Rhythm in Multimodal Texts

Abstract

The author presents a hier-archical model of rhythm in lan-guage, music and action and ap-plies it to the integration of these semiotic modes in multimodal texts. The model distinguishes be-tween rhythm and meter; meter is shown to synchronize the rhyth-mic hierarchies of musical instru-ments, as well as of voice, music and action. The author identifies the meanings conveyed by variet-ies of multimodal synchronization.