Digital Discord

As my project hopes to explore relationships between the aural and visual world, this chapter appears to be especially pertinent material. I found the separation of music into "the music one listens to," and "the music one plays" to be especially interesting. One might, at first glance, be inclined to equate the two musics as two largely equivalent representations of the same underlying form. Yet Barthes' analysis of them as "... two totally different arts" rings largely true to me, as an amateur musician myself. I have indeed experienced the very phenomenon Barthes describes: that of a piece not resounding with me when merely listened to, but becoming beautiful when played.  Could it be that Beethoven's "lack", the inability to hear his own music, unlocked an unrealized musical potential inside him? Existing outside the realm of the heard music, and likely the played music as well, Beethoven's new perspective simply as 'composer...

  This advertisement for Heinz ketchup is a good example of the kinds of visual rhetoric Barthes talks about in this chapter.  Linguistic The pieces of linguistic information within the image are: 1) The Heinz brand and label, and 2) the tagline "No one grows Ketchup like Heinz." The operative verb here is very telling as to what the intent of the advertiser is. As we all know, ketchup is not grown. However, tomatoes are. The linguistic equation of the product (ketchup) with fresh tomatoes serves to reinforce a positive, fresh, clean, and healthy view of the product in the consumer. This reinforcement happens by way of Barthes' idea of "anchorage," where linguistic information is used to “fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs.” That is to say, it steers the viewer towards the “correct” interpretation of the image, underscoring and highlighting the positive, ‘euphoric’, desirable qualities of the connoted i...