Musical Metaphor Research Articles

On the construal of MUSIC IS MOTION metaphor

Abstract TIME IS MOTION can be construed in two models. One is the Ego-based, the other is Time-based so as to form three time metaphors, MOVING TIME, TIME’S LANDSCAPE, and TEMPORAL SEQUENCE. When construing musical motion, people tend to borrow this conceptual framework and get three musical metaphors, i.e. MOVING MUSIC, MUSICAL LANDSCAPE, and MUSICAL SEQUENCE. The MUSICAL SEQUENCE metaphor falls into three categories, i.e. SEQUENCE IS THE RELATIVE POSITION ON THE TIME PATH, ON THE PITCH PATH, and ON THE KEY PATH. Time Metaphor and the Event Structure Metaphor jointly construct the two construal models for the metaphor MUSIC IS MOTION. This study tries to validate the previous research on conceptual construals in such a new field as music so as to enlarge the research range of the conceptual metaphor theory and provide reference for the subsequent research on music.

Rethinking urban street experiments through Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis: From vehicles and vibrancy to virtuosos

Streets, vital for vehicular and pedestrian traffic, are increasingly repurposed to enhance urban vibrancy beyond transport needs. This paper explores intentional and spontaneous street experiments, drawing on Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis. Streets are seen as hosts to intersecting rhythms shaped by daily routines and mobility, with users as performers in rhythmic interactions. While initially disruptive, these experiments strive to integrate innovative elements for cohesive urban compositions. Through a musical metaphor, the paper promotes a holistic approach to identifying rhythms influenced and introduced by street experiments. It examines how these rhythms interact, presenting as synchronised dynamics, disruptive discordance, or coexistence in dissonant compositions. Combining rhythmanalysis with spatial discourse analysis, the study ‘reads’ and ‘listens’ to temporary spaces through historical records (N = 55) of seven street experiments in Hong Kong from 2016 to 2020. Findings uncover the overly abstract agendas of these experiments — exemplified through narratives involving chairs, railings, and traffic signals — often oversimplify and exclude possibilities. The paper calls for open dialogue to capture power dynamics in street infrastructure and embodied lived experiences during the transition from vehicle-centred to people-oriented streets. It suggests rhythmanalysis as an initial tool for urban planners to envision streetscapes as symphonies, fostering sensitivity to time-space dynamics.

АУДИАЛЬНЫЙ СЕМАНТИЧЕСКИЙ КОД КАК ПРОЯВЛЕНИЕ КОГНИТИВНОГО СТИЛЯ ПЕРСОНАЖА В АНГЛОЯЗЫЧНОМ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОМ ТЕКСТЕ

The article discusses the linguistic and stylistic means involved in lingual manifestation of auditory perception. The lingual means of conveying an auditory perceptual image in the literary text are analyzed from the perspective of their potential in characterisation. The use of auditory based imagery is seen as a feature of the protagonist’s cognitive style formed under the influence of his passion for composing music. The perceptual plan of the narrative is conveyed by vocabulary with a semantic component of auditory perception, terms of musical notation, onomatopoeia, as well as music metaphors. The main trait of the protagonist’s cognitive style is the ability to express perceptual experience (visual, olfactory, tactile, etc.) with the help of an auditory imagery and, thus, compose music.

Aiola Nux : The Musical Design Of Sophocles’ Trachiniae

Abstract: In the original performance of Sophocles’ Trachiniae , song and dance were essential in communicating dramatic theme and character. Tragic choreia is structurally defined by paired stanzas: the antistrophe repeats the melody of the strophe but reverses its direction of dance. In Trachiniae , this antistrophic structure becomes thematic, representing the fateful bond between Deianeira and Heracles and the resulting narrative repetitions/reversals. Digital analysis of pitch accents reveals that this musical metaphor was reinforced melodically through the development of a “shimmering” circumflex motif, culminating in Heracles’ melismatic monody. Through this musical framing, Sophocles situates his tragedy in relation to other genres (epic, paean) and to musical developments in the fifth century.

