[5] The process of music correlated with visuals can be described in terms of two basic mechanisms: temporal synchronicity and cross-modal homology.
Invisible editing (a semiotic term) refers to what film editors use to almost decode a song's message for the audience through narrative actions.
Daniel Chandler's example from famous film editor Ralph Rosenblum describes this progression: "a man awakens suddenly in the middle of the night, bolts up in bed, stares ahead intensely, and twitches his nose.
Other examples of invisible editing in music videos are in a more formal narrative style, consisting of a plot or storyline of events and characters.
[7] In contrast, music videos that aren't formally organized may have no segmentation markings that flow with the lyrics and contain abstract images.
This type of technique is also called anchorage, found by Roland Barthes:[12] anchoring text to a context that changes the intentional meaning.
[13] Lady Gaga uses cultural bricolage in her music videos by using fashion and previous memorable characteristics of former pop stars.
Michael Jackson's Leave Me Alone is also a form of bricolage because it is a collage of already popular people and pop culture artifacts combined to portray his own message.