Aleix Herreras received the award for Best Doctoral Thesis on Political Communication in the presence of representatives from local authorities, during an event held at the Born Cultural and Memorial Centre in Barcelona and which served to recognise the efforts of the UIC Barcelona staff member.
The doctoral thesis, entitled “Musical Persuasion in Campaign Ads: A Multimodal Analysis of Musicology, Linguistics, Audiovisual Communication and Political Marketing Applied to Two US Presidential Campaigns”, takes an in-depth look at the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns in the United States. Aleix Herreras analysed 160 ads approved and paid for by both the Democrat and Republican candidates, exploring the relationship between the ads’ musical syntax and their verbal content, authorship and type.
What musical compositions are used in the campaign ads? How are they used in relation to the political discourse? How does the music highlight certain words or phrases in the ad? Aleix Herreras’s thesis answers these questions and connects musicology and linguistics with a view to elucidating aspects of communication and political marketing.
“The fact that a work on music has received an award is groundbreaking, as awards normally go to research that purely analyses political discourse. I think this opens the door for more projects related to music to be submitted,” contends Herreras.
“We also noted a decrease in the quality of how music was used in recent years. In 2020, the human creative input behind campaign ads was still highly valued, but in 2024 the use of AI was far more predominant, prioritising quantity over quality,” argued Aleix Herreras. One notable conclusion of the thesis points to the skilful use of expressive silence by the team representing the current president of the United States, Donald Trump (2016/2020), to highlight strategic ideas within the text.
A thesis supervised by lecturer Isabel Villanueva
Aleix Herreras Carrera is a musicologist specialising in musical strategy in political campaigns. Holder of a Master’s Degree in Specialised Communication from the University of Barcelona, he earned a doctoral degree in Communication at UIC Barcelona with the thesis “Musical Persuasion in Campaign Ads”, which was supervised by lecturer Isabel Villanueva and defended in 2024 before a committee presided by full professor of Communication Alfonso Méndiz.
