The hierarchisation of operatic signs through the lens of audio description: a corpus study

In opera, a multimodal art form by nature, meaning is constructed by the synthesis of its musical, verbal, visual and dramatic components. Audio description (AD) is an audiovisual translation modality that provides blind and visually impaired patrons with access to the visual elements of the play. The first aim of this pilot study is to conduct a corpus analysis to define the lexico-grammatical patterns of opera AD in the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona and the Teatro Real in Madrid. The second aim is to perform a semiotic analysis to elucidate the hierarchisation of the action, the parole and the visual aesthetics of the production in the AD scripts. The conclusions suggest a number of linguistic and semiotic idiosyncrasies that are shared with other AD modalities, as well as some key divergences.