The practice of listening as a private, purely sonic experience is a relatively new one. Before the era of recording, music had to come from some human source, either one’s self or some other performer. Along with this would have come a whole set of other sensory experiences, from the sight of the performers, to the feel of playing an instrument.

The way commercial music technology has progressed tells us a lot about what kind of experience we think music is. Take the iconic iPod and earbud combination of the 2000s. The musical ideal forwarded by the iPod and other .mp3 players was one in which music was conceived of as a private experience of pure sound. The iPod promised to pipe the music directly into your ears. The music had become all but immaterial; you could get just the music, free from the constraints of physical recording formats. This also meant shedding much of the visual experience of the cover art and the tactile process of cueing up music from a disc or tape.

But are those visual and tactile elements just extras surrounding “the music itself”? The resurgence of the LP and album art suggests that music is experienced across many different sensory modalities.

One way we can make sense of the crossing between sensory modalities is through the concept of metaphor. We’ve all probably studied this idea in an English or literature class at some point in our education. What I remember from this part of my education was the differentiation between simile and metaphor in literature: a simile uses “like” or “as,” but a metaphor compares two things more directly. To borrow an example from Tom Cochrane: “Life's like a road that you travel on” is a simile, and “life is a highway” is a metaphor. The idea “life is a highway” combines ideas from different areas of experience—”life” and “highway”—to create new poetic meaning.

But why do metaphors work, really? Why aren’t we just confused when we smash together language from different realms of experience? Sure, maybe life is like a highway, but life is not, in fact, a highway. Life happens whether or not we travel through space.

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff (b. 1941)

One explanation of how metaphor works is that it is the magic of poetry—creating new meaning through the extraordinary use of language. Cochrane’s metaphor helps us poetically understand that we experience change in life in the same way we do when we are traveling on a highway. But is metaphor just a poetic device? Cognitive linguist George Lakoff argues that “the locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another.” According to Lakoff, metaphor is not an extraordinary aspect of human language, but rather an everyday cognitive process.

What interests me most about this research is that it reveals that the realms of human experience—like the visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic—are all intertwined. I mean this not just in a poetic sense, but in a very real way. When we hear music, we experience the “movement” of a melody as a kind of physical movement. We experience a “bright” timbre as visually bright. There is something that resonates with the flavor of sweetness when we hear a “sweet” harmony.

So if music is not really experienced as “just sound,” then perhaps it was inevitable that the LP would make a return in the age of the iPod. The process of cueing an LP and viewing its cover art constitutes a more complete musical experience. The purely sonic experience that the iPod aimed for is something that does not really exist; our minds make sense of musical meaning within and across multiple sensory modes. Metaphor is at the heart of musical experience.

Did the iPod Suck? (or: Metaphor and Musical Experience)

Afrofutures and Album Covers

Can album cover fonts change how you hear the music?