‘A huge man is bursting out of a rock'. Bodies, motion, and creativity in verbal reports of musical connotation

Tools

Antović, Mihailo; Küssner, Mats B.; Kempf, Adrian; Omigie, Diana; Hashim, Sarah and Schiavio, Andrea. 2024. ‘A huge man is bursting out of a rock'. Bodies, motion, and creativity in verbal reports of musical connotation. Journal of New Music Research, 52(1), pp. 73-86. ISSN 0929-8215 [Article]

No full text available

Text
AAM_Man_Bursting_Antovic_et_al_2024.pdf - Accepted Version
Permissions: Administrator Access Only until 31 July 2025.
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial.
Download (521kB)

Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2024.2306406

Abstract or Description

The present study proposes a new approach to musical referentiality and its alleged tendency to relate to bodily experience and movement. To address this, we collected a corpus of 38,587 words (2,265 verbal descriptions of ‘associations’ or ‘imagery’ sparked by short musical excerpts by 554 participants from 32 countries). We tested the hypotheses that verbalizations containing clear references to bodies and/or their movement will (1) be prevalent in the data; (2) tend to be more creative than descriptions not containing such references; and (3) display similar underlying image-schematic structures, themselves hypothesized in cognitive linguistics to be a consequence of bodily interactions. Our analysis suggests that (1) descriptions containing references to human or animal bodies or body parts, and to movement, significantly outnumber those not containing such references, with a strong correlation between the invocation of bodies and movement ; (2) descriptions containing references to bodies and movement are deemed more creative by an automated creativity assessment routine than those not containing them; and (3) a qualitative linguistic analysis of the most creative descriptions reveals some embodied, image-schematic similarities beneath outwardly very different verbalizations. These findings suggest that musical meaning, while open-ended, may be partly constrained by tractable principles.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2024.2306406

Additional Information:

Funding: Mihailo Antović was supported by Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung; Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia: [project number 7715934, "Structuring Concept Generation with the Help of Metaphor, Analogy and Schematicity" - SCHEMAS]. Adrian Kempf and Andrea Schiavio were supported by Austrian Science Fund (FWF): [project number: P 32460].

“This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in 'Journal of New Music Research' on 31 January 2024, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2024.2306406. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.”

Keywords:

Music listening; mental imagery; embodiment; motion; creativity

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Psychology

Dates: