Understanding Jingles and Needledrop: A Rhetorical Approach to Music in Advertising Author(s): Linda M.

Scott Source: The Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Sep., 1990), pp. 223-236 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2626814 Accessed: 02/09/2009 11:29
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UnderstandingJingles A in Rhetorical Approach sing

and
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Needledrop: Music

Advert

LINDAM. SCOTT*
Studies of music in advertising have tended to characterize music as a nonsemantic, affective stimulus working independently of meaning or context. This implicit theory is reflected in methodology and procedures that separate music from its syntax of verbal and visual elements. Consequently, the consumer's abilityto judge and interpret music as part of an overall rhetorical intention is overlooked. This article proposes an alternative theory-that music is meaningful, language-likeand calls for both interpretive and empirical research as ways of exploring a richer, potentially more explanatory concept.

the averageAmerican, music in advertisingis a commonplace. Jingles, rock-star endorsements, and "needledrop" music are a trivial, easily understood part of the daily cultural discourse.' Children sing "Keep on, keep on, keep on moving with Twix" in the school yard. Parentssmile, shaking their heads. A moon-headed piano player flies across television skies crooning "Mack the Knife," and the audience laughs, recognizing Ray Charles.Pepsi yanks Madonna's commercial to avoid offending the Catholic church. The next morning, columnists raise their eyebrows knowingly. Advertisingmusic is a shared experience we can parrotand parody together. In spite of the ease with which consumers interpret, remember, and play with advertisingmusic, scholars who study advertising seem confounded by it. Few studies of the role of music in advertising exist, despite agreement that more work is needed. Those studies that have been done are riddled with inconclusive findings. In most cases, this researchincorporates little work from other fields toward understanding the complexity of music as a cultural form. Consequently, the research is plagued by simplistic presuppositions about "how music works." These assumptions, which tend to characterize music as a nonsemantic affective stimulus, form the basis of an implicit theory of music that is carriedthrough methodology to procedure.
* Linda M. Scott is a doctoral candidate, Departmentof Advertising, College of Communications,University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712. The authorwishes to thank Steven Feld, David Mick, and threeanonymousreviewers their comments on previfor ous draftsof this article. 223

To

The purpose of this article is to advance a new theoretical frameworkfor the study of music in advertising. An approach to musical meaning will be proposed that draws on notions of culture, rhetoric, and symbolic action, such as those espoused by Kenneth Burkeand CliffordGeertz. In this view, ads use a variety of symbolic forms to effect persuasion among culturally constructed beings, exploiting every available means, including music. Music becomes a functional component that contributes to the rhetorical task in ways as various as language. Eight illustrations of the complexity of music's role in advertising will be offered as evidence. Brought to the argument throughout will be the work of music theorists such as Leonard Meyer, Victor Zuckerkandl, Susanne Langer,and Alan Merriam.A broad range of musical disciplines will be represented-from psychology and social psychology, as represented by Jay Dowling, Dane Harwood, and Paul Farnsworth,to ethnomusicology, particularly as represented by Steven Feld, John Blacking, John Shepherd,and CharlesKeil. The approach proposed here also builds on recent works in consumer behavior that argue for a culturebased, or interpretive, approach to consumption (e.g., Hirschman 1989; McCracken 1988). In particular, this article is intended in the spirit of Grant McCracken's (1987) suggestion that ads be studied not as transparentenvelopes of product information, but
"'Needledrop"is an occupational term common to advertising agenciesand the music industry.It refersto music that is prefabricated, multipurpose,and highly conventional. It is, in that sense, the musical equivalent of stock photos, clip art, or canned copy. Needledropis an inexpensivesubstitutefor originalmusic;paid for on a one-time basis, it is droppedinto a commercialor film when a particularnormativeeffect is desired.
? 1990 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc. * Vol. 17 * September 1990 All rights reserved.0093-5301/91/1702-0011$02.00

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as meaningful artifactsthat require the invocation of cultural frameworksto be understood. The techniques used here are adapted from literary theory, specifically rhetorical theory and its contemporary cousin, reader-responsetheory. Although the frameworkproposed is more purely rhetorical than semiotic (Davis and Schliefer 1989), there is an underlying philosophical premise that ads are conventional constructions of differentkinds of symbols that require a unifying syntax to have meaning. In this sense, the proposed approach is continuous with structuralist work done by Mick (1986) and others (e.g., Umiker-Sebeok 1987). However, because rhetorical theory is historically grounded, this approach differs from a purely structuralist approach and shares philosophical overlap with historical approaches proposed or practiced by Pollay and others (Belk and Pollay 1985; Pollay 1979, 1987b). In an ad, as in any other speech act, syntax is important. The intersymbolic grammar of musical, visual, and verbal elements is basic to its work. Thus, those consumer behavior studies on music in or as a consumption experience, but not concerned with ads (Holbrook 1986, 1988; Holbrook and Schindler 1989; Milliman 1986; Yalch 1988), are dealing with an essentially different kind of musical communication. The discourse here is concerned with the research conducted on music in ads. Consumer behavior researchon music and consumption will be used, with work from other disciplines, to help illuminate the discussion of the reception of advertising music by consumers. The following review, however, is confined to studies of music in advertising and seeks primarily to illuminate the theoretical similarities that have driven this work.

THE LITERATURE

Theory
Studies of advertising music share an underlying theory in which music is an affective background component that causes attachment to the product without the cognitive involvement of the viewer. Two explicit processing models are represented:classical conditioning (Gorn 1982; Kellaris and Cox 1989; Pitt and Abratt 1988) and affective attachment or low involvement (Alpert and Alpert 1986; Haley, Richardson, and Baldwin 1984; Mitchell 1988; Park and Young 1986; Stout and Rust 1986). Descriptive studies also assume a simple cause-and-effectmodel (Sewall and Sarel 1986; Stewart and Furse 1986). Others not offering explicit processing theories express the belief that musical response is attributable to affect (Simpkins and Smith 1974; Stout and Leckenby 1988). In its simplest terms, the effect of musical tones in advertising is conceptualized as classical condition-

ing. For example, Gorn's (1982) experiment exposed two groups of students, pretested for musical preferences, to simple pictures of pens accompanied by country or popular music and then presented a "purchase opportunity." Results showed a relationship between music that was liked and purchasebehavior. Gorn concluded that his students were conditioned to purchase the pen by the pairing with music. Kellaris and Cox (1989) and Pitt and Abratt (1988) attempted to replicate this experiment without success. Gorn hypothesized that a positive affect mediated between music and response. Other researchersalso argue for an affect-mediated stimulus-response model, although terminology may differ. For example, Mitchell (1988, p. 31) sought to show that the induction of "subjective feeling states" by ads affected attitude toward the ad and the brand and, thus, their evaluation. His researchdesign conceived of music as a tool that directly manipulated mood without cognitive involvement. Mitchell's model carriesa different name and is explained in more complex terms than Gorn's, but it is substantially the same. Haley et al. (1984, p. 12) drew a similar model of nonverbal elements, including music: "In this model, the effects of the advertisingare immediately incorporatedinto overall affectiveattitudes towardthe advertised product and leave little if any traces elsewhere." In short, theoretical grounding for research in this area varies within a narrow range from affect-mediated classical conditioning to automatic mood manipulation-all postulate affect-oriented,nonsemantic, automatic responses to musical stimuli. Most researchers have substantiated their approaches with the work of Herbert Krugman and Robert Zajonc; thus, it may be helpful to review aspects of that research. In the mid-1970s, Krugman postulated that the right and left brain division allowed the right brain to monitor nonverbal stimuli without cognitive engagement (1977, 1986). Thus, people could be persuaded by nonverbal elements in advertisingwithout verbaltracesto recall. Krugman's thesis was not that nonverbal elements were always processed by the right brain and, therefore, not remembered in verbal form. Rather, he arguedthat the rightbrain'slonger attention span sometimes allowed it to monitor stimuli, calling in left-brain functions only as needed. The activities of the right and left brain are now thought to be substantially integrated, particularlyin the processing of rich symbolic material such as found in ads. But research on nonverbal elements in advertisingretains a trace of this thinking in a tendency to assume that nonverbal elements are processed in an affective, unconscious, right-brained manner. Of course, the notion that nonverbal elements never leave traces, verbal or otherwise, is falsifiable. The fact that I could cite three nonverbal commercials in the first paragraph of this article-and

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that most readerswill recognize them and recall their musical elements-tends to disprove the notion that such stimuli are always processed unconsciously and, therefore, are not remembered. Zajonc's thesis that affect can occur independently of cognition (Zajonc 1980; Zajonc and Markus 1982) is used to support researchdesigns that assume music is a stimulus that always works independently of cognition (e.g., Park and Young 1986, p. 14). Zajonc (1980, p. 154) has repeatedly stressed that the usual case is for thought and affect to occur together: "In nearly all cases, however, feeling is not free of thought, nor is thought free of feeling." The further equation of nonverbal elements with affective response is also counter to Zajonc's (1980, p. 165) arguments, which stress the emotional effects of "cognitive" stimuli and vice versa. As a theoretical basis, some experimental researchers have cited Cialdini (1984), whose theory of persuasion relies on highly structuredsocial situations of liking, such as Tupperwareparties and good cop/bad cop ploys. The interpretivejump from these interactive group situations to music as an automatic route to persuasion is a largeone. Further,Cialdini's advice to resist certain advertising appeals would be meaningless if consumers were indeed powerlessto resist or recognize emotional manipulation by musical tones. It is conventional in Western thought to believe that musical effects can be equated with emotional ones (Dowling and Harwood 1986, p. 202; Farnsworth 1958, p. 86; Merriam 1964, p. 266). However, past inquiry has revealed difficulties in this concept. First, even if musical effects were restricted to emotional appeals, we would soon find that music can both affect and representthe emotions, not necessarily simultaneously or in similar ways (Dowling and Harwood 1986, pp. 202-203; Farnsworth 1958, pp. 86-95). This results in interpretive listening, which intrinsically distances the hearerand lessens the plausibility of automatic attachments caused by tone as such (Meyer 1956, p. 11). Second, the assumption that tonal forms automatically arouse moods and emotions is counter to experience and practice. As Farnsworth (1958, p. 94) notes, "Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists would no doubt rejoice if all they needed to cure the depressed or maniacal were access to a variety of compositions whose 'moods' had previously been carefully catalogued. Therapy under such circumstances could be administered in truly engineering fashion-composition X for one disturbance and Y for another." Music's functional role in an ad, according to this positive affect theory, would be as pleasant background (Gorn 1982, p. 94; Park and Young 1986, pp. 11-12; Simpkins and Smith 1974, p. 362; Stout and Leckenby 1988, p. 207). Thus, the affective construct

to be responding to background music (liked or not) rather than to any meaning the music might have. LeonardMeyer (1956, p. 5), who has contributed substantially to music research as both theorist and empiricist, calls this the error of hedonism, "the confusion of aesthetic experience with the sensuously pleasing," an approach that overlooks the communicative meaning that a musical piece may have. According to Meyer, hedonistic conceptions of music are made manifest in the "testing of pleasure-displeasure reactions to simple sound or elementary sound complexes." Tests of bipolar musical coding based on a sensualistic theory of music abound in advertising research. Yet even a small sample of musical ads shows many ways in which music actually communicates, as we shall see.

Method and Methodology

Studies of music in advertising have been constructed by a theory of music as an emotionally manipulative stimulus that appears as a sensual backdrop and operates without cognitive intervention to achieve affective attachment. The tones themselves are thought to work independently and affectively, without semantic content, almost like a mood-altering drug. Methodologically then, isolating the music from the message is unproblematic, since the effect of the music is presumed to occur independently of meaning or context. This in turn leads to research procedures such as absence/presence coding, separation of musical modes or keys, and tests that present an austere visual with semantically unrelated music. These procedures exemplify what Meyer (1956, p. 5) has called the error of atomism, "the attempt to explain and understandmusic as a succession of separable, discrete sounds and sound complexes." The theoretical assumptions about the nature of music that underpin the methodology of separatingit syntactically lead to proceduresthat negate the complex functionality of the music. Procedurally, the studies can be grouped into two categories. In the first type, a laboratorysetting was used to test responsesto simulated ads with music (e.g., Gorn 1982; Kellaris and Cox 1989; Mitchell 1988; Park and Young 1986; Simpkins and Smith 1974). Responses usually involved an artificially constructed buying behavior or presumed antecedent, although one study used bipolar ratingsof emotional effects (Stout and Rust 1986). Nearly all experiments used static visual stimuli (cards or slides) with musical accompaniment, and the visuals were denuded of significant verbal or visual appeal to isolate the effect of the music. In no case using these artificial stimuli did the music have a semantic relationship to the visual stimulus. Respondents were generally pretested to determine mu-

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ness") on the hypothesis that more favorable buying behavior would be correlatedwith preferredmusic. In some instances, liking was mediated by some bipolar descriptor, such as happy/sad. Some significant results were found, but most showed no differences, correlated in unexpected ways, or conflicted internally (Mitchell 1988, pp. 140-14 1; Park and Young 1986, p. 21; Stout and Rust 1986). In contrast to the laboratory experiments, other studies tested largegroups of real ads in an attempt to correlate the presence of music in the aggregateto a similarly aggregated effect (Burke Marketing Research 1978; Haley et al. 1984; McCollum/Spielman and Company 1976; McEwen and Leavitt 1976; Ogilvy and Raphaelson 1982; Radio Recall Research 1981; Sewall and Sarel 1986; Stewartand Furse 1986; Stout and Leckenby 1988). Spots were first coded for "executional elements"; coding for music was usually absence/presence, but sometimes additional bipolar codes (happy/sad, melody/no melody) were used. In each of these large-samplestudies, the spots were tested for responses from groups of consumers; then the aggregateelements and responses were studied for correlations. The correlations were simple independent/dependent variable constructs: that is, the relationship of music to recall or to persuasion. None considered the interdependence of the executional elements themselves-the interaction of visual, verbal, and musical elements.2 No significant correlation between music and response was found in any of this research. The situations and instruments used in these studies-bipolar coding, emotional descriptors, isolation from meaningful context, undiscriminating aggregation-reflect the implicit theory. Further, the design of each study and the phrasing of conclusions were generallybased on the convention that if correlations to response were found, they would suggest that the absence or presence of music or a particular musical form might be generalized in its effects. This is the third error of music research identified by Meyer (1956, p. 5), the error of universalism, or "the belief that the responses obtained by experiment or otherwise are universal, natural, and necessary" and thus "good for all times and all places." In advertising research,universalismunderpins conclusions that preferences for a given mode, tone, or style will hold across a variety of advertising exposures. Such an assumption precludes consumers' ability to judge and understand various styles and melodies as appropri2McEwen and Leavitt did study the interaction of "elemental factors," but these were groups of elements that cut across what we normally consider executional elements, such as music and visuals. For instance, music in this study was an absence/presence descriptor grouped under a larger elemental factor called "pleasant liveliness," which included the presence of visual dissolves and the inclusion of children or babies.

ate and communicative in particular message contexts, exclusive of personal taste. Again, the assumption reflectsa theory of music in which tones result in effects without interpretation, mediation, or judgment on the part of the listener. When correlations were not found or were contradictory in these studies, researcherssometimes concluded that the "compatible music" had no effect (Simpkins and Smith 1974) and sometimes sought to refine their theory of processing (but not their theory of music; Park and Young [1986]). A few suggested that perhaps music requireda more complex conceptualization (Haley et al. 1984; Stout and Leckenby 1988). It is to this last need that this article is addressed.

MUSIC, MEMORY, AND CULTURE

The recognition and comprehension of any form of music-virtually the ability to perceive it as something other than noise-is now considered a learned skill acquired through years of enculturation and activated through memory (Dowling and Harwood 1986, p. 4; Merriam 1964, p. 297; Meyer 1967, p. 7; Zuckerkandl 1956, p. 64). Although invoked as intuitively and seemingly unconsciously as grammar,listening ability is no less the product of social training (Blacking 1973, 1981). Interpretingmusic, then, is a convention-based act, just like reading or looking at pictures. It is clear from the work of schema theorists in the arts (Gombrich 1960; Iser 1978; Meyer 1956, 1967) that understanding a complex message like an ad would involve evoking several symbolic schemataa huge regressionof past exposures to pictures, words, sounds, and ads-and the making and matching of many hypotheses according to learned conventions. The simplest response to an ad thus requires the retrieval of a storehouse of cultural information, as well as higherlevel manipulation of the present communication (Dowling and Harwood 1986, p. 4). The consumer's evaluation of the ad or the product necessarily follows a complex, highly symbolic enterprise required to find the ad intelligible at all. Further, each encounter with a given symbolic form results in its being recast by the present instance (Shepherd 1977, p. 19), because learning to interpret cultural material is not a skill that is learned once, like multiplication tables, but a continuing, lifelong experience (Dowling and Harwood 1986, p. 4; Merriam 1964, p. 146). Importantly, enculturation takes place in the largercontext of styles and norms, which
are "never static . . . on the contrary, dynamic and

ever-changing"(Merriam 1964, p. 162). Finally, both the exhibition of response behavior and the verbalexplanation of response are socially mediated (Meyer

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1956; Nisbett and Wilson 1977). Clearly, the cultural implications in studying the role of music in advertis ing are enormous. Yet one of the most arrestingweaknesses of the studies discussed here is their universal tendency to separate advertising from its social and cultural context.

FRAMING THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF ADVERTISING

If our concern is to understandmusic in communications, we must recognize the social characterof the musical communication process. According to Feld (1984, p. 6), "The listener is implicated as a socially and historically situated being, not just as organs that
receive and respond to stimuli.
.

