https://doi.org/10.1177/1029864917711218
Musicae Scientiae
2018, Vol. 22(1) 57­–71
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1029864917711218
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Schemas, grounds, meaning: On
the emergence of musical concepts
through conceptual blending
Mihailo Antović
University of Niš, Serbia
Abstract
This article offers a new theoretical approach to the conceptualization of music, based on Conceptual
Blending Theory, with a reinforced role ascribed to the constructs of generic space and the grounding
box. Three analyses of typical conceptualizations of music from prior experiments with children and
adults are provided to postulate that the ultimate linguistically reported concept comes from blending the
intramusical Gestalt (input space 1) with a rich image from an appropriate experiential domain (input
space 2). However, the mapping is not haphazard, but rather based on the invariant structure in the
generic space, which takes the form of an image-schema family. In the blended space new conceptual
elements emerge: one such typical resultant concept generates the idea that music “moves”, and in
specifically articulated ways. While more basic verbal reports from experiments may be constrained
by image-schema families alone, richer descriptions additionally require the theoretical notion of the
grounding box, which hosts experiential information that participants add to the description as they
progress in building musical meaning. The proposed model relativizes two common dichotomies in music
cognition: (1) the distinction between “intramusical” and “extramusical” meaning, since both participate
in the process of creating the ultimate blended concept; and (2) the strict divide between universalism
and linguistic relativity in musical concept formation, since the present proposal has sufficient theoretical
constructs to account for both schematic invariants and experiential diversity.
Keywords
conceptual blending, conceptualization, generic space, grounding box, image schema, music
Conceptualization is one of the major questions of cognitive science. Philosophers, psychologists
and linguists, among others, have long wondered where concepts come from, what they are
grounded in, and whether they share “building blocks” cross-culturally, even if they seem different
in various languages. Proposed answers have embraced a variety of positions, from universalism
to linguistic relativity, from nativism to neo-behaviorism to constructivism. The present
contribution aims to suggest that research of musical concepts can be an excellent vehicle for
addressing some of the big dilemmas of meaning construction in general. More particularly, this
Corresponding author:
Mihailo Antović, Faculty of Philosophy, Center for Cognitive Sciences, University of Niš, Ćirila i Metodija 2, 18000 Niš,
Serbia.
Email: mantovic@gmail.com
711218MSX0010.1177/1029864917711218Musicae ScientiaeAntović
research-article2017
Article
58	 Musicae Scientiae 22(1)
work proposes to use a model based on the Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT), with reinforced
roles ascribed to the constructs of generic space (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) and grounding box
(Coulson & Oakley, 2005). In an attempt to bridge the gap between disparate epistemological
approaches mentioned above, in the present proposal the blueprints of a system are provided
that might capture both cross-cultural diversity and schematic invariants underlying some frequent,
yet seemingly different musical concepts across languages and populations. Beyond that,
three groups of common linguistic descriptions of short musical fragments will be reanalyzed,
as obtained in experiments from naive participants of various age, cultural and linguistic background,
and cognitive status (Antović, 2009; Antović, Bennett, & Turner, 2013; Antović, Mitić
& Benecasa, 2017; Antović, Stamenković, & Figar, 2016). Including this introduction, the article
consists of four parts: section two provides essential information on conceptual blending,
along with its recent applications to music cognition, and then revisits some of the most interesting
verbal labels that participants used to describe musical concepts in previous studies. Section
three suggests why commonly employed theoretical approaches, such as that of the Conceptual
Metaphor Theory, stop halfway in explaining the experimental data. It then provides three analyses
to argue that a system based on conceptual blending, with an enhanced role assigned to the
generic space and grounding box, can more convincingly account for the motivation behind the
conceptual variability which regularly emerges in experimental work. Section four offers directions
for future research and introduces the ongoing experiments by Antović and associates,
which use the approach proposed here not merely as a means for post-hoc analysis, but also as a
tool for postulating empirical hypotheses.
