CFP: Special research topic on “Multimodal Perspectives on Sound and Music: Communication, Meaning, and Method Across Disciplines”. 

Joshua Han and Signe Kjaer Jensen are editing an article collection in the online journal Multimodality of Communication (hosted by Frontiers).

We hope that some of you will want to contribute with an article to the collection. See more information below:

CFP for a special research topic on “Multimodal Perspectives on Sound and Music: Communication, Meaning, and Method Across Disciplines”.

Abstract deadline: 15 Juli 2026
Manuscript deadline: 30 April 2027
Note that it is recommended, but not required, to submit an abstract.

Read more about the Research Topic and how to participate here: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/80307/multimodal-perspectives-on-sound-and-music-communication-meaning-and-method-across-disciplines
(If you click the ‘participate in this topic ‘ button, you’ll get automated emails explaining the submission process and deadlines. You can also submit your abstract/manuscript directly by clicking the button ‘submit’).

Background
Music and sound play central roles in how humans produce and interpret meaning across artistic, cultural, and communicational contexts. Sound design and music are essential resources in multimodal media such as film and computer games, but they also shape everyday environments and artefacts, from shopping malls and cars to digital interfaces. Musical structures and practices further influence other media, for example, literature, through processes of recontextualization and transduction. Musical performance itself mobilises a range of resources beyond sounding notes, including gesture, movement, clothing, and lighting.

While multimodality research in the narrow sense—that is, as a self-identified field with shared, though internally diverse, theoretical foundations and analytical approaches—has developed powerful frameworks for understanding the integration of diverse communicative resources (or modes) such as language, image, and gesture, sound and music have remained comparatively underexplored within this body of work. At the same time, a wide range of disciplines that focus centrally on sound—including popular music studies, sound studies, film music studies, and ludomusicology—routinely address multimodal phenomena, albeit often without explicitly framing their analyses as multimodal or engaging directly with multimodal theory.

This Research Topic seeks to advance multimodal scholarship by bringing these narrow and broad perspectives into productive dialogue and by positioning sound and music as essential, yet still insufficiently theorized, communicative resources (or modes). Although extensive research already exists across music- and sound-related fields, divergent terminologies, analytical traditions, and methodological assumptions can make cross-disciplinary exchange difficult, limiting the development of shared conceptual tools and analytical frameworks capable of accounting for the contribution of sound and music to multimodal meaning-making.

We welcome theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that investigate sound and music as integral components of multimodal communication. Submissions may engage with any medial or cultural domain in which music or nonverbal sound plays a significant role in meaning-making. In particular, we invite scholars to explore how multimodal theory can be productively combined with existing sound- and music-related research in order to enhance analytical transparency, conceptual clarity, and methodological comparability, and to advance our understanding of sound and music as communicative resources in complex multimodal media. We encourage interdisciplinary contributions spanning multimodality, sound studies, semiotics, musicology, popular music studies, media studies, film studies, game studies, and intermediality.

Potential themes include, but are not limited to:

• multimodal analysis of music, sound art, and musical performance
• sound and music in film, games, social media, advertising, and product or interaction design
• interactions between sound, music, language, and visual imagery
• transformations of auditory meaning across media (e.g., musicalized fiction)
• innovative methodological and theoretical approaches to sound and music within multimodal frameworks
• semiotic and socio-cultural approaches to sound and music as communicative practices
• critical discussions of the applicability of existing multimodal theories to sound and music
• cross-disciplinary terminology, systematics, and analytical transparency.

Authors should clearly articulate how their contribution advances multimodal theory or enhances understanding of sound and music as communicative resources in multimodal contexts. We welcome the following article types: Original Research, Methods, Review, Mini Review, Hypothesis and Theory, Perspective, and Conceptual Analysis.
We look forward to receiving your proposals.

Best wishes,
Signe and Joshua