Music and series: the verbalizing role of soundtrack lyrics from TV series to user-generated narrations.

In 1984, the creators of Miami Vice - a famous NBC detective drama - added pop and rock hits to the original themes of the soundtrack. This new use of music, later defined as 'MTV-inspired', has progressively increased in the last 10 years and has now become one of the widely accepted standards for music and image integration in US TV series and movies. Recently, it has also been fully exploited by users of social networking platforms in creating their own contents. In this article, the author examines how lyrics are used to 'design' meaning in both TV series and user-generated narrations, by applying the methodological framework of multimodality outlined by Kress, Van Leeuwen and Jewitt and, in particular, the system network of semiotic resources of sound elaborated by Van Leeuwen.