Introduction [to: Music and Discourse: Theoretical and Empirical Insights]

This special issue explores the intersection between language and music as complex semiotic and social practices. Building on the shared communicative, hierarchical, and cultural features of both, the editors frame music and discourse as a fertile domain for linguistic investigation. The volume brings together theoretical and empirical contributions grounded in diverse frameworks—Applied Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Discourse and Genre Analysis, Multimodality, Phonetics, and Translation Studies—demonstrating how linguistic methodologies can illuminate the meaning-making processes of musical texts and practices. The articles address topics ranging from genre definition and stylistic innovation in music journalism to corpus-assisted studies of song lyrics and oral histories, the political and educational roles of music, and issues of accessibility and multimodal representation. Collectively, the contributions reveal music as a site of ideological negotiation, cultural memory, and pedagogical potential, highlighting the value of an interdisciplinary approach that integrates linguistic, social, and aesthetic perspectives.