"Lookin' for a sound that's gonna drown out the world": Resolving musical emotional ambiguity in U2's POPVision

Rasmussen Pennington, Diane

Abstract

Semantic ambiguity complicates finding desired information. Additionally, the same music elicits different emotions in different people, which makes it difficult to find music online that meets our emotional desires. I operationalise this as “musical emotional ambiguity.” U2’s musical emotional ambiguity is especially complex, as any fan can attest. In this presentation, I will disambiguate the emotion of U2’s PopVision using multimodal analysis of music, lyrics, videos, and live concerts from Achtung Baby, Zooropa, and Pop, 1990s world events, interviews, reviews, paraphernalia, and fandom discussions. Can we agree on how PopVision and its artefacts make us feel?

Citation

Rasmussen Pennington, D. (2018, June). "Lookin' for a sound that's gonna drown out the world": Resolving musical emotional ambiguity in U2's POPVision. Paper presented at The U2 Conference 2018 - POPVision, Belfast

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: The U2 Conference 2018 - POPVision
• Conference Location: Belfast
• Start Date: Jun 13, 2018
• End Date: Jun 15, 2018
• Deposit Date: Feb 6, 2023
• Keywords: semantic ambiguity; information retrieval; emotions; U2; PopVision; Zooropa; Pop; Achtung Baby; popular music