. For this reason,

a description, and a theory of the musical encounter must be sensitive to the biographies of the object/
events and actors in question. . . . In short, the musi-

cal object is never isolated, any more than are its listeners or its producers." The firststep in viewing music as a socially situated, communicative experience is to recognize that musical responses are not biologically imbedded but are thoroughly learned. There are two important consequences to this. First, it means that communication of meaning through music is based on systems of cultural conventions and, thus, interpretations are not idiosyncratic but largely shared. Second, it means that each musical communication is framed by the sum of the listener's past listening experience. The phrase "past experience" includes the immediate temporal experience of the particular stimulus (i.e., the message syntax) as well as the more remote, yet ever-present,past experience of similar musical stimuli and similar musical situations in other works, including other ads (Meyer 1956, p. 36). Thus, each advertising experience is framed by all those that preceded it. We approach an ad as we approach a novel, symphony, or sculpture-by framing it with a set of expectations (Feld 1984; Gombrich 1960; Meyer 1956, p. 73; Iser 1978). Our expectations are based on the axioms of the culture, mediated by our own experiences, whether individual or shared. We learn through our enculturation to approach ads with prejudice, fascination, and skepticism. The lack of recognition of this framing step causes considerable bias in advertisingresearch,which formulates an audience searching for product information, compliantly forming positive brandattitudes, and resolving intentions to purchase. A more accurate formulation might be television viewers who roll their eyes, sigh, and go for a snack when the commercials come on. Ads are inherently self-interested messages. Knowing that, a viewer comes to any commercial by fram-

ing it as a self-servingpiece of rhetoric (Festingerand Maccoby 1968). The conventions of commercial placements prepare us to invoke that frame as a defensive move (Allyn and Festinger 1961). So the viewer, far from being driven to submission by affectproducing nonverbal elements, is often holding back from acceptance of the message, waiting for an excuse to dismiss the communication as "just more advertising hype." In this way, "knowledge and experience often color or modify our opinions about what is heard" (Meyer 1956, p. 78). This kind of wary stance is not the sort of behavior that leads to classical conditioning. Given the skepticism of the viewer, it is part of the work of the executional elements of advertising to help make the essential proposition more suasive. The music in an ad may perform any number of rhetorical tasks: supporting arguments, demonstrating claims, building a ground for mutual confidence, catching and holding attention, and providing a vehicle for repetition and remembrance. Music serves these functions only by virtue of shared cultural
meaning.

Importantto the functioning of music as rhetoric is the notion of style, the manner in which a message is communicated. Style in communications is no mere frill but a necessary and omnipresent attribute of any symbolic vehicle (Burke 1973, pp. 126-129). No message can be crafted without the appearance of style, regardlessof the medium, and musical messages are no exception: "The meaning of a tone, however, lies not in what it points to but in the pointing itself . The meaning is not the thing indicated but the manner of indicating" (Zuckerkandl 1956, p.68). Musical styles are artificialconstructs developed by musicians at specific times within specific cultures (Meyer 1956, p. 60). Their meaning-and intended effects-must therefore be understood historically. Responses to musical styles depend not on natural, universal responses or on learned denotative meanings but on habits of listening, acquired and adapted through ongoing enculturation (Meyer 1956, p. 61). Music is in no way a universal language but is shaped by the culture of which it is a part;in the texts it uses, it communicates direct information to those who understand the language and style in which it is couched (Merriam 1964, p. 223; Meyer 1967, p. 7). By using certain visual, verbal, and musical styles, an advertisermakes a meaningful choice from among a variety of possibilities. The viewer interpretsthe stylistic choices as a sign indicative of the character or intent of the communicator (Aristotle 1954, pp. 164218; Burke 1969, pp. 49-64; Feld 1984, p. 2). Thus the style itself has meaning. Since the musical sign in an ad is understood by the hearerto be purposive, we must interpret it by addressingfunction. Because the same sign may serve very different functions or may

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be replaced by a synonymous sign, meaning can be attributedonly in the context of use (Hirsch 1976, pp. 23-26). Therefore,we must look for musical meaning in the historical and social context of performance, purpose, and function-it is from this vantage point that music attains a rhetorical eloquence that can challengelanguage(Blacking 1981, p. 186).

MUSIC AS A FUNCTIONAL ELEMENT IN ADVERTISING

Music in advertisingis part of"an interdependence of elements which is complex, intermediate, and reciprocal, as againstthe simple, direct, and irreversible dependence implied in classical causality" (S. F. Nadel, quoted in Merriam 1964, p. 215). It is active, playing a part, and making a contribution to the total task. As such, music should not be isolated from the complex interrelationship of verbal and visual symbols that always accompany it in a specific message. Music never appearsin an advertisingcontext without at least one other executional element: the announcer voice-over, the words in a jingle, or the photographyin a television commercial. These elements vary in their relationship to the music, depending on the function the music has in the particularcommercial. The meaning of the music is determined by this relationship and does not inhere in the tones per se. Just as words in a language become meaningful by virtue of being joined in a system of relationships called a grammar,the elements in a commercial are made meaningfulby their relationshipsto each other. According to Langer (1942, p. 67), "Grammatical structure,then, is a furthersource of significance. We cannot call it a symbol, since it is not even a term; but it has a symbolific mission. It ties together several symbols, each with at least a fragmentary connotation of its own, to make one complex term, whose meaning is a special constellation of all the connotations involved. What the special constellation is, depends on the syntactical relations within the complex
symbol, or proposition." So the combination of non-

nearly as intriguing, as, "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." Although equally grammatical, the sentences are likely to be evaluated differently. In examples of advertising, generalizations are often based on tests of static pictures systematically stripped of verbal or visual appeal and accompanied by unrelated music. Such generalizations are clearly founded on a "see John run" test. The leap from plain photographs accompanied by Benny Goodman to Robert Palmer and his postmodern Rockettes' message that Pepsi is "simply irresistible" is one that requires more than faith. It demands an absence of critical judgment. Ads, like sentences, symphonies, and sculptures, vary in quality and impact. Tests that do not recognize this overlook the consumer's ability to discriminate among commercials. Just as grammar allows us to generate and understand an infinite number of sentences and cultural conventions allow us to interpret poetry, newspaper reports, and VCR instructions, we interpret advertising in a given context, using shared cultural experience. Through convention and grammar,advertising music can function with at least as much variability as language: it can be informative or affective, it can denote or connote. Music can structure time, simulate motion, and support repetition. The demonstrations that follow are intended to illustrate, and thus act as evidence for, the proposition that music performs a variety of functions in its contribution to the overall rhetorical task of advertising. Several commercials will be describedin sufficientdetail for readers to either recall or imagine them. If a readerwishes to obtain video copies of the commercials, the names, dates, and agencies, as well as the Radio TV Reports identification numbers, have been provided in Table 1. In each commercial, music will be shown to be playing a different role, to contribute to persuasion, and to requireinterpretation.And we will see that the traditional research constructs would have obscured the rhetoricalwork of the music.

