Musical Metaphor Research Articles

Sustaining affective resonance: Co‐constructing care in a school‐based digital design studio

AbstractBased on two years of ethnographic engagement in a school‐based digital design studio in a high school on the West Side of Chicago, Illinois, this paper conceptualizes the development and maintenance of an ethos of care in teaching and learning through sustaining affective resonance. Adopting musical metaphors as a vocabulary for affective movements, we operationalize practical and practiced methods for sustaining (actively extending) affective (care‐giving and care‐taking intensities) resonance (shared meaning making and cultural production). Sharing examples across years, we show the specific ways that mentors and students in the digital design studio built and nurtured care‐full practices. The purpose of the paper is to explicate the development and enactment of mentoring practices that we observed in the design studio and then to consider how these practices might be shared, spread, and adapted across contexts of teaching and learning.

Design, Implementation and Students’ Emotional Assessment of a Software for the Learning of Rational Numbers through Music Metaphors in Chilean Primary Education: An Exploratory Study on Audio Fractions

Using sound and music as a metaphor to approach curricular mathematical contents in Primary Education seems an interesting field that deserves some research. Both music and sound can synergically act as scaffolding for learning, intervening as part of situated knowledge, and they could offer a new perspective for learning mathematics at schools, giving pupils opportunities to develop their own mental representations. Also, the incorporation of an affective/emotional analysis, as criteria for evaluation, seems pertinent and complementary to other criteria in the production of multimedia material with educational purposes both in formal and non-formal domains of education. These are the intentions of the present work, which shows the design, implementation and assessment of AudioFractions, as part of an educational software package called Sound Interactive Music-Mathematics, which was conceived to aid mathematical learning through sound and music in Chilean Primary Education. The investigation was carried out in a three-stage design: 1) generate significant metaphors; 2) implement and test functional software prototypes and didactic guidelines; and 3) assess the software. Pupils in risk of social exclusion at three priority public schools in Santiago de Chile (N=137; 9-11 years old) were subjected to AudioFractions in one 60-minute session. Then, students filled a questionnaire validated by experts with their perceptions about the software and their emotions. Results of the four assessment variables (global, technical, mathematical, musical) plus an affective-emotional assessment, show an excellent reception of AudioFractions

МУЗИКА І СЛОВО В РОМАНІ ДІНИ РУБІНОЇ «БІЛА ГОЛУБКА КОРДОВИ»

Стаття присвячена аналізу «музичного» шару роману Діни Рубіної «Біла голубка Кордови». Автор статті дойшов висновку, що цей шар представлений цілою низкою інтермедіальних посилань (intermedial references – І. Раєвська), які реалізовані на різних рівнях тексту. Відповідно до класифікації, запропонованої В. Вульф, їх можна також позначити поняттям «інтермедіальна тематизация». Інтермедіальні посилання виконують у романі Рубіної в першу чергу характерологічну функцію, маючи при цьому найрізноманітніші форми: ім’я персонажа, опис виконання музичного твору або танцювального номера, музичні метафори і порівняння як частина портретної характеристики персонажа тощо. Випадки включення в текст твору слів пісні розглядаються як приклади інтрамедіальності. Музичні прийоми застосовуються для організації художнього світу «Білої голубки Кордови», стають засобом характеристики просторового середовища, у якому розгортається дія. Основу архітектоніки роману становить діалог між головним героєм – художником Кордовіним, який сприймає світ у якості мальовничого полотна, і наратором – професійним музикантом, для якого світ – це гармонія звуків і ритмів. Музичні прийоми визначають будову сюжету, що складається із взаємодії окремих тем, розвиток яких імітує розгортання музичних лейтмотивів і визначає специфіку композиції твору, яку можна порівняти з музичної симфонією. Принципи організації роману, запозичені з інших видів мистецтва – музики, живопису, кінематографу – розглядаються автором статті в якості перспективи подальшого дослідження поетики твору.

Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Sarah Finley

Reviewed by: Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Sarah Finley Colleen R. Baade HEARING VOICES: AURALITY AND NEW SPANISH SOUND CULTURE IN SOR JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ, by Sarah Finley. New Hispanisms. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 252 pp. $60.00 cloth; $60.00 paper; $60.00 ebook. Sarah Finley’s Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz makes a noteworthy contribution to our understanding of the various ways in which sound is manifest in the works of Mexico’s celebrated seventeenth-century nun poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Finley’s exploration of Sor Juana’s aurality goes beyond interpretation of music metaphor and beyond explication of the poet’s engagement with the music culture of her time to include considerations of nonmusical sound disciplines such as the musical-rhetorical doctrine of musica poetica—which draws analogies between the composition of music and the composition of oratory or poetry—and the alignment of music, painting, and poetry in Sor Juana’s literary output. In Finley’s own words, her approach “draws out previously marginalized components of Sor Juana’s acoustical inheritance and results in new interpretations that attend to sonority’s intersections with significant themes in [Sor Juana’s] writing, including gender, agency, and authority” (p. 2). The first chapter, “Harmony,” examines representations of political order in Sor Juana’s occasional works and shows how in works such as loa 374 (1689; a loa is a form of allegorical play), the poet relies heavily upon the prevailing early modern understanding of the ancient philosophical concept of the music or harmony of the spheres. Finley affirms the importance of what she calls “Sor Juana’s Pythagoreanism”—that is, Sor Juana’s apparent adherence to the philosophical idea that the same mathematical ratios that are produced by musical intervals also govern the movement of the celestial bodies—in her compelling analysis of loa 384 (1692) (p. 43). Chapter two, “Resonance,” confirms Sor Juana’s familiarity with the writings of the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, convincingly demonstrating that his Musurgia universalis (1650; Universal musical art) and Phonurgia nova (1673; New mode of sound production) “were fundamental to Sor Juana’s acousticopoetic imagination” (p. 61). Finley’s reading of redondilla 87 (1689) highlights the ways in which the poem “exploits a lexicon shared by music and poetry to describe a painting” by means of a polysemic appeal to the senses of both sight and hearing (p. 74). The subsequent chapters, “Sound,” “Echo,” and “Silence,” assess ways in which such diverse Sorjuanian works as the villancicos for the Feast of the Assumption (1677) and El divino Narcisco (1690; Divine narcissus), an allegorical auto sacramental (a kind of religious theater specific to Spain), constitute defenses of female intellect and agency. A discussion of [End Page 451] the representation of literal music-making in Sor Juana’s villancicos—for example, the references to military bands in the fourth villancico from the Assumption cycle—will be of particular interest to musicologist readers. The book’s penultimate chapter, “Silence,” offers new insights into the meanings of soundlessness by considering the absence of sound in Sor Juana’s writings through the lens of the Baroque concept of horror vacui (fear of empty space). Finley argues persuasively that in works like Primero sueño (1692; First dream) and Respuesta a sor Filotea (written 1691, published 1700; Reply to Sor Philotea), Sor Juana reimagines the mechanisms of silencing and censoring “as alternative modes that challenged masculine dominance” (p. 183). Finally, the book’s “Coda” reveals “sound’s importance for conceptualizing and reimagining knowledge, power, and the (female) self’s place in the world” in the auditory imagery of Primer sueño (p. 186). To write in the field of sound studies is to undertake an interdisciplinary enterprise that brings with it the challenge of possessing expertise in multiple fields. This book rises admirably to the task on multiple counts; however, the musicologist reader may note an occasional lack of familiarity with certain terminology or an apparent unawareness of some aspects of music history. For example, the...

