How music MOVES: Musical parameters and listeners' images of motion

This article presents an empirical investigation of the ways listeners associate changes in musical parameters with physical space and bodily motion. In the experiments reported, participants were asked to associate melodic stimuli with imagined motions of a human character and to specify the type, direction, and pacechange of these motions, as well as the forces affecting them. The stimuli consisted of pairs of brief figures, one member of a pair presenting an '' intensification '' in a specific musical parameter, the other an '' abatement '' (e.g., crescendo vs. diminuendo, accelerando vs. ritardando). Musical parameters manipulated included dynamics, pitch contour, pitch intervals, attack rate, and articulation. Results indicate that most musical parameters significantly affect several dimensions of motion imagery. For instance, pitch contour affected imagined motion along all three spatial axes (not only verticality), as well as velocity and '' energy.'' A surprising finding of this study is that musical-spatial analogies are often asymmetrical, as a musical change in one direction evokes a significantly stronger spatial analogy than its opposite. Such asymmetries include even the entrenched association of pitch change and spatial verticality, which applies mostly to pitch falls, but only weakly to rises. In general, musical abatements are strongly associated with spatial descents, while musical intensifications are generally associated with increasing speed rather than ascent. The implications of these results for notions of perceived musical space and for accounts of expressive musical gesture are discussed.