Blending and musical conceptualization: Theoretical background
and prior work
Conceptual blending (CB; Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) focuses on operations at high levels of
cognitive integration, and addresses the construction of meaning in various cognitive domains
– including linguistic metaphors, counterfactuals and puns, as well as the aesthetic appreciation
of literary images. Essentially, it proposes two sets of online conceptual packets, input mental
spaces, whose elements selectively map onto one another, where novel, emergent structures occur
in the newly-created, blended space. In addition, there is commonly a generic space, which hosts
preconceptual, often spatial, topologies common to the two inputs, holding the system together
and motivating the mappings in the first place. The Sphinx, the snake from the Garden of Eden,
“space-time” in physics, “consciousness as the tip of the iceberg” in Freudian psychology, or
unconventional expressions such as “That surgeon is a real butcher”, are but a few structures
embodying the process of blending. In this last example, mapping the semantic elements of the
“surgeon mental space” (a conscious professional using a sharp instrument to cut human flesh
in order to heal) onto those of the “butcher mental space” (an equally conscious professional
using a sharp instrument to cut animal flesh in order to carve and ultimately eat meat) results in
a sense of imbalance in the blend, since even the most technically proficient butcher cannot use
a cleaver to heal. This discrepancy between means and ends in the input spaces engenders the
emergent semantic element of incongruency, which is crucially responsible for the interpretive
power and emotional appeal of this unusual metaphorical expression (see Grady, Oakley, &
Coulson, 1999, or, for an alternative analysis, L. Brandt & P. A. Brandt, 2005).
Blending has excelled as a functional approach to linguistic semantics, but it has lately been
applied more broadly in cognitive science, including music cognition. In terms of semantic phenomena
which musicologists often label extramusical, i.e. relating musical structure and the
world of experience (cf. Koelsch, 2012), Zbikowski (2002) has discussed text painting, in which
Antović	 59
a musical and a linguistic structure, such as a trill and the word “trembling”, blend to create an
emergent, augmented, perhaps even bodily effect of trepidation in the audience. Accordingly, in
more recent work Zbikowski has increasingly argued for the bidirectionality of musical-textual
mappings (Zbikowski, this issue). Cook (2001), Sayrs (2003), Chattah (2006), Tasoudis and
Vouvaris (2016, and this issue), and Antović (in press) have used blending to discuss music semiotics,
typically interpreting extramusical meaning in program music. These contributions used
blending to analyze, respectively, the impact of television commercials, the connection of lyrics
and music inspired by a well-known literary novella, and the semiotic effects of film music.
Recently, the connection between blending and musical emotions has also been studied, providing
a fresh theoretical perspective on one of the most widely debated questions in the psychology
of music in general (Spitzer, this issue). On the other hand, P. A. Brandt (2008), A. Brandt
(Brandt & Eagleman, 2017), and Antović (2014) have also analyzed intramusical constructs,
such as the integration of rhythmic and melodic patterns, counterpoint, pitch hierarchies, or
complex meter as instances of blending. From an equally intramusical perspective, recent
research has seen excellent progress in the computational corroboration of the construct of
blending, in music mostly in terms of chord sequencing and harmonization (Cambouropoulos,
Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, & Tsougras, 2015; Eppe et  al., 2015; Zacharakis, KaliakatsosPapakostas,
& Cambouropoulos, 2015); One of the most remarkable achievements of this program
is the fact that an AI routine has managed to blend two well-formed cadences from the
classical repertoire and infer the “emergent” tritone substitution, simulating the actual historical
development of this musical concept – from classical to jazz harmony (Zacharakis,
Kaliakatsos-Papakostas,Tsougras,&Cambouropoulos,thisissue).Theapplicabilityof theintra-/
extramusical distinction has been critically questioned from a CBT perspective (Stefanou &
Cambouropuolos, 2015), where both types of phenomena have been successfully analyzed in
the same musical composition (Tsougras & Stefanou, 2015, and this issue). Finally, the importance
of conceptual blending for performance, rather than just perception or conceptualization
has been discussed in relation to so-called “intermedial blends” (Stefanou, this issue).
All these studies ask important questions about musical conceptualization, for instance, on
any qualitative difference between intramusical concepts, such as a five-note theme taken as an
absolute piece of music, and extramusical ones, e.g. the same theme being related to an event,
character, or sensation from the world of experience, often expressible in language. For musicologists
who base their approach on Cognitive Grammar – a school in linguistics denying the
sharp divide between form and meaning – this distinction collapses (Zbikowski, 2002). For others,
it remains theoretically important (Kühl, 2008, p. 86). Some related earlier work has also
taken a traditional metalinguistic perspective and insisted on the distinction (Antović, 2014),
yet here more recent experimental data are considered, in search of a theoretical approach that
might indeed render the dichotomy unnecessary. Partly independently of the intra-/extramusical
divide, the question of universals remains equally important. When musical concepts are
constructed in different cultural circumstances, as in a scale that goes “up and down” in one
language but becomes “thinner and thicker” in another – one might ask if the conceptualization
is chiefly motivated by the speaker’s knowledge of the mother tongue (Dolscheid, Shayan,
Majid, & Casasanto, 2013) or if there might be higher-order, schematic invariants beneath
apparently disparate cross-linguistic conceptual choices (Antović et al., 2017, partly based on
Jackendoff, 1990).
A series of studies with Serbian, Roma, and American sighted and blind children, and musician
and nonmusician students, has revealed significant cross-linguistic differences in the conceptualization
of basic musical elements, such as pitch distances, movement, dynamics, and
(dis)harmonious chord sequencing. In two such studies, 10-year-old naive participants were
60	 Musicae Scientiae 22(1)
exposed to diametrically opposed musical stimuli, such as an ascending and descending musical
scale, and asked to verbally describe the difference between the two, as best they could. The
raw responses were then classified into higher-order, metaphorical categories. Upon the analysis,
some interesting differences emerged among the preferred conceptualizations in different
groups. For instance, for Serbian children, two tones an octave apart were typically “high and
low”, while for Romani pupils they were “big and small” or “thick and thin” (Antović, 2009).
The former group viewed pitch movement predominantly as going “up and down”, the latter as
getting “bigger and smaller” or going “to the goal and back”. In a replicated study with nonsighted
children, musical movement was occasionally defined as a change from “heavier toward
lighter” or even occurring “in a circle” (Antović et al., 2013). Similar results emerged from
descriptions of other musical constructs: a staccato and a legato line was commonly “abrupt
and linked” or “hopping and walking”; a piano and forte note sounded “weak and strong” or
“letting go and pushing”. Finally, in the most recent studies by the same group, which asked
nonmusician students to provide descriptions of any meaning provoked in them by pieces of
programmatic music, with or without prior linguistic prompts, an actual musical excerpt (So
grüss ich die Burg from The Ring of the Nibelung) was found to resemble “growing tension” resulting
in a “path of two armies that are about to clash”, but also reminded some of “growth, since
the tonality elevates” (Antović, 2016; Antović et al., 2016).
This diversity of verbal reports leaves two choices for interpretation: more directly descriptive,
in which one highlights the obvious surface differences to support the thesis of linguistic
relativity; or more theoretically speculative, where one performs a post-hoc linguistic analysis
in search of potential deeper semantic constraints – ideally revealing some invariants beneath
the different verbalizations. The dilemma of course does not have consequences only for musicological
debates, but may be fundamentally important for broader discussions in semantics
and cognitive science. In linguistics, for instance, it has defined entire paradigms. The breakup
betweenChomskyanGenerativeGrammar(Chomsky,1981)andLakoffianCognitiveLinguistics
(Lakoff, 1987) centered largely on the problem of semantic atomism and universals, and
remains a matter of fierce debate even today (Pinker, 2013 vs. Evans, 2014).
The remainder of the paper attempts to suggest that in (musical) conceptualization studies
“intra-/extramusical” and “universalist/relativist” should not be viewed as dichotomous poles.
Rather, a conceptual blending approach may be useful in capturing both shared schematic
invariants and experiential cross-linguistic differences in (musical) concept formation. To take
the conceptualization of scales as an example, the individual verbal descriptions have certainly
differed in previous studies: the music indeed “went up and down”, “thinned and thickened”,
“became smaller and bigger”, “moved from heavier to lighter” or “ran in a circle”. Yet instead
of taking these descriptions as a clear sign of linguistic relativity, one can also view them as a
motivation to look for higher-order constraints. In other words, the actual (different) verbal
descriptions do not point only to what is possible, but also to what, in principle, is not. For
instance, pitches can hardly be naturally compared to “apples and bananas” (Zbikowski, 2002,
p. 70). Thus, focus on the nature of conceptual constraints is as legitimate a research question
as is descriptive cross-cultural comparison. In the scales example, whether the tones “move”
from a low towards a high position in space, “run” in a circle or along a vertical line, “shrink”
horizontally or by all axes, or finally stepwise “let up” physical pressure, there seem to be at least
three schematic notions underlying the apparently diversified conceptualizations – force, discrete
distance, and path (Antović, 2014). However the particular concept may be finally framed
– and this is certainly culture-specific and has a lot to do with the participant’s native language
and personal experience – all five conceptualizations seem to inhere these proposed notions.