Becoming the Song of Christ

While the connections between exegesis, music, and moral formation are well known, what Augustine’s use of particular metaphors reveals about his theology that more literal renderings do not is less clear. This article explores how Augustine’s use of musical metaphors in Enarratio in Pslamum 32(2) illuminate his understanding of the relationship between grace and human virtue. After first offering a doctrinal description of the rightly ordered will and its Christological foundation, Augustine proceeds to narrate the Christian life as one of various stages of learning to sing the “new song” of Christ. He interprets references to the lyre and psaltery as figures of earthly and heavenly life, and then exegetes the psalm’s language of jubilation as laudatory praise of the ineffable God. The chief contribution of the musical metaphors here are twofold. First, they enable Augustine to display the mysterious process of the will transformed over time. Second, the musical figures help Augustine account for how a human will, encompassed in time, can align with the will of an eternal God whose will is ultimately inexpressible. Augustine’s musical exegesis is able to gesture towards the profound mystery of human life in time and its relation to an eternally un-timed God.

Attention and Narration to Micro-Moment Registrations of Embodied Dialogue in the Clinical Interaction: How Are We Doing?

ABSTRACTThis article offers a comparison between two different strategies for clinical attention. The author compares his lens shaped by a musical metaphor of “polyrhythmic patterning” on embodied registrations which he describes as “fluidity” in contrast to a lens of structures or categories of experience. He then contrasts this lens to that offered by Lewis which she describes with the metaphor of an “imaginary camera” with which she creates “snapshots” as representations of unbearable (and often unformulated) trauma shaped by the patient's narrative and her own trauma history. Acknowledging the exquisite connection between analyst and patient, the author uses 2 clinical moments to further illustrate the benefits of each metaphoric lens for possible analytic work.

Cuckoo coloureds: Cacophonic auralities and hidden visibilities of so-called coloured identities in South Africa

Beginning with the association between “sounding out” and “voicing” this article begins with a tacit question of what musical metaphors might offer for thought concerning identity, and in particular the complex racial (mis-) or (dis-)identifications of so-called coloured people in South Africa. I tie the aurality of the cuckoo bird to the notion of something that pops out of invisibility and makes an irrelevant or silly kind of noise. In musical settings the cuckoo is often associated with a dissonant cacophony of multiple chiming (cuckoo) clocks and steeple bells. This offers a telling metaphor for the determination of coloured(ness) by white and black South Africans alike, for whom coloured is precisely the incomprehensible “other” whose voice cannot be heard clearly. At the same time, among so-called coloureds in South Africa, the metaphor of an internal cacophony refers to a resounding, but tragic noise created by the “sounding-out” or “voicing”, i.e. the aurality, of multiple narratives of what constitutes and nullifies coloured(ness) in South Africa. In other words, the cacophonic plurality of so-called coloured voices in society speaking simultaneously against one another in terms of self-determination also seems to be speaking beyond comprehension for most other South Africans. The ironic outcome of all of this noise is an extraordinary kind of silence.

Sans Tongue, Sans Hands, Sans Music? Violence and Musical Bodies in Titus Andronicus

ABSTRACTIt is by now a critical commonplace that early modern English theorists and authors used the metaphor of music and musical instruments to describe and understand the body. William Shakespeare, like other Renaissance English authors, makes repeated use of the analogy in his plays. Leontes, for instance, in The Winter’s Tale, witnesses his wife “virginalling” (as he calls it) upon Polixenes’ hand (1.2.127). Hamlet uses another musical metaphor for the body when he tells his mother, “My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time, / And makes as healthful music” (3.4.131–32). Rather than merely recognising the metaphor in Shakespearean drama, this article debates the potential of the early modern music–body correspondence to comprehend or “read” bodies that otherwise cannot speak on stage, considering especially the mute and handless Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. The audience can understand Lavinia’s mutilated body as musical by means of the metaphors of the hand as music, the lute as the body, and the pulse as tempo. Because her body can still be musical, the analogy provides other characters, and the audience, the ability to hear and understand her through her performance of dance, melody, or ballad.

Moral Tuning

AbstractCan a set of musical metaphors in a treatise on ethics reveal something about the nature and source of moral autonomy? This article argues that it can. It shows how metaphorical usage of words like tone, pitch, and concord in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments can be understood as elements of an analogical model for morality. What this model tells us about morality depends on how we conceptualise music. In contrast to earlier interpretations of Smith's metaphors that have seen music as an aesthetic object, this article sees music as a practice. Understood in this way, the analogy allows us to see morality too as a practice––as moral tuning. This in turn reveals a novel answer to the intractable problem of conventionalism: moral autonomy consists in the freedom inherent in the constant need to interpret and reinterpret the strictly formal ideal of perfect propriety.