Dissonance/Consonance: Bayer Aspirin

A recent commercial for Bayer aspirin opens abruptlywith a shot of a man in pain and the sound of dissonant music. Within seconds, a billboard flashesa black-and-white message: "Pain." Then we see a series of flashes of various people rubbing their bodies in gestures of discomfort, accompanied by heightening aural dissonance. After a few of these pictures, we are shown a quick image of a Bayer aspirin bottle. Intermittently, with the continued images, the product pitch starts. As the announcer builds his case, the dissonant music almost imperceptibly becomes consonant. The people now are smiling, relieved. Bayer aspirin has done its work. This commercial is playing on the widely understood meaning for consonance and dissonance: "It is

verbal elements in an ad comes to have meaning via a peculiar sort of grammarthat can employ all these symbols simultaneously: words, voice, music, color, shape, and motion. And it can do so in as many various waysas a grammarin languagecan construct sentences from individual words. Just as the representation and impact of different parts of speech will vary from sentence to sentence, the salience and impact of music (or pictures)will vary from ad to ad. Thus, the expectation that the relationship between music and consumer responsewill be consistent is not realistic. In language, two sentences may be equally grammatical and comprehensiblebut not be equally interesting, pleasing, seductive, or persuasive. For example, "See John run" is just as grammatical, but not

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TABLE 1 MUSIC IN COMMERCIALS:EIGHTDEMONSTRATIONS

229

Product Bayer aspirin Honda LX Diet Coke Alleract Matchlightcharcoal Californiaraisins Levi's 501 jeans Pepsi
NOTE.-The identification

Year 1989 1988 1982 1989 1988 1982 1984 1989

Commercial name "Pain" "Rough Idea" "Premiere" "Sneak Attack" "The Moment of Truth" "Rondo" "Bluesman" "Robert Palmer"

Advertising agency Lintas, New York Rubin Postaer, Los Angeles Lintas, New York McCaffery & McCall, New York DDB-Needham, Chicago Foote, Cone & Belding, San Francisco Foote, Cone & Belding, San Francisco BBDO, New York

Identification number 89-05043 88-11365 82-15634 89-04832 88-05569 82-20260 84-16011 89-02229

number is from Radio TV Reports.

evident, no matter what theory we adopt, that consonance representsthe element of normalcy and repose, [dissonance] the no less important element of irregularity and disturbance" (Meyer 1956, p. 231). It would be natural to assume that our response to this grating sound is instinctive, working on pain-avoidance principle. What is actually happening here is not instinctive, however, but a learned response to a culturally construed notion of noise. Although all cultures have some concept of dissonance (Meyer 1956, p. 229), the particularnotion of what sounds actually are dissonant varies from culture to culture, indicating that recognition of dissonance is culturally determined, socially mediated, and learned (Dowling and Harwood 1986). "For consonance and dissonance are not primarily acoustical phenomena, rather they are human mental phenomena and as such they depend for their definition upon the psychological laws governing human perception, upon the context in which the perception arises, and upon the learned response patterns which are part of this context" (Meyer 1956, p. 229). Thus, what we might interpretas a phenomenon occurring in nature is, in fact, a metaphor. Yet it is in this apparent naturalness that the artifice of metaphor finds its strongest power: the metaphorical is felt to be naturallyreal, obvious, and complete. Even the naturalnessof this metaphor needs interpreting within the frameworkof the commercial. We do not merely cover our ears in reaction but understand quickly, on the basis of our past experiences with advertising, that this dissonance is part of an effort to tell us something. To understand what that something is, we must attend to other parts of the message: "No particularconnotation is an inevitable product of a given musical organization, since the association of a specific musical organization with a particular referential experience depends upon the beliefs and attitudes of the culture toward the experience" (Meyer 1956, p. 262). Dissonance is often used in music as a foil against which consonance can be "more gloriously" present (Zuckerkandl 1956, p.

106). A similar construct is used in the Bayer commercial; the resolution of the dissonance into consonance parallels the structure of a problem and solution within the ad. So, by invoking both our past experiences with dissonance and consonance and our schema for problem/solution advertising, we are easily able to interpret the intended meaning: Bayer aspirin makes pain go away. The music in this spot has accomplished two tasks. It has reproduced the affect of discomfort and the peace of repose, while demonstrating product benefit with a higher-levelcognitive operation of metaphor. Thus, it has functioned efficiently as a rhetorical device. Note that the kind of bipolar, "liked-disliked"music construct of many research strategieswould have obscured this meaning. Certainly no one would report liking the music. Yet its use is persuasive.

Representing Motion: Honda LX

A Honda LX spot opens with a familiar situation: a driver wants to pass a slow "eighteen-wheeler"on a narrowcountry road. An opportunity opens up when a side road appears. The driver takes it, but must "floor it" to be sure she actually does pass the truck. As the race goes on, we hear sprightly music, clearly designating the movement of the little Honda as it presses to pass the truck. In this spot, the music is working to describe the speediness of the car while heightening the tension of the narrative, helping to hold our attention. Music's ability to represent motion is widely recognized and a time-honored use (Zuckerkandl 1956, pp. 79-95). However, it is important to note also the substitutability of this particularpiece in representingthe motion of the car. Any number of other sprightly representations of motion in musical form would have worked for this task. (From this phenomenon comes the whole industry of"needledrop" music.) Note also that this particularmelody, in another context, could

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take on many other meanings: a hostess frantically making last-minute adjustments to the buffet table, children scrambling up a tree, a young man unloading groceries from a car, and so on. It is this principle of synonymity that is at the basis of cultural interpretation, as distinguished from lexically oriented systems of meaning (see Hirsch 1976, pp. 50-73). Since this piece is potentially synonymous with other musical notations, we interpret it with the aid of the related visual. The meaning of the music would be lost if separated grammatically from its visual term.

it pleasurablewhen other forms would be gratingand nonsensical (Zuckerkandl 1956, pp. 213-214). Further, rhythmic repetition in music creates a growing sense of accomplishment. In rhetoric, this sense of accomplishment is called "formal assent." Burke (1969, pp. 58-59) explains, "We know that many purely formal patternscan readily awakenan attitude of collaborative expectancy in us. For instance, imagine a passage built about a set of oppositions ('we do this, but they on the other hand do that; we stay here, but they go there, we look up, but they look down,' etc.). Once you grasp the trend of the form, it invites
participation . . . by the time you arrive at the second