Hudební obraznost v Janáčkových fejetonech z Lidových novin

Leoš Janáček's feuilletons from Lidové noviny form a substantial part of his literary work. Inspired by music on several levels, they are both valuable musicological documents and original literary works. This article focuses mainly on their literary qualities, observing Janáček's music-related figurative language, particularly musical metaphors. It shows how the author combines the motifs of nature and music and how he treats the motif of a musical tone. It also demonstrates the ambiguity of musical images, which could be interpreted both literally and figuratively. Such ambiguity is presented as an efficient literary device, which connects diverse styles, themes, or locations, and thus contributes to the heterogeneity of Janáček's texts.

Inhospitable Conditions: Hospitality, Kinship and Complaint in Maureen Freely's Angry in Piraeus and Mireille Gansel's Translation as Transhumance (tr. Ros Schwartz)

ABSTRACT This article examines hybrid life writing by literary translators that focuses on the interpersonal relationships between translators and other agents including authors and collaborators. Through a comparative study of Maureen Freely's pamphlet essay Angry in Piraeus (The Cahiers Series, Syph Editions, 2014), described in its blurb as ‘the story of the creation of a translator’, and Mireille Gansel's ‘half memoir, half philosophical treatise’ Traduire comme transhumer (Edition Calligrammes, 2012), translated by Ros Schwartz as Translation as Transhumance (Les Fugitives, 2017) I explore the ways Freely and Gansel present their respective translation philosophies. In the first section, ‘Hospitality’, I set out how their writing welcomes in the reader and sets out various barriers to their task. In ‘Kinship’, the second section, I look at the translators’ stories of their families and how they use séance and music metaphors to show how they conceptualise collaboration with others and the text itself. In the final section, ‘Complaint’, I propose viewing Freely's and Gansel's books as personal and political complaints respectively, drawing on the work on institutional complaint by Sara Ahmed. Taking a lead from contemporary women's writing scholarship, I make an early intervention in the burgeoning field of Literary Translator Studies.

“The Specter of Drama in the Specter of Another Drama”: The Anamorphosis of the Singspiel and the Palimpsest Effect in Aspern by Salvatore Sciarrino

The article explores the early opera by Salvatore Sciarrino, based on Henry James’s novelette The Aspern Papers. Sciarrino’s Aspern has aroused considerable interest both in the aspect of the transposition of James’s prose into the musical sphere, and in terms of the formation of the poetics of musical theater and the principles of the composer’s dramatic thinking. The experimental character of the singspiel (in the author’s definition) was stipulated by the idea of representation as an act of composition. Rejecting the traditional format, Sciarrino and his co-author of the libretto Giorgio Marini created an intertextual connection between the novelette and the opera, having turned the reading of the text into an element of dramaturgy, along with other components — the singing, the music and the stage decorations. The protagonists of the story (the Narrator, Giuliana, Titta) dissolved in the recitations of various actors. The arias based on the texts of Lorenzo da Ponte from Le Nozze de Figaro, performed by one single singing protagonist, the Female Singer, offstage, created an ironic estrangement on the scenic (between the dramatic performance in spoken dialogues and the music) and the stylistic levels (between da Ponte’s text and Sciarrino’s music). The special optics of artistic imagination established this way, making it possible to view the one through the other, helped the “ghost” of Mozart, the musical equivalent of the “divine Aspern,” appear. Mozart’s “disturbing presence” also explains the unexpected genre-related definition given by the composer to his work. The singspiel becomes an object of anamorphosis, in which elements of the genre projected from the past acquire a strange oneiric form in the present. Reflecting on Sciarrino’s invitation to search for “music in the music and drama in the drama” in Aspern, the author of the article reveals the connections between the Italian maestro’s opera and Piotr Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, set up by the palimpsest effect hidden in James’ original text. An important connecting link between the two operas is the figure of Mozart as the ideal of “the Composer”, who had managed to absorb and transform the traditions of different eras and national schools of composition. In this light, Sciarrino’s Aspern becomes a musical metaphor of the search for and the finding of oneself in the “traces” of others.

