ABSTRACT
Like all semiotic resources, sound and music have very specific affordances, which means they can be used in special ways. Scholars have argued that music has a special kind of force as a carrier of collective memory and tradition, working more in ‘an emotional and almost physical sense’ (Eyerman 1999, p. 119). Unlike texts and pictures, the sounds in music enter and flow through our bodies, calling us to move with their rhythms, and feel the texture of their pitches and sound qualities (Machin & Richardson 2011). A migrant child sitting in a classroom while their classmates sing the daily national anthem may not understand the words, but they will physically experience its power (Abril 2012). In this chapter, I show how we can document and analyse the way this power and the ideas, values and identities that it communicates, are realised. I explain how we can approach sound as discourse using the case study of two national anthems: ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘O Canada’. The first part of the chapter introduces what a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) approach to sound looks like. It then moves on to apply these ideas to the anthems by looking at the lyrics and then at how these are realised through sound.