After all, for the static tones to start “moving” – which is a conceptual, and not an auditory
Antović	 61
phenomenon – some (mentally represented) force needs to be applied, after which the representations
of the tones metaphorically “traverse” discrete distances. In turn, these sequential,
adjacent distances result in a path trajectory, again irrespective of whether the conceptualized
movement is linear (horizontal, vertical, diagonal), circular, or more abstractly based on the
succession of pressures.
These proposed schematic constraints mirror one of the fundamental postulates of Cognitive
Linguistics – image schemas, pre-conceptual Gestalten providing the basis for structuring
abstract concepts (Hampe, 2005; Johnson, 1987). Of course, linguists typically look for schemas
in verbal utterances. For instance, we can locate force and path in many expressions in
language which have literally nothing to do with force or movement, such as “I have strong
feelings for her” or “Our paths have crossed again”. Yet similar schematic elements can be found
in other domains, e.g. purely visual (Antović, 2010) or mathematical (Lakoff & Núñez, 2000).
Applying them to cognitive musicology is not a novelty, either. Larson (2012) has provided a
detailed theory of cognitive forces in music, while the notion of path and other spatial topologies
have been ubiquitous, and discussed in relation to image schematicity since the work of Saslaw
(1996), Brower (2000), Zbikowski (2002), and Johnson and Larson (2003). What can be considered
new in the present approach is (1) the attempt to introduce image-schematic constraints
as a common ground beneath a number of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural possibilities
for describing the same musical concepts, and (2) the methodological decision to base such an
analysis on actual utterances obtained from actual participants in behavioral experiments.
How the proposed system works in practice will be explained in the next section, which analyzes
the most common linguistic descriptions of three musical stimuli from previous work with
children and adults, as follows: (1) an isolated five-tone staccato and legato sequence played
side by side as musical opposites (Antović, 2009); (2) the staccato fragment from Grieg’s In the
Hall of the Mountain King described by naive nonmusician students as part of a semantic experiment;
and (3) the violin trill excerpt from Vivaldi’s spring movement from The Four Seasons
verbally portrayed in the same experiment (Antović et al., 2016). The goal will be to affirm
blending as the theory of choice for explaining the musical conceptualization process.
Three analyses
The previous section introduced image schemas as the theoretical construct constraining the
range of musical conceptualization. Yet, image schemas in themselves are not sufficient. For
instance, even if the description of scales is based on a path topology, actual participants in
experiments do not just talk about “traversed paths”. Typically they provide richer imagery,
often personified/anthropomorphic (Watt & Ash, 1998). Hence for one to describe an upward
major scale, for example, as “running in a circle” or “moving upstairs”, one needs at least to (a)
make an intramusical concept in input space 1 (create a unified mental whole, or a Gestalt, out of
the eight successive pitches) and (b) evoke from long-term memory an extramusical concept in
input space 2 that contains elements which could appropriately map onto the intramusical
concept. This may be an image of a little square revolving in a circle, of a person walking
upstairs, of a physical object becoming lighter, etc. At this point the mapping starts. The major
earlier approach in Cognitive Linguistics, known as Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980) typically stops at this point and just assumes a series of connections between
musical and extramusical domains. The “vertical movement” metaphor could map the music
onto a series of stairs on a staircase, with the particular organization of the eight steps in the
stairway standing for the musical key, and the movement of a person along the stairs giving us
the succession of pitches, i.e. the sense of musical movement. In the “circular” situation there
62	 Musicae Scientiae 22(1)
would be no staircase, but rather a round space for the person to traverse; similarly, in a “teleological”
metaphor the person would go from a more abstract “beginning” to an “end”, while
in the “horizontal” metaphor there would be a flat surface along which one would walk “forward
and backward” (cf. some mappings in Johnson & Larson, 2003; Antović, 2009).
But this analysis is not explanatory enough, for two reasons. First, it assumes an “intuitive”
connection between the music and the experiential domain, instead of providing an explanation
for the why and whence of such a connection. It does not show what it is that holds the
system together, motivating the mappings in the first place. It also leaves open how the musical
movement came about. While it is true that the musical input space may itself be viewed as a
conceptualization, a mental construct rather than the physical succession of pitches, the sound
stimulus motivating this intramusical concept still did not “move” anywhere: all eight tones
were played from the same, static headphones. On the other hand, the extramusical, conceptualized
“agent” in input 2 indeed changed his or her position, perhaps going upward along eight
stairs. So the question is how the static tones and the dynamic experiential movement could
saliently map onto one another in the ultimate concept/mental representation, in which the
music itself seems to be moving.