Spiritual resonance

This article presents a pneumatological reading of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s appeal to the phenomenon of musical resonance through his use of the metaphor of “polyphony” and related musical casts of mind. In so doing, it provides an alternative reading of Bonhoeffer’s late theology by establishing a connection between Letters and Papers from Prison and Ethics through his use of musical metaphors. In it I make two significant claims about Bonhoeffer’s use of musical metaphors in his late theology. First, that polyphony is a dynamic metaphor which Bonhoeffer discovers and utilises to express his understanding of the relationship between God and the world in Christ. I argue that the limitations of visual-spatial metaphors, which Bonhoeffer openly laments in Ethics, are overcome by his discovery of polyphony in Letters and Papers from Prison as a metaphor which conceptualises the relationship between God and the world (operating in a single realm or space) as well as preserving the distinction of each; in this respect, polyphony texturizes Bonhoeffer’s view of reality, carefully nuancing it. The way the metaphor functions for Bonhoeffer mirrors the way he employs the work of the Holy Spirit in his theology. Thus, it indicates that implicit in Bonhoeffer’s theological appeal to polyphony is a model of the agency of the Holy Spirit, so that in exploring polyphony a latent pneumatology in Bonhoeffer can be unearthed. Read in this way, polyphony is a potent metaphor for illumining the Spirit’s work as that which enables unity, distinction, and dynamic relationality between God and the world in the church. The article concludes by pointing to how a musico-pneumatology such as that which we find in Bonhoeffer can be further developed.

“The Music of Being”: a note on a metaphor from Giorgio Agamben’s last volume of <i>Homo Sacer</i>.

The article attempts to clarify the place and meaning of musical-acoustic metaphors that appear in the last volume of Homo Sacer, The Use of Bodies, in connection with the project of modal ontology. The definition of philosophy as the “supreme music,” increasingly common in the pages of his later texts, suggests that this is not just a figurative meaning of musical images but an attempt to give them conceptual weight. To clarify the musical basis of philosophy, the article offers an analysis of a number of statements from The Use of Bodies in the context of Agamben’s early reflections on language and voice (most notably in Language and Death). The analysis allows us to show that musical metaphors mark the direction of Agamben’s positive program, particularly the project of modal ontology, which seeks to resolve the aporia of the ontological apparatus thattraces back to Aristotle. Although the aim of the article is mainly technical — to fit only apparently incidental musical metaphors into the logic of Agamben’s entire philosophical project — it seems that this analysis may be useful in clarifying the basis for understanding and critiquing the thought of the Italian philosopher.

KONSERVATUVAR ÖĞRENCİLERİNİN HALK MÜZİĞİNE İLİŞKİN METAFORİK ALGILARI

Metaphors are frequently used expressions in music and are essential for determining people's perceptions of music. Therefore, this study aims to identify and analyze conservatory students' perceptions of folk music as a study in which the concepts of metaphor and music come together. The study group for the data consists of 82 conservatory students studying at Dicle University in the 2021-2022 academic year. The researchers collected data on conservatory students' perceptions of folk music using the phenomenological analysis method. These data were then interpreted through content analysis. According to the study results, the most common metaphors of participants’ perceptions of folk music were life, past, history, Anatolia, sadness, mother's lap, and nightingale. In this context, conservatory students' folk music metaphors were grouped under 12 different categories such as tool, guide, belonging, pleasure, need, cultural transfer tool, reflection, closeness, serenity, diversity, abstraction and concretization. Conservatory students' folk music metaphors differ from each other to a certain extent. These findings contribute to determine conservatory students' perceptions of folk music and providing better music education. Different perceptions can help music students evaluate folk music diverse perspective and better understand cultural heritage. This may lead to positive results regarding folk music education.

