The Shape of Music - The Music of Shape

Musicians make use of the notion of shape in relation to music performance, teaching, composition, improvisation; they often think and talk about the shape of a musical phrase or melody, the shape of a single sound event, the shape of a longer section or piece, the expressive shaping of music during performance. But how can a primarily spatial term such as shape (meaning “the external form, contour, or outline of someone or something” according to the Oxford dictionary), be applied in the temporal domain of music? How can one talk of shape in regards to a temporally emitted sequence of sound events? Many researchers have studied the correspondence between space and time in human conceptualisation, and more specifically the use of spatial metaphors in temporal reasoning [1, 2]. Johnson and Larson [3] discuss the relation between music motion and space, and, more specifically, the employment of two basic spatialisation metaphors of time in the conceptualisation of musical time and motion. Frequency/pitch is also commonly conceptualised in terms of spatial metaphors, namely along the high/low spatial axis [4, 5]. The combination of the x-axis spatial representation of time with an orthogonal high/low pitch y-axis gives rise to the most common 2D representation of music (standard score notation, piano-roll notation, spectrogram, various graphic scores) – see [6] for a cross-cultural study on visual representation schemes of melodic shape. The correspondence between time and space is so strong that it is difficult to conceptualise music without thinking about shape or pattern. Music becomes intelligible to a great extent through its inner self-referential structural relations. New unheard musical passages relate to previously heard material giving rise to meaningful musical units (such as motives, themes, rhythm patterns, harmonic progressions). The emergence of musical patterns via repetition/similarity is paramount in making sense and understanding music. As music does not have explicit denotative meaning (as language has) musical meaning is more multi-faceted, ambiguous and, in a certain sense, richer. It has been debated for centuries whether musical meaning is intraor extra-musical (absolutists vs referentialists), whether music can evoke emotions (formalists vs expressionists), what music signifies [7]. In this paper we focus on structural patterns in music: in intra-musical structural relations per se that allow the emergence and perception of salient musical shapes, patterns, forms, structures, and, additionally, on aspects of music performance that shape music by bringing out various elements of musical structure giving this way ‘life’ to a music