessed 21 April 2015) 3 Middleton, Studying Popular Music, Mitton Keynes, Open University Press, 1990, pp. 214-220, 28 Longhurst, Popular Music & Society, Oxford, Polity Press, 1995, p. 167. Y 2.1, Chomsky, ‘Three models for the description of language’, IRE Transactions on information Theory, vol. 2, no. 3, 1956, prs, 113-124. 2. Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, Berlity Mouton, 1957 er1) General cognitive processes. These are broad, high level ideas that can be ‘understood and organised logically. For example, ideas of size, direction or whether two objects are the same. Concepts on this level should be understood in the same way by anybody. 2) Culturally determined applications of general cognitive processes, specific to musical material. For example, musical units of time or pitch relationships Any person with a musical background based in the same culture should agree on understanding for concepts on this tier. In the context of this essay, this means Western popular musical tradition. 3) Style-specific syntaxes constructed on the foundation of tier 2. Concepts in this category should be understood similarly in the context of any composition within the same style. For example, a certain style may have restrictions or biases for key, scale or the use of certain intervals (such as Emo Revival music, which favours D major and A major almost exclusively), or a certain sound may indicate something structural about a piece (such as a ‘riser’ indicating an impending drop in EDM). It may be that any such axioms cease to be true outside the style in question 4) Intra-opus patterns. These are concepts that hold true only within a certain work or body of work. This could be a single song, or an entire album or group of albus by an artist or collective. An example would be that @ single song could use a specific sound to indicate a structural transition for a number of transitions, or perhaps across a whole album, a specific lyric could be paired with a specific harmonic backdrop in multiple instances. Of course, these categories can be seen in a less discrete way, and in particular the ine between tiers 3 and 4 is quite blurry; sometimes the distinction between a body of work by a collective and entire style can be quite arbitrary. ‘The second and thirdedimensions Middleton describes are the syntagmatic ant paradigmatic continua, respectively. The two can be seen as different orders of the same concept, Syntagmatic analysis involves explores ‘the ways in which different musical units are combined to produce sequences of sounds’, This method refers to * Longhurst, Op. cit/ap. 167. see