Musical metaphors: Innate and objective

As in the recent approach cognition is embodied and metaphor theory of meaning metaphoricity of music is a topic that is mostly studied in cognitive musicology and cognitive linguistics and should be studied from the perspective of cognitive scientists. Musicologists use metaphors to describe the musical system itself in the music theory, music psychologists also use metaphors to describe perceptual facts like a tone is higher as in it resonates somewhere higher in the body or conceptual as in the tone’s place in the musical spectrum. This conceptual part tells us that this kind of metaphor derives from a more complex activity of the cognitive system, a complex interaction of the environment with human posture and bodily movement during cognition of music. Metaphors are always in account when describing music. In my research I will try to determine if the musical metaphors are innate and objective by analysing how human posture and movement interacts in describing music by researching on bodily metaphors called image schemas using methods similar to Mihailo Antovic(2014) where he presents 5 different sound stimuli to children subjects and asks them to describe their experience and then analysing the subject answers using the image schemas and conceptual metaphor theory. The results showed musical comprehension is metaphorical and image schemas employed in subjects metaphors. In this research I examined a broader age range and compared musical instrument players and non players to see if their comprehension of music is also metaphorical and which image schemas they employ in metaphors. I used 9 different sound stimuli and 7 different image schemas to analyse with. According to results of this study, body-environment interactions which are related to force image schemas utilized in the metaphors the most.