Rhythm and Repetition: Diet Coke

The Diet Coke jingle is well known. The introductory spot employed a staged Radio City premiere with a cast of hundreds of celebrities. The Rockettes dance around a gargantuan Diet Coke while waiters serve samples on silver trays. There is no auditory message except the jingle. The lyrics themselves are the kind of advertising message that has meaning only for a brand manager. IntroducingDiet Coke! You're gonna love it just for the taste of it. IntroducingDiet Coke! You're gonna love it just for the taste of it. You're gonna taste with just one calorie. IntroducingDiet Coke! IntroducingDiet Coke! This is the one that can carrythe fame Of the number one soft drink, The number one name. The real cola taste that you wanted is here. Now and forever, We'regoing one better. IntroducingDiet Coke! You're gonna drink it just for the taste of it. Just for the taste of it, Diet Coke! What is persuasive in this commercial is not the selfcongratulatory verbals. What is persuasive is the crowd of celebrities and the rhythmic movement of the repeated rising tones in the jingle. Rhythm, like consonance and dissonance, is culturally determined: "We must not forget that what we call rhythm in music is a comparatively new thing, unknown to antiquity and the Middle Ages" (Zuckerkandl 1956, pp. 76-77). But the definite intent in the wavelike pattern in a rhythmic motion like this is one of the most forceful in modern Western culture. Rhythmic motion and patterned tones are traditionally used in situations to elicit group solidarity in action (Zuckerkandl 1956, pp. 173-174). In this particular instance, the music is also helping to carry the ridiculous repetitiveness in the wordsan important task in advertising, where repetition is key. Music not only supports repetition but can make

of its three stages, you feel how it is destined to develop-and on the level of purely formal assent you would collaborateto round out its symmetryby spontaneously willing its completion and perfection as an utterance." Thus, through its unrelentingly rhythmic, ascending, and repetitive pattern, particularlyin a visual matrix of social approval, the music in the Diet Coke commercial is doing the lion's share of the rhetorical work through the mechanism of formal assent.

Music as Narrative: Alleract

A recent Alleract commercial operateson that wellknown cultural form, the narrative, using conventional denotations of musical instruments (see Merriam 1964, p. 237). An allergy sufferersits on a park bench. Strings are plucked suspensefully as, behind him, animated trees and plants-presumably carrying allergenic pollens-creep up to the bench. He begins to sniffle and sneeze. A snare drum signals the climax. Then the sound of trumpets declares the rescue as the product is introduced as the hero. Finally, the narrativeis briefly reprisedboth visually and musically. While the product pitch in this commercial is being given by the announcer voice-over, a simultaneous narrative is being carried by the musical accompaniment and visuals. Notice that relegatingthis music to mere "pleasant background music without a melody" would completely obscureits functionality in narratingthe rescue of the hay-feversuffererby the product. Childhood experiences with pieces such as "Peter and the Wolf" are the basis for our ability to interpret music narratively. Holbrook (1986, 1988) has recounted personal experiences that demonstrate the cultural and individual forces that shape our concepts of artifactual meaning. In particular, he tells of his fear on first hearing "Peter and the Wolf." These singular fears, related to his own injuries and development, were embroidered on the cultural meaning of the piece as a fearsome narrative (1988). In this way, interpretationsof cultural artifactscome to have individualized meanings while resting on a large base of

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shared significance. The challenge of musical communications research,then, would be to find that area in which interpretationconverges and is no longer idiosyncratic but shared.

"Locating": Matchlight Charcoal

The current Matchlight charcoal campaign dramatizes ease of use via sports metaphors. In one ad, a man wearingjeans and a baseball cap emerges from his basement and walks toward the barbeque pit. We hearthe familiar organ music of the ballpark,increasing the tension through dramatic chords. The man's family looks on with apprehension; his wife offers him lighter fluid. The man "pitches" a lighted match into the pit, and it lands on a bag of Matchlight charcoal. As the flames catch, the family looks happy and dinner begins; the organ music changes to that distinctive scrambleof triumphantchords that one hears at the ballparkwhen a home run or other celebrative event occurs. The music here operates through the interpretive move that Feld (1984) describes as "locating." In this case, the location is a specific kind of experience, American baseball games, that the viewer must have to interpret the commercial. Thus, the message is intentionally audience-selective. The appeal, however, is not based on musical taste but on what the music signifiesabout a lived experience. Retrieval of that experience is necessary to understanding the meaning on all levels: visual, verbal, and musical. The music, then, is part of a complex syntax that argues through sports metaphors, and it must be understood on a cognitive level. Although the intended viewer may have-and probably does have-a positive association and affecttowardthe commercial, to say that this spot works through affective response and automatic attachment would be reductive in the extreme.

passingly familiar with classical music to know that this is a soft send-up of so-called serious music. Its flouting of convention is both musical and culinary. Therefore, we can see that a coding system designed to correlate preferencesfor "classical" versus "popular" music would entirely miss the point.

Forging Identifications: Levi's "Bluesman"

