Verbal and Visual Interface in Select Nigerian Pop Music Videos

Abstract Pop music is one of the popular genres of music with much rhythm and harmony and its emphasis on romantic love songs is not news. What needs clarification is the level of the interface in terms of meaning-making between the verbal and visual aspects of pop music videos. This study thus investigates the visual-verbal interface in some Nigerian pop music videos to determine the extent to which both visual and verbal modes encode and enhance meanings in the music. Three famous Nigerian pop music artists, Wizkid, Davido and Iyanya were chosen for their top status in the top-ten music videos in Nigeria in 2019. Two of their songs each were randomly picked out of the 49 music tracks produced by Wizkid, 60 tracks of Davido and Iyanya’s 22 singles. Findings indicate that, apart from paying attention to semiotic resources that are available in communicative modes, the variety of modes and their modal affordances, including multimodality account for how each mode interacts with others and how they are orchestrated in specific contexts to produce meaning. An understanding of all the modes and their meaning-making properties thus brings about a clearer/better understanding of texts.
Keywords: Multimodality, Semiotics, Pop music, Systemic functional semiotics