The Music Made Me: A Study of Classical Music in Television Advertising
Senior Honors Thesis – April 2013
This thesis explores the uses of classical music in contemporary television advertising considering both theoretical and pragmatic approaches. It argues that television advertisers make particular assumptions about musical gesture, representation of emotions and ideas, and the ability of music to persuade consumers to purchase products and services. Based upon these assumptions, advertisers favor a certain subset of classical music exhibiting properties such as contrastive sections (in mood and/or tempo), conventional gestures that depict or illustrate emotions and actions, slow harmonic rhythm, and flexible metric organization. The repeated use of pieces bearing these properties contributes to a larger cultural expectation of how classical music operates, persuades, and represents ideas and emotions. Advertisers depend upon these assumptions to create new cultural associations for television advertisements and their accompanying music. Through examining the history of advertising, paradigms of music in media, pragmatic reasons to employ classical music, and four advertising case studies, it shows that there is no absolute ‘meaning’ of classical music and that television advertising, as well as other media, continually reinvent and redefine the role of classical music within culture.
Watch a brief thesis presentation.
Radio Storytelling Projects
December 2012
In Fall 2012, I helped design a Group Independent Study Project (GISP) in Radio Storytelling. We considered how radio can be used as an effective storytelling medium and produced our own radio stories.