A semiotic approach to albums: homogeneity and heterogeneity in Canções praieiras and Tropicália ou panis et circencis

Abstract

This paper reflects on different possibilities of manifestation of senses from the object album, understood as a textual whole. Its senses emerge from the series of tracks – and not from the tracks taken as separated objects. First, pertinent analysis parameters to this object are defined and discussed, considering that this object is constituted in the constant tension between the album’s identity and the otherness between tracks. The administration of this tension can be verified in the exam of selection and sequencing of tracks, enunciative acts which define the album’s paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. By emphasizing continuities or discontinuities between textual entities, these acts can create, as a whole, effects of homogeneity or heterogeneity, which, making themselves compatible with contents manifested by the tracks, highlight and disseminate them in the textual whole. With that in mind, two albums are compared, Canções praieiras and Tropicália ou panis et circencis, aiming at showing how tendencies towards homogeneity and heterogeneity can be manifested by different uses of the same textual possibilities. Finally, it is verified how the tensive approach can describe these tendencies, understood as manifestations of dominances between operations of sorting and mixing.