Sound as an infrastructure of political circulation:
affect and video on digital platforms
Keywords:
sound, Digital Platforms, Affective Circulation, Short Form Video, Digital PoliticsAbstract
Short-form audiovisual ecologies reconfigure political communication as affective entertainment, dissociating messages from stable referents. Drawing on analytical configurations developed from user-generated videos within the digital ecosystem associated with the Portuguese party Chega—across platforms such as TikTok, Instagram (Reels), and YouTube (Shorts)—this article examines how sound operates as affective infrastructure and as an indexing operator that organises the articulation between the sonic dimension and image, with viralised musical excerpts constituting its dominant manifestation in the corpus, preceding interpretation and stabilising attention. The analysis identifies three recurring operations: (i) sound-driven audiovisual architectures, in which music, effects, and sonic motifs structure temporality and shape visual expressivity; (ii) inter-video repetition and audiovisual recontextualisation, sustained by recognisable musical cells whose prior circulation enables semantic displacement and facilitates mild forms of aesthetic disinformation; and (iii) infrastructural automation and standardisation, through models, sound libraries, and AI tools that normalise formats, orient sonic indexing, and distribute authorship. These operations inscribe the circulation of content associated with a populist party within regimes of ambiguity, frequently framed as humour, irony, or spectacle, while maintaining high affective efficacy. By shifting the analytical focus from message and authorial intention to regimes of circulation and infrastructural effects, the article contributes to music and media studies by demonstrating how the sonic dimension—materialised predominantly through viralised musical fragments—sustains contemporary dynamics of political communication.
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