The Levi's 501 campaign that began in 1984 playfully centers around the color and word "blue." There are blue jeans, blue film, and the blues-in one ad, a young man even paints his sneakers blue. In an early spot, a Clio winner, the lighthearted interludes of urban youth are paradoxically interspersed with the image of a black man sitting in a window and quietly playing the blues. He is clearly the singer of the music, but his image seems incongruous with the others. He is older, immobile, boxed in. He is recognizable as the archetypal rural bluesman (Keil 1966, pp. 34-36)-hence, the title of the spot. We could interpret this as a casual use of popular music. This campaign capitalized on the crossover of black artists into the mainstream pop audience in the mid-1980s (Perry 1988, pp. 51-54) and the rise of the blues in popularity among white audiences (Keil 1966, p. 79). But I suggest that this spot is a dialogic representation of the phenomenon of play and subcultural forms found between urban white youth (especially workingclass) and black culture. The conflict between urban youth's exclusion from mature roles and their exposure to an ethic of material success often results in a hedonistic approach to life and an adoption of other cultural forms that articulate alienation (Shepherd 1985). In particular,the adoption of blues and other black musical forms by white working-class youth has been observed. Thus, the playfulness and the bluesman represent a dialogic approach to identifying with alienation. Meaning is being played out through a multivoiced discourse-the voice of urbanyouth, the voice of the bluesman-represented within a fictive construct (Bakhtin 1981). This spot speaks through an identification between classes, as opposed to insinuating a direct identification between advertiser and consumer. The most clearly marked carrierof the identification is the music. As Burke (1969, pp. 19-27) explains, the need for communication exists only in our division from each other; we communicate through simple and sometimes small areas of consubstantiation-a taste for the blues, for example-and in so doing forge identifications. As Burke (1973), Bakhtin (1981), and Iser (1978) have made clear, even fictive constructsnovels, poems, proverbs-are interestedcommunications, and rhetoricalintent is active even in the fictive representationhere. Thus, this interplay between urban youth and ruralbluesman insinuates the interests

StructuringTime: California Raisins

In a 1983 Clio-winning commercial, Mozart's "Rondo alla Turca"provides a dizzying dive through 30 seconds of unconventional recipes using California raisins. A feminine voice sings about the recipes so quickly that the words are nearly unintelligible. A legion of dishes sails by. The raisins fall on them in slow motion, opposing the speed of the music. Once the spot begins, most viewers are held to the end and perceive the experience as shorter than 30 seconds. This spot demonstratesmusic's well-known ability to structure time, creating a time sequence that is different, bracketed from the normal, perceived flow of events (Dowling and Harwood 1986, pp. 182-184). In a rhetorical sense, the music in the raisins commercial interrupts the surrounding commercial flow by creatinga virtual "time-space."And one need be only

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of the advertiserthrough the device of an identifying metonymy-blues and blue jeans.3

background and who are acquainted with the modes of association established within the style. However, this variation, though significant, is often not as wide
as it seems at first glance.
.

Musical Ethos: Pepsi

In one of the Pepsi rock-star endorsements, a collage of product shots and fountains is interspersed with Robert Palmerand a fashionablydressed, pokerfaced contingent of young women, who are at once reminiscent of beauty-pageantcontestants, the Rockettes, and Esther Williams movies. Palmer is singing a version of his hit song "Simply Irresistible"; the commercial visually mimics the video. Thus, the commercial refers to a product, a song, a video-as well as to Miss America, Radio City extravaganzas, and water ballet. By referring to so many cultural texts, this spot exemplifies what is called "intertextuality." As a typically postmodern artifact, the meaning of this ad is in the free play between all these textual references. Inferring the meaning is a complex, impressionistic, and highly creative enterprisefor the
viewer.

. In other words, while

The increasing economic interdependence among rock stars, record companies, music television, and advertisingagencies draws the meanings of products, records, stars, and videos ever closer together (Frith 1988). It becomes difficult to sort out a separate meaning from these interrelated texts. In this case,
the lyrics ("anything but typical . . . simply irresist-

ible") are fortuitous for the product. But, for the intended audience, the song is not necessarily referential-as a typical jingle would be. What the song, the star, and the women are doing is pointing to an ethos, which in rhetorical terminology means the fictively constructed implied speaker. It is neither the actual speaker(Pepsico) nor the visualized character (Robert Palmer) but an entity somewhere in between. An ethos is constituted through sketchy referencescalled deictics, cues that must be assembled to see a clear personality(see Culler 1975, pp. 164-166). Here, the ethos is the Pepsi Generation, a 25-year-old fictive construct that has been carefully maintained by updating the deixis-the system of visual and musical cues-periodically. This allows an appeal to a targeted audience familiar with both the music and the visual language. Other viewers may or may not be pleased by the presentation, but they will know to whom the message is directed. Here we address the fact that musical signs may have varied effects on viewers, even from the same culture. According to Merriam (1964, p. 271), "Connotations will vary even among those who do have the same cultural
3A metonymyis a rhetoricalfigurebased on adjacencyor contiguity. That is, the relationshipis possible merely because the two objects happento occurtogether.Thus, metonymy often drawsassociations in which the relationshipsare accidentalor trivial.

it is true that on one level (that of specific meaning) the ideas entertained by various listeners are patently different, on another level (the level of symbolic and metaphorical meaning) the concepts entertained by the various listeners are very similar." Pepsi commercials continually update the signifiers and, thus, the appeal to a youthful audience. Older viewers may not interpret the music in exactly the same way as the intended audience or be affected by it in a similar way. But this does not mean they do not understand it. On the contrary, they understand that the intended purpose is to appeal to other groups. Notice that it is through the changes of style (not only of music but of clothing and other signifiers)that the Pepsi Generation continues to be young in spite of its advancing years as an ethos. The adoption of a particular style of delivery as a means of building mutual confidence between speaker and listener is a device that rhetoricians have recognized since classical times (Corbett 1965, pp. 26-27). The rhetorical effectiveness of a given style, however, depends on how it is interpretedin a particularculture at a particular historical moment. Thus, any model ascribing a certain style of music as most effective with this age group would fail to be predictive because it lacks dynamics. Such a model would be potentially falsified with every new Top 40 list. This is but one example of the need to ground musical tests in a sense of cultural temporality-that is, in history. A disco style that might have been appropriate to the Pepsi ethos in 1978 would have seemed hopelessly dated and unappealing to young audiences in 1988. The blues of the rural black man once had particular meaning for a specific subculture; this style has now, according to some critics, lost its subcultural edge and been coopted by the dominant culture in the form of the white record industry-and the advertising industry (Perry 1988). Holbrook (1986) has chronicled his own travailsin maintaining a taste forjazz againstthe vagariesof popular trends. The historicity of musical tastes in general has recently been demonstrated by Holbrook and Schindler (1989). Thus, studies that attempt to identify ideal relationshipsbased on musical preferencessufferfrom the failureto recognize the dynamics of style.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

First and above all, an explanation must do justice to the thing that is to be explained, must not devaluate it,