The Communicative Function of Legal Transplants in Mixed Legal Systems

The article analyzes the definition of the communicative function of law from the point of view of legal communication between the dependent legal systems of the former colonies. In this context, the “evergreen issue” arises about legal transplantation, the legal transfer of norms and institutions and reception of nomadic legal constructs. The modern comparative lexicon uses three types of metaphors related to the interaction of legal systems and their law hybridization: anthropomorphic, communicative and mechanical metaphors. Among the best-known cases of legal transplantation, the authors pay attention to the spread of codes, the diffusion of common law, and the emergence of mixed legal systems. They explore the positivist concept of “legal transplants,” which appeared in comparative discourse thanks to the theory of Alan Watson. The article discusses the comparative opposition to this theory — the so-called cultural concept of legal transplants (transferists vs. culturalist debate), as well as the musical metaphor “legal transposition” and the process of diffusion of law in dependent legal systems. The practice of legal transplants in mixed common law systems and their application in practice are analyzed in national jurisdictions. The article shows criminal legal bijuridism and the process of the so-called “diffuse codification” in India, Canada, Australia and other British former colonies, which is an example of codistics communication of dissimilar political and legal cultures and circulation of model codes between them. In conclusion, attention is drawn to the discourse of the effectiveness, applicability and effectiveness of transplants. It is concluded that the success — failure discourse of legal transplants depends on the degree of communicativeness of transplanted and receptive constructs, their ability to “speak” in an understandable language for the host cultural environment of law.

From Night to Light: Harmony as Allegory in Die Zauberflöte

Abstract: Mozart's final opera, Die Zauberflöte , wields visual and musical metaphor to deliver possibly the most effective allegory of Enlightenment themes ever achieved in Austrian art. Supported by a systematic tonal analysis, this article reviews, integrates and expands upon decades of scholarly research on this opera, with a strict focus on the thematic symbolism of its harmonic elements. By unifying disparate sources and providing an independent overview of tonality throughout the two acts of Die Zauberflöte , this study aims to foment subtler appreciation of Mozart's application of harmonic contrasts. Special attention is devoted to the manner in which the symbolic meaning of such contrasts evolves together with the opera's dominant themes, to build a formidable musico-dramatic metaphor of a fundamental narrative of European Enlightenment—the philosophical struggle of reason against ignorance.

BETWEEN AUDIATION AND EKPHRASIS: PASCAL DUSAPIN'S ‘FALSE TRAILS’

AbstractThis article investigates the prolific deployment of images in Pascal Dusapin's scores of the mid to late 1990s. Using Edwin Gordon's concept of ‘audiation’ and Siglind Bruhn's concept of ‘musical ekphrasis’, as well as Neal Curtis’ ideas on the agency and liveness of images, interdisciplinary interpretations of three Dusapin works are offered, using the score image as the main analytical starting point. Beginning with his Piano Études and Loop, these analyses will demonstrate how the score images, derived from the study of ‘catastrophe theory’, prefigure the control of various musical parameters relating to the relationship of variables in this mathematical concept and its forms. An analysis of String Quartet No. 4, notable for its use of both a score image (of a machine) and textual quotation (from Samuel Beckett's Murphy), will then demonstrate how the visual can interact with the verbal to construct a plurality of musical metaphors. The article concludes by positing that Dusapin's elusiveness on the role and function of the images within his work could amount to what W. T. J. Mitchell describes as ‘ekphrastic fear’: an anxiety that the composer's success amalgamating image and music might have broken down the ontological boundary between them.

In Search of Lost Time in Word and Sound: about the Influence of Marcel Proust on the Work of Reynaldo Hahn

