Revista de comunicación política e institucional

No. 51 (2023): Local political communication: the territory and digitization
Articles

Musical syntax in Hillary, Trump and Biden’s presidential ads

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.56151/maspoderlocal.92
Aleix Herreras Carrera
UIC

Keywords

  • Comunicación política,
  • campaña electoral,
  • estudio de caso,
  • spots electorales,
  • música,
  • armonía,
  • cadencia armónica,
  • tonalidad
  • Political communication,
  • political campaign,
  • case study,
  • campaign ads,
  • music,
  • harmony,
  • harmonic cadence,
  • tonality

How to Cite

Herreras Carrera, A. (2023). Musical syntax in Hillary, Trump and Biden’s presidential ads. Más Poder Local, (51), 61-79. https://doi.org/10.56151/maspoderlocal.92

Copyright (c) 2023 Of the author or authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Abstract

In order to identify similarities and differences in the musical strategy used by Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, this study starts from the observation of 160 videos approved and paid by for them in the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. The results show that all the candidates generally use pre-existing music extracted from sound and video banks. Most of Hillary’s spots (2016) got the piano as the main instrument, and Trump was the candidate who has used this least as the main instrument in both campaigns. Half of the spots observed are in minor tones, and this mode predominates in the ads of all typologies. In the case of comparative advertising, there is a remarkable cluster of ads that change from minor to major. Most contrast ads exploit musical juxtaposition techniques, especially to Hillary and Trump. Most of the contrast ads that include harmonic changes as musical juxtaposition techniques were released by Donald Trump. The study provides methodologies to extract data on the music of campaign ads, paying special attention to the harmony.

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