The Role of Music in City Audio Guides in Italian and in English

The aim of this study is to investigate city audio guides in Italian and in English from a multimodal perspective, focusing on the use of music. The audio guide genre is here described as a ‘soundscape’ (Van Leeuwen, T. (1999). Speech, Music, Sounds. London: Macmillan.), i.e. a composite semiotic system characterised by speech, music, and sounds. A Corpus of fifty professional city audio guides in Italian and in English has been qualitatively investigated in order to determine how music can be distributed within the audio guide script, whether and how it intertwines with speech, and the effects it may produce on the listener. The results show that music may be used to serve several purposes, and highlight in particular the roles played by music when this is strictly relevant to the narration. Key differences in the use of music between audio guides in Italian and in English were identified and on the basis of these differences translation issues and implications for professionals in the field are addressed by listing a series of aspects that could be taken into account when producing English versions of Italian audio guides. Keywords: audio guides; tourist multimodal communication; music in audiovisual products; social semiotic