Dissertation - World Federation of Music Therapy

crying, or symbolized as falling chromatic melodic lines, as in the ostinato bass of the
aria. But not only downward motion has metaphorical function, as shown in Aksnes’
analysis of the second part of the aria, moving towards the climax:
“Both the repetitions [of ‘Remember me’] themselves, and the affective contour of
crescendo and rising pitch create an increase in intensity that brings us to the
aria’s climax: the third ‘Remember me’, sung on a high G, followed by a
meandering sigh which gradually brings the melody to an end an octave below.
We find this basic contour both in discontented newborn and everyday speech, as
well as in many familiar patterns of motor activity (cf. Stern’s vitality affects).”
(p. 91-92)
Other mappings between non-musical modes of expression and music include bodily
postures related to and reflecting sadness: head drops, the body sinks together,
movements become slow 36 . Thus, many correspondences between musical features
and bodily-emotional patterns and reactions are demonstrated.
Cox (2001) suggested the “mimetic hypothesis” to account for how embodied
experience motivates and constrains the formation of basic music meaning, or in other
words: how the cross-domain mappings are created that serve as foundation for
metaphoric conceptualizations of music. The “mimetic hypothesis” is based on
evidence from infant studies, clinical studies of human cognition, and studies of
subvocalization of speech and music (imagery). It states that
“1) part of how we understand human movement and human-made sounds is
in terms of our own experience of making the same or similar movements and
sounds, and
2) this process of comparison involves overt and covert [mimetic] imitation of
the source of visual and auditory information.” (p. 196)
36 Aksnes refers to an experiment done by cognitive psychologists Adachi and Trehub (1996). They
filmed children who were asked to sing either in a sad or a happy way, without giving them any
instructions on bodily postures. The children singing sadly showed the postures mentioned above.
87