A Study on the Role of John Donne’s Musical Metaphor in ‘Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness

A Study on the Role of John Donne’s Musical Metaphor in ‘Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness

“Aqueles dois”: A heterossexualidade compulsória, a moral, o julgamento e as metáforas do amor sob o olhar de Caio Fernando Abreu

Propõe-se revisitar o conto “Aqueles dois”, de Caio Fernando Abreu, a fim de discutir como o autor evidencia uma sociedade heteronormativa compulsória que pune os protagonistas, Raul e Saul, por pensá-los gays. Julga-se importante destacar também as metáforas musicais que explicam o que sentem os protagonistas com a sutileza necessária àquele contexto. Recorremos, para tanto, aos estudos queer e aos textos de WITING (1992), FOUCAULT (1998) e BOURDIEU (2014), dentre outros.

‘Savoy Truffle’: Love, lust and longing in a box of chocolates

Abstract This article re-reads The Beatles’ song, ‘Savoy Truffle’, not as an ode to Eric Clapton’s rotting teeth and chocolate consumption, but rather as a thinly veiled rock music metaphor reflecting the triptych love relationship between its composer, George Harrison, his wife, Pattie Boyd, and her lover and later husband, Eric Clapton. Re-reading ‘Savoy Truffle’ provides a valuable insight into the intricacies of how popular rock music communicates constructs of love within metaphor and how The Beatles integrated multiple meanings into lyrics conveying love and its contention. Such multiplicity aids explanations exploring the band’s extraordinary popularity by providing a socio-temporal insight into an extra-ordinary time: the 1960s. In re-reading ‘Savoy Truffle’, this article contextualizes the multiplicity of love itself within an exploration of the passion within lust, the longing of desire and the satisfaction of having the desired object. The desired object was Pattie Boyd, who Harrison projected within a box of ‘Good News’ chocolates.

The acoustics of therapeutic subjectivity and their impact on the resonance of mutual recognition.

This paper addresses how musical metaphors can be useful in understanding the substructure of psychotherapy by considering how our patients resonate inside us, what that resonance does to and for us, and how these acoustic properties seem to be foundational in the construction of the therapist as an instrument of healing. From this perspective, psychotherapy involves "living music" with another person, as the process of psychotherapy always involves the passing of sound back and forth across an interpersonal divide. This requires both psychotherapist and patient to step into the roles of performer and audience member. Additionally, psychotherapists can be meaningfully thought of not only as an "instrument" of healing, but also an "instrumentalist" who produces unique "therapeutic music." Moreover, the patient and therapist cocreate the concert space in which treatment is performed. This concert space has unique "architectural," and thus acoustic, properties within which we hear and remember one another.

Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility by Jonathan Goldberg

Reviewed by: Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility by Jonathan Goldberg Anupama Kapse (bio) Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility by Jonathan Goldberg. Duke University Press. 2016. $89.95 hardcover; $23.95 paperback; e-book available. 204 pages. An understanding of affect as an index of the political has been vital to the resurgence of scholarly interest in melodrama. As an affective mode par excellence, at least in the last two decades, melodrama has been associated with the ability to amplify the emotions of marginal and disadvantaged groups.1 Analytically, in cinema studies the challenge has been to uphold melodrama’s capacity to posit individual problems as larger, more complex indices of a desired social imaginary. Jonathan Goldberg’s Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility attempts to offer an interdisciplinary account of melodrama’s political possibilities by returning to its musical roots. Goldberg attempts to retrace melodrama’s original meaning of “drama to which music has been added.” More provocatively, he approaches melodrama as a musical-temporal mode that can incorporate queer desire into its form outside the progressive register of teleology. Such a project necessarily presents itself as a book for advanced readers. Wasting no time on rehearsing arguments, Goldberg simply assumes the reader’s familiarity with the key conventions and debates of melodrama.2 By and large, following Peter Brooks’s foundational work The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess, scholarship on melodrama has foregrounded [End Page 191] victimhood as the primary site of expression and intervention.3 Goldberg privileges a dense, poetic mode of writing: eschewing an overly rationalistic road map of his chapters, he complicates the existing meanings of melodrama as a hyperbolic form to be “explained” away. The style of the book is essayistic—symmetrically arranged readings and fine-grained analyses are themselves presented lyrically instead of being organized chronologically. Part 1 examines opera and cinema. Part 2 focuses on the novel and cinema. The four chapters in these two parts include an eclectic and often canonical range of examples that are read noncanonically: Beethoven in chapter 1 and Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Todd Haynes in chapter 2. The third chapter is titled “The Art of Murder: Hitchcock and Highsmith.” The fourth and final chapter, “Wildean Aesthetics: From ‘Paul’s Case’ to Lucy Gayheart,” looks at Willa Cather’s novels through a melodic lens. Featuring astute readings of the nonverbal, Goldberg uses musical metaphors to “listen” to queer meanings and otherwise invisible emotional parameters. Whether it is Beethoven’s Fidelio, Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1942), or Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart (1935), he aims to find the “queer lever[s]” that “ignit[e] sites of desire at . . . places of crossing” (xiii).4 These chapters foreground affective intersections, over and above any clear examples of moral certitude. Putting relationality over identity, Goldberg begins with Beethoven’s opera Fidelio (1814), an example of how “for male to become female is not to become woman but to enter into the differentially shared space of self-division.”5 Similarly, Todd Haynes’s melodramatic “remakes” of Sirks and Fassbinder’s films enact (or reenact) a “disengagement of the term woman from its referent “woman” setting into motion a “homo-aesthetics” vis-à-vis the politics of a similarity-in-difference.6 Fidelio functions as the book’s analytic center: it is an opera about a cross-dressed protagonist who switches voice, pitch, gender, and tonal registers that are dependent on an identity that collapses as soon as he/she retrieves his/her husband from jail and lapses back into being Leonore. As such, “the thrill of hearing Leonore’s voice ascend into soprano range has a great deal to do with its escape from confinement to the alto register [as Fidelio].”7 As Fidelio descends into the depths of prison to help dig the grave of an unjustly imprisoned man, Beethoven interrupts the separation of the speaking voice and music, joining melos and drama together in a moment the score names technically, formally, as “Melodram.”8 The central argument depends not only on the interpenetration of identities but also on the Melodram as the point at which music and...

Релігійно-культові засади творчості Г. Свиридова.

Метою даної статті є виявлення релігійно-культових засад композиторського методу як головних парадигматичних властивостей творчості Г. Свиридова. Методологія дослідження спирається на системний аналітичний підхід з виокремленням музично-історичного, етимологічного, текстологічного та семантичного музикознавчих методів, що дозволяє простежити шляхи формування стильових ознак творчості Г. Свиридова. Наукова новизна даної статті міститься у виявленні православної богослужбової традиції як культурної домінанти у творчому доробку Г. Свиридова. Висновки. Головні стильові настанови та провідні семантичні аспекти у творчості Г. Свиридова наочно демонструють те, що релігійно-культові тенденції набувають значення парадигми, а у пізньому періоді його творчості досягають філософської, майже богословської узагальненості. Композитор прагне з одного боку до ораторіальності як до однієї з постійних форм музичної виразності, наділеною стійкими інтонаційно-тематичними формулами як відображення сфери колективної піснетворчості як широкої музичної метафори пам'яті – соборності, з іншого – прагне до пісенності як до ідеального природнього способу буття музики.Ключові слова: релігійно-культова традиція, культ, соборність, канон, канонічний текст.

