Helen Julia Minors

Multimodal translation through the eyes, the body and the ears

This paper tackles the field of intersemiotic translation by focusing on the interweaving of the senses (especially of the eye and ear) to challenge how we process, understand and interpret the musical multimodal art forms. Since the translational turn (Backman-Meddick, 2009) and the more recent multimodal turn (Kress, 2020; Minors 2020, 2023) in the arts, humanities, social sciences and in industry, I seek to illustrate how methods from translation studies and multimodal analysis, applied to the ephemeral art forms of music, film, and dance, can help us analyse our sensory experiences. I question, how might multimodal intersemiotic translation enable us to explore the interrelationships of music, film and dance? Or, how can this methodological approach inform our bodily and sensory experiences as creative artists? 

Building on the myths of music and translation (Minors, 2023), I now offer new myths of multimodal translation, to challenge the opportunities and benefits of advancing work in this field. In an increasingly globalized, digitized, online, AI, interconnected world, the role of multimodal translation in meaning construction is becoming increasingly significant and is growing in urgency for artists and researchers to grapple with, understand and apply. Not least the perceived threat of AI to creative individual voices is looming presently. With the increase in music and film consumed via digital streaming as well as in music/art tourism, this paper proposes the need and benefit of considering and applying the recent ‘translational turn’ (Bachman-Meddick, 2009) and ‘multimodal turn’ (Kress 2010) within the context of music. 

I claim that art is necessarily multimodal and offer a range of examples for each myth, not least that something is lost in translation (and gained!) and that music (and other arts) is a universal language (or rather, a sensory communicator, as it is not coded and culturally specific in the same way as language). Due to the rich variety of multimodal works, I broadly select the following areas to provide interconnected illustrative examples: music and word setting in popular music; narrative music-dance works; and music in contemporary film.

Bio:

Helen Julia Minors is Professor and the Head of the School of Arts at York St John University, UK. She was previously Associate Professor of Music and School Head of the Performing Arts Department at Kingston University, London. She is also Visiting Professor in Artistic Research at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. Helen was the founder and first co-chair of EDI Music Studies Network UK. She is co-investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Women’s Musical Leadership Online Network, having previously co lead the AHRC network, Translating Music (in 2013). She has published the following volumes: Music, Text and Translation (2013); Building Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Bridges, co-edited with Pamela Burnard, Valerie Ross, Kimberly Powell, Tatjana Dragovic and Elizabeth Mackinlay (2016); Paul Dukas: Legacies of a French Musician, co-edited with Laura Watson (2019); Artistic Research in Performance Through Collaboration, co-written and co-edited with Martin Blain (2020); Teaching Music Performance in Higher Education: exploring the potential of artistic research co-edited with Jorge Salgado Correia, Gilvano Dalagna, and Stefan Östersjö (forthcoming 2023); Routledge Companion to Women’s Musical Leadership, co-written and co-edited with Laura Hamer (forthcoming 2023); Choreomusicology: Dialogues in Music and Dance, co-edited with Samuel Dorf and Simon Morrison (forthcoming 2024); and Music, Song and Translation (forthcoming). Recent articles have appeared in London Review of Education (2017, 2019) and Tibon (2021), and recent book chapters in Translation and Multimodality (2019), Opera in Translation (2020), Intersemiotic Perspectives on Emotions (2023) and The Routledge Companion to Applied Musicology (2023).