Pitch metaphors and the body in singing classes

Prové, Valentijn; Feyaerts, Kurt

doi:10.4000/cognitextes.2037

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…The inner logic of the target domain is represented in terms of the inner logic of another domain, the source, based on some sort of similarity relation. Such metaphorical mappings structure our experience as well as the communication about our experiences (Prové and Feyaerts, 2022). In the present study, we investigate by what imagery aspects of musical dynamics are construed metaphorically in terms of movement in 3D space.…”

Section: Meaning Construalmentioning

confidence: 97%

Mapping musical dynamics in space. A qualitative analysis of conductors' movements in orchestra rehearsals

2022

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In this contribution, we examine the way in which orchestra conductors use the space around them to convey aspects of musical dynamics. In music, dynamics refers to the intensity of volume of notes and sounds and its interpretation is highly context-bound. We approach dynamics as a phenomenon of emergent and construed meaning in interaction, induced by the music score and the interpretation in situ by musicians and the conductor. Conductors' movement-based instructions on dynamics result in highly complex usage events. This study aims at disentangling these instances by asking how conductors move and use the space around them to instruct on (un)desired aspects of musical dynamics, zooming in on movement direction as a central formal feature. We find ourselves at the crossroads of cognitive and interactional linguistics, aligning with existing studies on the interactional and contextually embedded nature of music interaction. From a cognitive linguistic perspective, this endeavor translates as the identification of the construal mechanisms (metaphor, specificity and viewpoint) that underlie and therefore motivate movement directions in the specific instances under examination. The analysis is based on 10h of video data from a corpus recorded during rehearsals of five conductors instructing their respective orchestras in Dutch. Our data reveal that conductors use different movement patterns, some of which appear to involve opposite movement directions for expressing a similar music dynamical aspect, e.g., depending on the usage event, a vertical upward movement can mean both a request for playing louder and softer. By taking into account different construal mechanisms, we are able to provide an encompassing multimodal analysis, in which these allegedly deviating oppositional movements appear as consistently motivated (metaphorical) expressions, which profile a similar target concept involving different viewpoints.

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Section: Meaning Construalmentioning

confidence: 97%

Mapping musical dynamics in space. A qualitative analysis of conductors' movements in orchestra rehearsals

2022

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“…However, in a series of experiments involving more subjective pitch mappings in the domain of tonality (Maimon et al, 2021), musicians did not rely more on conventional metaphors than non-musicians did. Moreover, a qualitative study on the use of pitch metaphors in lyric singing classes (Prové and Feyaerts, 2022) showed that singing teachers blend conventional and unconventional conceptualizations in one multimodal expression. In one example, the teacher depicts how the student should sing a rising melody with a high note that is difficult to produce, by bending the knees, pointing downwards along her legs as the melody rises (non-conventional), and subsequently pointing upwards so as to indicate where the highest note should be (conventional).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring embodied conceptualizations of pitch in singing performances: Insights from an OpenPose study

Prové

2022

Front. Commun.

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People conceptualize auditory pitch as vertical space: low and high pitch correspond to low and high space, respectively. The strength of this cross-modal correspondence, however, seems to vary across different cultural contexts and a debate on the different factors underlying this variation is currently taking place. According to one hypothesis, pitch mappings are semantically mediated. For instance, the use of conventional metaphors such as “falling” or “rising” melodies strengthens a pitch-height mapping to the detriment of other possible mappings (e.g., pitch as bright/dark color or small/big size). Hence, entrenched pitch terms shape specific conceptualizations. The deterministic role of language is called into question by the hypothesis that different pitch mappings share a less constraining conceptual basis. As such, conceptual primitives may be concretized ad hoc into specific domains so that more local variation is possible. This claim is supported, for instance, by the finding that musicians use language-congruent (conventional) and language-incongruent (ad hoc) mappings interchangeably. The present paper substantiates this observation by investigating the head movements of musically trained and untrained speakers of Dutch in a melody reproduction task, as embodied instantiations of a vertical conceptualization of pitch. The OpenPose algorithm was used to track the movement trajectories in detail. The results show that untrained participants systematically made language-congruent movements, while trained participants showed more diverse behaviors, including language-incongruent movements. The difference between the two groups could not be attributed to the level of accuracy in the singing performances. In sum, this study argues for a joint consideration of more entrenched (e.g., linguistic metaphors) and more context-dependent (e.g., musical training and task) factors in accounting for variability in pitch representations.

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Pitch metaphors and the body in singing classes

Cited by 2 publications

References 51 publications

Mapping musical dynamics in space. A qualitative analysis of conductors' movements in orchestra rehearsals

Mapping musical dynamics in space. A qualitative analysis of conductors' movements in orchestra rehearsals

Measuring embodied conceptualizations of pitch in singing performances: Insights from an OpenPose study

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