Music and Metaphor

The goal of this article is to investigate the way we describe music. I wrote this not long after reading Music and Memory by Bob Snyder. I was also lucky enough to take the class he teaches based on the book while I attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This article covers some of the concepts presented in the book as well as my own observations and analysis. Eventually I move on to the topics of Space, Place and Mood, which I think are the fundamental building blocks for how we percieve not only music.

"Sound is a material fact. Music is an intentional contruct." Understanding Music, Roger Scruton

1. a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, as in "A mighty fortress is our God."

2. something used, or regarded as being used, to represent something else; emblem; symbol.

Metaphor is a relationship between two or more memory structures. Our understanding of experience comes from long term memory, which is anything we remember beyond the range of short term memory (3-5 seconds). Within long term memory are schemas. A schema is a metacategory made up of "slots" which are themselves categories. They store large sets of associations as well as sequences of events, temporal and spatial information. In our minds we have a set of schemas that help us understand and react to the world around us. Here is a common example of a schema: We walk into a room full of tables and chairs. There are people sitting, talking, eating and drinking. Some people are walking around in white shirts, black pants and black shoes attending to the people sitting down. One of them approaches us and asks how many people are in our party. By now you probably have enough information to understand that you are in a restaurant. This understanding is possible because of a schema stored in your long term memory containing default parameters for what a restaurant is like. (Snyder, Music and Memory)

Image Schemas are metaphorical mappings based on fundamental cognitive structures developed from recurring physical experiences, especially concerning our own bodies. They are thought to form the basis for our mind's conceptual systems because they are likely derived from similarities between experiences. Image schemas are thought to be derived from situations we can visually imagine but are more abstract than any distinct vision. Therefore it can be difficult to explain an image schema with only words. Try explaining "up" and "down" without using some visual or physical gesture. (Snyder, Mind and Music)

We understand a musical space and hear tones coming from within it, but this space has no correspondence with the sound waves themselves occurring in physical space. The most used example of this is the description of pitches as existing in vertical space, being high or low. However, this is a metaphor specific to western culture. Ancient Greek music theorists described pitches in a range of sharpness and heaviness. Built into the western music system is the idea of sharp and flat. In this metaphor, sharp is higher and flat is lower. In Bali and Java pitches are small and large. In the Amason basin the Suya describe pitches as young and old.

Most of these metaphors are tied to the human body. Singing a low note, we feel vibrations in our bodies. Singing successively higher notes we feel the vibrations move up into our heads. A young human has small vocal chords and therefore produces a higher pitch than an older human with larger vocal chords. Sharpness and heaviness are harder to place, but a heavier animal like a rhinocerous is likely to make a lower sound than a light animal like a bird. High frequencies are often described as piercing which implies sharpness, but I can't think of a physical relationship. (Snyder, Mind and Music), (Roger Scruton, Understanding Music)

Verticality does not only describe pitches but is linked to musical contour, which loosely describes the amount of tension in any paramater of music--melodies, rhythms, harmonic motion, formal structure, etc. Lets think of a melody that ascends and descends in pitch. At the peak of its contour the melody is likely to have the most tension, and when it reaches the bottom again, the most release and closure. This has a correlation with physical height, because, as I climb to the top of a tall ladder, the potential kinetic energy of my body rises. This puts me in potential danger and I feel tension since I'm not accostumed to being at the tops of tall ladders. As I descend to the bottom, the tension that I feel is released.

Centrality is another image schema that influences our perception of time and space. Each individual views the world from their own central location being wherever they are at any given time. As a human being I make a landmark of myself by which I can judge my relationship to other things in the world as well as the relationships between those things. Other landmarks become centers of reference if they are prominent enough within my experience.

Central locations are important because they are returned to repeatedly. In music, a central location is decided by either particularly novel or repeated events. They help us understand where we are over a range of different parameters. It refers to central pitches in a melody or harmonic progression, central beats in a metrical cycle, or central landmarks in a formal structure. (Snyder, Mind and Music)

The idea of musical motion is purely metaphorical, seeing as physical motion occurs when physical objects move in a physical space. A piece of music in musical motion is made up of multiple unique events that are percieved as connected, changing and moving through a space. This phenomena is much like the fusion of still images that makes up moving pictures. Musical motion requires change and the percieved connection of events in time. If one sound plays on unchanging it merely sits or hovers in space. If different and disconnected sounds occur they merely appear and disappear as self-contained units. (Snyder, Mind and Music)

Musical motion can also be understood with a source-path-goal schema, the idea being that some piece of music begins in one place, has a goal in mind and follows a path to that goal much like a person would move through a physical space. (Reybrouck, Body, Mind and Music) There are two polar ways to enterpret this idea, one being that the music is a sonic landscape that a listener is immersed in and moving through in time and percieved space; the second being that the music itself is an organism moving through the sonic landscape it creates and the listener follows its path. These usually exist concurrently, having some changing part of the music creating the environment and some more consistent part being an organism passing through it with the listener. The relationships get very complex because almost all environments we are familiar with contain static and moving organisms (plants, animals, bugs, cars, segways, etc), as well as static and moving elements/structures (dirt, water, air, buildings, etc.), all together creating space, place and mood that we ourselves are observing and participating in.

To my mind, space, place and mood define my perception of music. They have multiple definitions and metaphorical connections to many different things. In relation to music, I have developed the following definitions for each: A space is non-specific; it doesn't necessarily define something in particular but is a general word for some expanse, extent or enclosure that the music is creating. Much of this effect is controlled by reverberation, the reflections of sound waves bouncing around a space. Whether you are aware or not, the slightest reverberation drastically changes our perception of space in music as well as everyday life.

Place defines a specific space, point or position and can establish a heirarchy of spaces or abstract positions. While the tape echo on Jimi Hendrix's guitar creates a distorted and trippy musical space, the quality of the recording, content and format of the music put it in a particular place.

Mood defines an emotional quality that music emotes. Nobody has any idea why sonic vibrations can conjure emotions in humans, although string theory, also known as M Theory seems like it could possibly begin to make connections. A popular idea is that the structure of music is similar to the structure of our emotions. For example, perhaps the harmony of frequencies created by a major chord is similar to the harmony of frequencies of brain processes that create a happy emotion.

I don't have the discipline to untangle the web of relationships between these three words that are basic building blocks of how we percieve music figuratively. I will instead lump space and place together, since they describe similar things, and put that beside mood in a pretencious dualism.