Therefore just two mental spaces/conceptual domains are not enough for successful mapping
in this case. To allocate the factors constraining the possibilities in the final concept, such
as the postulated schemas of force, discrete distance, and path, a third space is required. Its purpose
would be to preclude the “apples and bananas”, i.e. to “tell” the input spaces what, in
principle, is possible, and what is not. On the other hand, to explain how the musical movement
suddenly appeared, one needs to introduce the notion of emergence. In other words, the musical
percept alone did not move anywhere. The movement was the conceptual result of the mapping
operation and it emerged in the fourth, blended space.
The allocation of image schemas to one of the mental spaces in the blending network, and
more generally the role of the generic space, are controversial issues in Conceptual Blending
Theory (for criticism, see L. Brandt & P. A. Brandt, 2005; P. A. Brandt, 2008; Coulson & Oakley,
2005). In terms of musical concept construction, the position advocated here is in line with
Hedblom, Kutz, and Neuhaus (2015) who claim that constraints on meaning generation must
be image-schematic and in principle localizable in the generic space (they sometimes call it the
base ontology). They also rightly note that image schemas motivating concepts typically come
together in ordered sets, image-schema families (Hedblom, Kutz, & Neuhaus, 2016, partly following
Mandler & Pagán Cánovas, 2014). What is added in the present proposal, however, is that
image schemas alone are not always enough as the motivating force. While for more basic
cases, such as the definition of “clean” music-theoretic concepts, they may be sufficient, more
elaborate musical descriptions will require additional contextual grounding. This is exactly
where the schematic invariants and the experiential factors meet, allowing for a good methodological
opportunity to account for both more universal and more cultural aspects of concept
formation in a single theory.
The first set of typical participant responses that is analyzed here is quite schematic. It comes
from two previous studies with young participants, looking into image schemas underlying
elementary musical concepts, such as pitch distances, successive movement in scales, or tempo
variations (Antović, 2009; Antović et al., 2013). This research program found that children
had given predominantly metaphorical descriptions of music, with some cross-linguistic and
cross-cultural differences, yet with a possibility to infer more abstract, higher-order invariants
beneath the responses. The particular example of interest here relates to the conceptualization
of a five-tone sequence played on a computer sample simulating a violin timbre. The first
sequence was played staccato, and the second legato, and then the participants (nonmusician
Antović	 63
and musician Serbian, Roma, and US sighted and blind 10-year-olds) were asked to describe in
brief terms “what the first (x) and what the second part (y) were like”. One conceptual class
stood out as the mode, and was statistically significantly much more common than the remaining
ones. More particularly, in 53.4% of the cases, the children talked about some form of interrupted
and uninterrupted (human) movement to describe the sequences.The remaining classes
were much less frequent, describing these pitch relations as qualities – 14.4%, unrelated extramusical
descriptions – 6.7%, or sizes – 5.6%.The three most common individual conceptualizations
were movement which was “interrupted and continued”, “abrupt and linked”, and
“hopping and walking”. These also employ the metaphor of musical movement, arguably
grounded in the same schemas responsible for motion in the scales example: (force/
magnitude)/path (Antović, 2014). However, yet another invariant seems to be present here: the
link schema, where individual elements of music that move (such as tones) are either “disconnected”
(interrupted, abrupt, and hopping) or “connected” (continued, linked, or walking) to
one another. The schema is also noticeable in conventional musical notation, as staccato is
usually presented with dots (punctuation) and legato with a solid curve (slur) above or below
the notes. Thus, the underlying generic set of schemas for this type of musical motion could
look as follows: [(force/magnitude)/path] + {link}, where the optional schema of link serves to
modify (articulate) the musical movement. Along with the methodology introduced above, I
propose to allocate these schematic constraints to the generic space. The musical concepts (the
conceptualized five-tone staccato sequence – “x” and legato sequence – “y”) will comprise the
intramusical input space 1, and the three extramusical descriptions involving different types of
movement would belong to the input space 2 (for simplicity of presentation, they are given
below in a single blending network).The emergent property in the blend is again that of musical
movement, which is now articulated in two ways – with the constituent elements either less or
more interlinked (see Figure 1).
