WEBVTT

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Hi, we are now in the
office of Hallgjerd Aksnes.

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Hello, Hallgjerd.

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Hello.

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You have led the research
project with the title Music

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Motion and Emotion.

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In this title you
connect emotions

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with motions or movement.

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Can you explain the connection.

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Yes, I've always been fascinated
by the etymological connection

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between motion and emotion.

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What is the reason why
we have put the prefix

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"e" in front of motion
to describe how we feel.

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And I think that has a
lot to do with the fact

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that emotions are temporal.

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They are dynamic.

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They move through time.

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We can feel a surge of
anger, for instance.

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We all have felt that feeling.

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And it's very easy to
conceptualise emotions

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in term of motion.

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And that is, in fact, also
a very central metaphor

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for the understanding of music,
that we cannot understand

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music, almost invariably, we use
metaphors of motion and space

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and time, movement through
space, when we describe music.

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And it's quite fascinating,
because music is, in fact, just

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a constellation of sound waves.

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And how is it that we imbue
these sound waves with such

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a richness and
heterogeneity of meaning.

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That is precisely through
metaphors of motion

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and the emotions they evoke,
give rise to more metaphors.

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And as you understand,
I've been working a lot

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with cognitive
metaphor theory, which

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is a discipline within
cognitive science

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where one focuses on
the fact that even

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literal meanings in language
are, in fact, metaphorically

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based.

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For instance, if we
say I'll meet you

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at the foot of the mountain,
we understand intuitively

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that that's the bottom
of the mountain.

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A mountain doesn't
have a foot, no?

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It doesn't actually have a foot.

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Well, in the fairy
tales it does.

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They make very much
use of these metaphors.

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And we do so in music as well.

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We understand music in
terms of motion in space.

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But it is, in fact, just sound
waves vibrating in the air.

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But would you say it's connected
to human movement, then?

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Certainly.

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That is one of the tenets of
cognitive metaphor theory,

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that we use our experiences
as embodied human beings

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in a physical world where we
are subject to physical forces,

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like gravity for instance.

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We use these experiences to
understand more abstract things

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like language, poetry, music.

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For instance, if we look
at the notion of balance,

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that is something we all
intuitively understand

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when we speak of emotional
balance, for instance,

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or psychological balance.

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We can say she's
completely out of balance

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and everybody understands
what that means.

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And there we make use of
what Lakoff and Johnson call

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image schemata,
image schemas, which

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are skeletal forms of
structure that are amodal,

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they are independent of
the sensory modalities,

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like vision, hearing,
the tactile sense,

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the kinesthetic sense, which
is knowing where the body is,

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the muscles and joints.

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And these amodal
image schemas, they

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are used to make sense out
of more abstract phenomena,

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like for instance,
feelings or music.

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We also use the notion of
balance to understand music,

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very much.

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For instance, the
music of Palestrina

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is heard by many people.

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And Palestrina scholars, and
during the Renaissance period,

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as something that is
exceptionally balanced.

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And that is something we
intuitively understand,

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that up and down
are in equilibrium.

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And especially up and
down there in Palestrina.

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He has melodic motion
where he can make leaps

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up and then stepwise downwards.

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There we make use of the sort
of feeling of potential energy,

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which is a physical phenomenon.

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When we lift something up,
this book for instance,

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we give it potential
energy, which is then, now

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it's back to zero,
thanks to gravity.

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And we use
gravitational metaphors

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to understand music as well.

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And that is another way
of understanding balance.

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And then you have the temporal
balance, the balance of tempo.

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For instance Stravinsky, who
changes metrum the whole time.

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He goes from 3/4 to
4/4 to 2/4, and it

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has this stumbling effect.

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It's like we're constantly
shifting our centre of balance.

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And that makes us very
awake in his music.

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I wanted to ask you, a lot
of melancholic, sad music,

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we recognise as melancholic,
it's very often in a slow

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tempo.

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Do you think that's
a coincidence?

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Certainly not.

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I have, myself, focused
on, for instance,

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Dido's farewell
from Purcell's opera

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Dido and Aeneas, which is
in a very, very slow tempo.

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And there's a repetitive
pattern in the instruments.

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It's like ruminating
over these sad thoughts.

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And in fact, studies
of depressed patients

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show that they have a
slower perception of time.

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They think their whole and
their body, their pulse,

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everything goes more slowly.

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And we all have
loved ones around us.

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And we can sense immediately
if they're happy or sad if we

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talk to them on the phone.

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And there's this tone of voice.

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And if you're sad the voice
is subdued and it goes down.

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Yes, we have the
downward motion,

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just like the mouth goes down.

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And if they're happy,
they're excited

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and they're talking fast
in a much higher register.

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And of course, we
use those kinds

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of icons of feeling in music.

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In music, too, yeah.