A Multimodal Understanding of the Role of Sound and Music in Gendered Toy Marketing

Luca Marinelli¹, Petra Lucht², Charalampos Saitis¹

¹Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom

²Center for Interdisciplinary Women’s and Gender Studies, Technical University of Berlin, Germany

Licence: CC-BY-4.0

Research paper: PLOS One, Nov 2024, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0311876.

Abstract

Literature in music theory and psychology shows that, even in isolation, musical sounds can reliably encode gender-loaded messages. Musical material can be imbued with many ideological dimensions and gender is just one of them. Nonetheless, studies of the gendering of music within multimodal communicative events are sparse and lack an encompassing theoretical framework. The present study attempts to address this literature gap by employing a critical quantitative analysis of music in gendered toy marketing, which integrated a content analytical approach with multimodal affective and music-focused perceptual responses. Ratings were collected on a set of 606 commercials spanning a ten-year time frame and strong gender polarization was observed in nearly all of the collected variables. Gendered music styles in toy commercials exhibit synergistic design choices, as music in masculine-targeted adverts was substantially more abrasive—louder, more inharmonious, and more distorted—than in feminine-targeted ones. Thus, toy advertising music appeared deliberately and consistently in line with traditional gender norms. In addition, music perceptual scales and voice-related content analytical variables explain quite well the heavily polarized affective ratings. This study presents a empirical understanding of the gendering of music as constructed within multimodal discourse, reiterating the importance of the sociocultural underpinnings of music cognition. We provided a public repository with all code and data necessary to reproduce the results of this study on github.com/marinelliluca/music-role-gender-marketing.

Quick guide

• For Table 1 (contingency tables) refer to nb_2_contingency_tables.ipynb in the main folder
• For the inter-rater agreement of the music-focused (mf experiment) and of the multimodal ratings (mm experiment) refer to nb1_inter_rater_agreement.ipynb
• For Table 2 and Table 3 see nb3_anova_content_analysis.ipynb
• For Figure 2 and 3 see nb4_umap.ipynb (links to the interactive version below)
• For the variance inflation factor computed to inform the exploratory factor analysis and factor score regression see nb5_variance_inflation_factor.ipynb
• For the exploratory factor analysis see R_code/exploratory_factor_analysis.R
• For Krippendorff's alpha of the content analytical variables see R_code/compute_krippendorffs_alpha.Rmd
• For the factor score regression (via principal axis extraction) see R_code/principal_axis_regression.Rmd

Interactive maps

• https://marinelliluca.github.io/mf-interactive.html
• https://marinelliluca.github.io/mm-interactive.html