Shifting metaphors, shifting mindsets: Using music to change the key of conflict

Music- and art-based interventions in organizations have become more common, yet to date little research-based evidence has existed to support the claims of efficacy of such approaches. This article presents a mixed methods research study that explored the effects of introducing a music-based metaphor and pedagogical approach to teaching, learning, and resolving conflict. The study provides insights into whether and how the musical ensemble metaphor might assist in shifting adversarial, combative, and competitive approaches toward more collaborative, settlement-oriented mindsets and outcomes. In addition, the study offers an understanding of whether and how music-infused pedagogy might assist in developing enhanced skills and practice behaviors that would lead to more desirable outcomes. Results from this initial study suggest that non-musicians in non-musical contexts are able to learn from musical metaphors and concepts related to ensemble music-making and that such cognitive, affective, and behavioral learning translates into changed and more effective behavior in practice. In simulated scenarios, study participants who were introduced to the musical metaphor and other music-based learning outperformed colleagues who were not exposed to similar music-based learning. Engagement with music appears to reconnect people to their creative potential and thus to lead them to see the value of employing creative thinking in professional settings that traditionally over-emphasize analytical and critical thinking. Such music-based collaborative approaches appear to have the potential to shift traditional norms and behaviors.

‘Cangiar la lira in tromba’: Metaphors for Poetic Form in Torquato Tasso

Beginning with his earliest poetic works, Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) often makes use of specific metaphors in order to reflect on his activity as a poet. For instance, he frequently employs images of musical instruments (the lyre, the trumpet, and the zampogna) as a particularly suggestive means of differentiating between poetic forms and genres at the level of language, style, and sound. This article will analyze Tasso’s use of these specific musical metaphors beginning with his earliest known lyric poetry, where the young poet presents himself as a new Virgil, potentially at odds with the aesthetic sensibilities of a vernacular literary tradition still in the process of consolidation. By shedding light on Tasso’s thinking about poetry within his own poetry, this analysis will complement much of the scholarship already devoted to exploring Tasso’s poetics on the basis of his prose treatises and his relationship to contemporary debates surrounding Aristotle’s Poetics.

Design and Real-World Evaluation of Eyes-Free Yoga: An Exergame for Blind and Low-Vision Exercise.

People who are blind or low vision may have a harder time participating in exercise due to inaccessibility or lack of encouragement. To address this, we developed Eyes-Free Yoga using the Microsoft Kinect that acts as a yoga instructor and has personalized auditory feedback based on skeletal tracking. We conducted two different studies on two different versions of Eyes-Free Yoga: (1) a controlled study with 16 people who are blind or low vision to evaluate the feasibility of a proof-of-concept and (2) an 8-week in-home deployment study with 4 people who are blind or low vision, with a fully functioning exergame containing four full workouts and motivational techniques. We found that participants preferred the personalized feedback for yoga postures during the laboratory study. Therefore, the personalized feedback was used as a means to build the core components of the system used in the deployment study and was included in both study conditions. From the deployment study, we found that the participants practiced Yoga consistently throughout the 8-week period (Average hours = 17; Average days of practice = 24), almost reaching the American Heart Association recommended exercise guidelines. On average, motivational techniques increased participant's user experience and their frequency and exercise time. The findings of this work have implications for eyes-free exergame design, including engaging domain experts, piloting with inexperienced users, using musical metaphors, and designing for in-home use cases.

Writing Gender Identity through Musical Metaphor in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night

Writing Gender Identity through Musical Metaphor in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night

Her "whole soul was ear": Novel Sound, Experimental Music, and Artistic Community in Mary Shelley's The Last Man

Composed after the destruction of her beloved circle of family and friends, Mary Shelley's The Last Man conducts readers through a narrative heretofore unrecognized as exceedingly experimental. This essay argues that Shelley incorporates a language of sound and music into The Last Man to amplify the intellectual and emotional resonance of her highly inventive novel. It begins by examining the musical musings in Shelley's journals and letters in the months surrounding The Last Man's inception, suggesting these forays as origins of innovations that find ultimate expression in the novel. Next, close readings of The Last Man's musical metaphors and sonically themed references solidify music as a textual hermeneutic and as a metaphor for artistic community inside and outside the world of the novel. This essay concludes that Shelley's text incorporates elements of written musical scores. Shelley's unique novel thus unites the language of narrative with the language of written music.