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interpret it away, belittle it, or garble it, in order to make it easier to understand.The question is not "At what view of the phenomenon must we arrive in order to explain it in accordancewith one or anotherphilosophy?" but precisely the reverse: "What philosophy is requisiteif we are to live up to the subject, be on a level with it?" The question is not how the phenomenon must be turned, twisted, narrowed,crippled so as to be explicable, at all costs, upon principles that we have once and for all resolved not to go beyond. The question is: "To what point must we enlarge our thought so that it shall be in proportion to the phenomenon." [FriedrichWilhelm Joseph von Schelling, epigraph in Zuckerkandl( 1956)] I have illustrated here the complexity of music as a cultural form and the range of roles it can play as a rhetorical element in an ad. The foregoing arguments thus constitute an alternative theory of music as a basis for advertising research, one in which music is meaningful and language-like rather than affective and nonsemantic. This theory of music is greatly expanded in terms of complexity and in terms of potential explanatory power as well. It illustrates the promise of the interpretive, or humanistic, paradigm that has recently been under discussion in consumer research (Hirschman 1989; Lutz 1989). I do not, however, wish to suggest that the proposed theory should not be subject to empirical investigation (see Calder and Tybout 1989); I am offering it as an alternative theory to be negotiated and investigated empirically (Deshpande 1983). A careful review of the sources used to construct the argument for this theory would show that it is already based on a combination of interpretive and empirical sources. However, adopting such a concept would necessarily lead to a different methodology and, therefore, alternative procedures for research. The most obvious difference is in the use of interpretive skills and language to de-velop a more sensitive grasp of the ways that consumers may interpret music in an ad. My hope is that this article might stimulate a discourse in which scholars share, negotiate, and refine knowledge about musical rhetoric in the way that scholars in the humanities do (Hirschman 1986). Since advertising borrows from the arts in both form and content, it seems worthwhile to look at those disciplines for a better understanding of how artifactual meaning is constituted by both makers and users. Some researchers have already begun to analyze language and visuals in ads through literary criticism or semiotics (Stern 1989); it seems reasonable to argue that doing the same with music would be fruitful. As Sherry (1990, p. 43) has argued in his analysis of the postmodern potential for consumer research, this would require honing interpretive skills in a way that has not been traditional in consumer research, yet it could reveal the "virtually unrecognized limits our

conventionally-framedconstruals of persuasivecommunication have placed upon our insight." To accommodate such notions as style and locating, we would need to formulate interpretiveconcepts with a historical base of advertising samples. This would require some things that are still in short supply in the discipline-archives and histories (Pollay 1979). Although several institutions now have advertising archives, we are a long way from having a shared, easily accessible record of texts, such as those in literature or the other arts. This situation is exemplified by the need to describeand suggestavenues for procuringthe commercials interpreted in this paper. Yet these difficultiesshould not overridethe development of a historical sense of advertising forms; neither marketing nor consumer culture are ahistorical constructs (Sherry 1990). Because rhetorical theory tends to ground analysis in history and culture, it would become more evident that advertising, as an institution, is a speaker in political as well as economic discourses. As Pollay (1986, 1987a) and Rogers (1987) have suggested,critical approachesto consumption and ads could be appropriately added to the domain of consumer research. Rogers has suggested the broadening of method and scope, the triangulation of qualitative and quantitative, to achieve this end. The power implications of ads are significant. Developing ideologies of consumption, chemical use, race, class, gender relations, and even warfareare evident in ads across time. The Levi's 501 jeans commercial discussed here is just one that suggests even music can be adapted to ideology in advertising. Taking advantageof the richness and theory-generating ability of interpretive approachesdoes not preclude such things as quantification and does not relegate research to the idiosyncratic (Christians and Carey 1980). A major premise of this article is that musical meanings in ads are culturally based and, thus, socially defined and shared. So, although individual interpretation does occur, that understood area where the meaning can be seen as generally acceptable can serve as an anchor for research (Culler 1975; Hirsch 1976). Measurement of acceptable interpretations can then occur conceptually as the collective overlap of many individual interpretations rather than as a one-to-one matching with the interpretations of the researchers.For example, given the Alleract commercial describedpreviously, how many allergy suffererswould describe it by telling a similar story?How similar would they be to each other? Hirsch (1976) and Culler (1975) have suggested that recognition of synonymity is a way of observing shared interpretations empirically. Substituting music of various tempos in the Honda ad and seeing how people recognize the semantic difference might be one way of doing this and would not require complex

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articulation on the part of respondents. Successful precedent exists for using synonymity recognition as a basis for measuringmusical meaning (Dowling and Harwood 1986, pp. 210-211). Several interpretive writers mentioned here, including Geertz, Burke, and Blacking, have called for a statistical analysis of symbolic or musical meanings in other contexts, on the basis of confluence of meaning or function, not form. This would result in an ethnography of symbols (Geertz 1983) or a statistics of the symbolic (Burke 1973). This kind of study might ask questions about how often ads use music to designate motion or to locate the viewer in the past and about how people interpret these cues and with what degree of convergence. By designing studies and instruments that look for convergence, synonymity, and confluences of meaning, we might be able to quantify comprehension and response to music in ads with greater success than is now being achieved. In sum, we do not have to view the development of an interpretive theory and the empirical exploration of that theory as mutually exclusive enterprises. Instead, each can enlighten the other in the form of a triangulation (Deshpande 1983; Sherry 1990). Several of the writers cited in this article-Hirsch, Culler, Burke, and Iser-are literary critics. In textual criticism, the infusion of empirical data into theory building has recently been a vibrant source of learning, particularlyin the area of readerresponse theory and new historical criticism. What constitutes empirical research often differs from the experimentaldesigns analyzed here, and the methods I have proposed differ too, but the effort should be made to ground theory in experience. One of the signal symptoms of weakness in the studies discussed here is that the theory of music being used is not consistent with the way we experience the phenomenon in everydaylife. The way out lies not in avoiding observationand quantification but in avoiding ahistoricism, reduction, and atomism. We must not let our methods drive our theories but must instead, in the spirit of the Schelling quotation, design our methods in a way that can encompass whatever theory seems articulateenough to fully describe the phenomenon. In this way, the full potential of a pluralistic perspective can be achieved in the study of music, and in other areas of inquiry as well, as these approaches come acrossschisms to meet each other. [ReceivedSeptember1989. Revised April 1990.]

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