Out of the three verbalizations, “interrupted and continued movement”, just like “abrupt
and linked movement” seem strongly schematically motivated: force, distance and path schemas
engender the notion of musical motion, while the antonymic adjectives used by the participants
are almost synonymous with the presence or absence of links.The sense of moving music
emerges, in which the motion is articulated in two dichotomous ways. However, the third
description, “hopping and walking” does not exclusively reflect the generic image-schematic
constraints, but rather invokes a richer image, that of animate, likely human movement. It is in
such descriptions that experiential factors – individual, linguistic, cultural – become an important
part of concept construction, resulting in remarkable conceptual creativity. To illustrate
this, the third most common individual description of staccato and legato given by our participants
was indeed “hopping and walking”, but other enriched conceptual images they produced,
reflecting the same underlying relation, included “hops and walks”, “hopping and treading”,
“hopping and strolling”, “running away and rushing”, and “sneaking and expectation”.
Clearly, these resulting, blended concepts were no longer only defined by image schemas. While
still based on the same set of four schematic constraints, they now incorporated additional
experiential knowledge.
Such a tendency is much more conspicuous when actual examples from the musical literature
are used as experimental inputs. With this in mind, a recent study (Antović et al., 2016)
tested the interpretation of one of the most remarkable staccatos of the common practice
period – the beginning of Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King. Two hundred and one nonmusician
students, unfamiliar with Grieg’s musical program, were asked to provide a one-sentence
description of the musical motive they had heard. Upon coding and calculating inter-rater
agreement, it turned out there were 76.3% responses classifiable as based on image-schematic
64	 Musicae Scientiae 22(1)
notions, 64.1% of which involved some form of human or animal movement, typically sneaking,
stalking, walking, approaching in a concealed manner, a quest for someone, a person moving
sluggishly, very comic treading of an animal, etc. Three most common conceptualizations
were “heavy steps”, “sneaking”, and “stalking someone”. Again, the descriptions most likely
focused on the staccato in the string section, and involved schemas underlying musical
Figure 1.  Generic legato/staccato conceptualization.
Antović	 65
movement (discrete distance, path and force, this last one most notably in the invocation of
“heavy” steps). Appropriately, just like in example 1 above, such a schematic movement was
further articulated by the link schema: the participants’ lexical choices typically stressed the
separated, interrupted nature of leg movements, focusing on individual steps, sneaking and
stalking but not just on unmarked motion, for instance, walking or moving around.Yet, in this
set of responses one notices that in the final concept the image-schematic basis becomes less
directly employed. Rather, quite a bit of additional contextual information is added to the ultimate
description. Hence participants often named animal species conducting the sneaking
movement or stalking their pray, described scenes in which thieves were slowly approaching a
house with an intent of breaking in, pointed at the arrival of an important, mysterious character,
etc. Therefore, at this point the image schemas in the generic space provided just the skeleton
for the final conceptual construct, yet much richer experiential knowledge was added to the
final description of the music.
If one wishes to incorporate these added elements in the consideration of musical concepts,
not even the four-space blending system is sufficient. The four interconnected image schemas
in the generic space may indeed constrain the possibilities for the description of the staccato.
The intramusical input space straightforwardly interprets the entire 13-note theme as a single
Gestalt, and the extramusical space provides a rich narrative based on the image schemas in the
generic space, chosen by the participant from an almost unlimited pool of experiential options.
This last tendency convincingly supports frequent claims in the literature that the range of
musical semantics is potentially unlimited (Swain, 1996, p. 140), where the linguistic descriptions
of music do not “constitute musical meaning; they open toward it” (Kramer, 2011, p. 15,
emphasis in original). The emergent property of the music in the blend is again articulated
movement, with steps clearly separated from one another. Yet, where do so many rich final
images come from? The answer must be that they are contextually based, coming from the participant’s
individual experience and cultural circumstances. This is why two prominent blending
theorists, Coulson and Oakley, have proposed to add to the blending system the notion of
the grounding box. This is not a mental space, but rather a set of contextual “assumptions that
need not be explicitly represented by speakers, though they influence the way that meaning
construction proceeds” (Coulson & Oakley 2005, p. 1517). The idea behind the concept of the
grounding box is that in real-time meaning construction, conceptualization does not stem from
the understanding of schematic or metaphorical relations alone, and not even only from blending
the elements of appropriate mental spaces. Rather, to account for the complexity of the
meaning generation process, a theorist should take into account the multitude of operations
working in so-called “background cognition”, such as the interlocutors’ immediate contextual
experience, overall cultural milieu, personal background, or values (in relation to music, the
grounding box is analyzed in detail in Antović, 2016).