In the late 19th century two young and original artists — Marcel Proust, who worked not only as a writer, but also as a journalist (a music critic, as well), and Reynaldo Hahn, a composer, music critic and public figure, — fall into the orbit of mutual influences. Having remained friends (which can be seen, in particular, from their correspondence) up until Proust’s death, they have maintained their artistic dialogue in one way or another. As a result of this, a number of Hahn’s compositions dedicated to Proust appear at that time, as well as the cycle Portraits d’artistes – four piano pieces by Hahn with declamation of texts from Proust’s early cycle with the same title. The composition presents a peculiar double ekphrasis, since it portrays four baroque artists (Albert Cuyp, Paulus Potter, Anthony van Dyck and Antoine Watteau), using poetic and musical means, generating synthetic images-metaphors. Hahn’s other compositions permeated with Proust’s aesthetics is his piano cycle Le Rossignol éperdu, the pieces of which were composed at the same time as the first volume of In Search of Lost Time was written. Unifying into a certain resemblance to a cycle, Hahn’s pieces are in effect miniature sketches of images that are different in their nature (poetic, pictorial, architectural, natural, mythological, etc.), affixed with epigraphs and other verbal commentaries. The composition demonstrates the stylistic features essential to the French Belle Époque: passéisme, ornamentality, impressionistic hearing of sound-color, as well as a special attitude towards time. In the outcome, this results in a compilation-cycle continuing the romantic tradition of the traveler’s album (Franz Liszt), turning out to be concordant with compositions of Hahn’s contemporaries (in particular, Debussy’s Preludes) and, in addition, presenting an original musical metaphor of Proust’s novel.

A Fuzzy Gestural AI Approach for Expressive Interactivity in Multitouch Digital Musical Instruments Based on Laban Descriptors

Abstract One of the main research areas in the field of musical human–AI interactivity is how to incorporate expressiveness into interactive digital musical instruments (DMIs). In this study we analyzed gestures rooted in expressiveness by using AI techniques that can enhance the mapping stage of multitouch DMIs. This approach not only considers the geometric information of various gestures but also incorporates expressiveness, which is a crucial element of musicality. Our focus is specifically on multitouch DMIs, and we use expressive descriptors and a fuzzy logic model to mathematically analyze performers' finger movements. By incorporating commonly used features from the literature and adapting some of Rudolf Laban's descriptors—originally intended for full-body analysis—to finger-based multitouch systems, we aim to enrich the mapping process. To achieve this, we developed an AI algorithm based on a fuzzy control system that takes these descriptors as inputs and maps them to synthesis variables. This tool empowers DMI designers to define their own mapping rules based on expressive gestural descriptions, using musical metaphors in a simple and intuitive way. Through a user evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in capturing and representing gestural expressiveness in the case of multitouch DMIs.

The career of metaphor hypothesis and vocality in contemporary music

ABSTRACT The career of metaphor hypothesis advanced by Gentner et al, which describes differences in cognitive processing between metaphors encountered for the first time (novel metaphors) and metaphors encountered frequently (conventional metaphors), is applied to diverse relationships between instrumental music and the voice. A general account of musical metaphors hypothesizes that historical controversies over music’s capacity to communicate extramusical meaning are rooted in the problematic conceptual metaphor Meaning is Content and may be allayed by adopting an alternative, Meaning is Mapping. Historical practices of modelling instrumental performance and composition on the voice (e.g. cantabile, The Singing Style) are conceived as conventional metaphors and various contemporary approaches to voice-based instrumental and electroacoustic composition are conceived as novel metaphors. A brief survey of contemporary practices illustrates some of the ways recent music has exploited vocality with examples from recent repertoire, and points of comparison between conventional and novel approaches to vocality are summarized.

Towards a contextual theology of conviviality: Tutu, Bonhoeffer and living musical metaphors

Both Tutu and Bonhoeffer embraced conviviality as an attribute of Christian life, not only as theory, but also in practice. Both also drew from lived experience in an effort to articulate their respective theologies of conviviality. We discuss the experience of music and musical metaphors as a lens through which to explore this relationship between lived experience and an explicit theology of conviviality. Bonhoeffer’s metaphor of the “polyphony of life” is a product of his milieu and does not fully capture the conviviality implicit in his Christology (being-for-others). We argue that African manifestations of conviviality such as ubuntu and gbenopo, when understood as lived realities rather than isolated abstract concepts, make an important contribution to theological discourse, in general. In this case in particular, utilising ethnomusicology to attend to the polyrhythm in Ogu music enriches our understanding of what it means to be-for-others.

Drilling Automation - A Robot Takes Over the Drilling Floor

The work on the drilling floor of the PaceR801 rig revolves around a stout robot methodically picking up sections of pipe and moving them precisely over the drilling center to rapidly connect the pipe. While it is one of many technological advances on the rig Nabors bills as “the world’s first fully automated land rig,” the robot is the one “that gets most people interested and excited,” said Travis Purvis, senior vice president, global operations for Nabors Industries Ltd. As of 18 October, the PaceR801 had completed the first well on an ExxonMobil pad and was drilling the lateral on the second well of the three-well pad. After the third is done, the extended test will move to the next pad. It is risky to announce who came in first in a competitive race in a secretive business. But Nabors stands out because the PaceR801 has an automated drilling floor, a range of other automated functions above and below ground, and most significantly, it is the only one using its rig to drill producing wells for a customer. Jason Gahr, operations manager for unconventional drilling at ExxonMobil, said the research collaboration “demonstrates the ability to optimize drilling using the combined power of robotics, automation, computing, and data.” Since the announcement, Nabors has heard from other oil companies. “There is strong interest in the rig in many markets,” Purvis said. The companies’ interests range from automating more drilling functions by retrofitting rigs, to wanting to hire the rig, whose name is frequently shortened in conversations to R801. There is only one PaceR801 and it is going to be tied up for a while. “We expect to drill multiple test wells on multiple pads and continue to work on the technology” with ExxonMobil, Purvis said. It was created to show off the fruits of a 5-year drive to create a totally automated version of its Pace high- specification rig. Nabors likens it to the concept cars built by automakers to show off their vision of the future and to promote innovation within the company. In this case, it is a vision of the near future. While the automated drilling floor is new, much of the rest is recently proven technology. Two of the drilling automation programs used—Nabors’ SmartSLIDE and SmartNAV—are already on 30% of the Nabors fleet, said Austin Groover, director of operations for smart products at Nabors. Those applications, which manage drilling of the curve and directional drilling, plus a third that automates drilling a stand of pipe, SmartDRILL, have been used by ExxonMobil for 2 years. Maximizing the performance of a rig with multiple proven technologies plus a new one such as a robotic drilling floor required developing a system that coordinates the movements of those apps and the rig hardware while drilling. When Nabors experts describe that process, they rely on musical metaphors, from the robot doing its little dance to a conductor leading a symphony.

Metaphorical perceptions of high school students about pop music

The purpose of this research is to examine the pop music metaphors developed by high school students. In this study, the phenomenology model, which is one of the qualitative research methods, has been used. A total of 650 students from a public school in Province Ankara, District Mamak, attended the study during the spring semester of the 2020/2021 academic year. The data were collected through a form containing the question ‘Pop music is like... because...’. The data were analysed through content analysis. Based on the 324 different metaphors created by high school students, these metaphors are classified into 13 categories based on their shared characteristics. Students’ gender and their conditions whether they play an instrument or not were considered when categorising them. According to the findings of the study, high school students described pop music as the most energising/friendly genre. The study also demonstrates that metaphors can be an effective tool for eliciting students’ perceptions of pop music.
 
 Keywords: High school students, metaphor, music, perception of pop music.

The Eschatological Key

Abstract In the first volume of his systemic series, German theologian Jürgen Moltmann begins his systematics with a musical metaphor; “The eschatological is not one element of Christianity, but it is the medium of Christian faith as such, the key in which everything is set …” Moltmann then goes on to propose that the eschaton is a temporal event, which breaks the logic of his initial metaphor of the key signature. This essay will explore the differences between understanding the eschaton explicated as the key that Christian hope is set as opposed to a temporal alternative, such as the time signature. Jeremy Begbie is brought into the conversation to explicate how “harmony” can guide our conversation of music theory, and Miguel De La Torre illuminates how Moltmann’s claim, which while revolutionary in many aspects, continues to rely on Eurocentric understanding of salvation history, just as music theory tends towards Eurocentrism. We also examine what we lose out on when we leave this uninterrogated. To conclude, we explore how Moltmann’s proposal about Christian hope becomes more coherent within the metaphor of key signature and right relationship instead of time signature and temporality.