In terms of the experiment in focus here, the participants were just given the musical pieces
to describe, without any additional context provided. They had little to start from, but the
image-schematic constraints. While many have obviously adhered to these, the rest of the
interpretation they needed to construct themselves, which is why they created their own contextual
frames. A possible blending analysis of such responses would therefore need to introduce
the grounding box to the system, to account for the contextual elements that interviewees
in the experiment added to the interpretation; for example, participants, settings, and circumstances
(see Figure 2).
An even more revealing set of descriptions was given with regard to example 3 – a 28-second
section of violin trills from Vivaldi’s Spring, commonly interpreted in music criticism as an onomatopoeia
for the chirping of birds. The same study with 201 student participants unfamiliar
66	 Musicae Scientiae 22(1)
with the musical program (Antović et al., 2016) revealed a striking result in which onomatopoeic
responses were by far outnumbered by image-schematic ones. Presented in numbers,
there were 134 image-schematic descriptions of the segment (72.43%), as opposed to 22
Figure 2.  Conceptualization of the staccato in Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King.
Antović	 67
onomatopoeic verbalizations (11.89%). Out of the latter, only 11 had to do with birds and their
chirp – the rest were unrelated (“metallic sound”, “chalk screeching”, “people chattering”,
“glass shattering”, “a bee buzzing”, etc.). In terms of those responses that contained references
to birds, it turned out again that onomatopoeias (11, e.g. “twitter”) were outnumbered by
image-schematic notions of movement (e.g. 17 descriptions of the “flutter of wings”). This
result in itself warns against the insistence on onomatopoeia in musical meaning construction
and justifies an approach that would favor cognitive processes less direct than mere imitation.
Three typical individual verbalizations here involved the “swarm of bees”, “flutter of wings”,
and “flight path of mosquitoes”, extramusical images allocated to input space 2 in Figure 3.
The intramusical input space 1 consisted of the violin trills, i.e. of musical ornaments comprising
quickly alternating lower and higher tones, separated by a half or full step. In Figure 3
below, only four tones from a single trill are captured, and the notion of repetition is added to
designate that the same pattern repeats through several measures (14, 17–18, 23–26), providing
the Gestalt for the intramusical concept in space 1.The generic space would need to contain
the schemas shared by the musical concept and the three extramusical descriptions. It seems
that the phenomenon of musical movement can be observed again here (based on force, discrete
distance, path), the specific articulation of this movement through the quick succession of short
tones (not a staccato anymore, but likely also based on the link schema), and, in a new development
in this example, the additional rapid change of the direction of this movement (of either
the whole group of animals, as in swarming, or of the animal’s individual wings, as in flutter
and flight). This last underlying parameter could be based on what some authors in music cognition
have called an oscillation schema (Echard, 1999; Malawey, 2010). The emergent property
in the blended space is again musical motion, yet articulated in a series of successive
movements in opposite directions. For this reason, the participant can now interpret the music
as “swarming”, “fluttering”, or creating a “flight path”. Again, the participants had to construct
the experiential assumptions themselves in order to finalize the three richer images (and
potentially many others). In Figure 3, these are allocated to the grounding box.
It seems, therefore, that constructs regularly employed by blending theorists, such as mental
spaces, conceptual mapping, emergent structure, image-schema families, and grounding boxes
can serve as good tools for postulating hypotheses on the reasons behind some typical descriptions
of programmatic musical excerpts.
Conclusions
The goal of this article was to propose that the four-space model of the Conceptual Blending
Theory could be successfully used in interpreting data from music conceptualization studies.
The approach can be advantageous as it has sufficient theoretical tools to account for both
questions of how new musical concepts emerge and how seemingly different concepts may
derive from a similar set of constraints. The generic space contains the constraints, viewed as
families of image schemas. Input space 1 incorporates the musical percept as a Gestalt, i.e. an
instance of elementary conceptualization. Input space 2 hosts the referential description which
the respondent draws from his or her personal, linguistic, or cultural circumstances. In the
blend, we see how a novel conceptual property emerges from the system. Finally, semantically
richer descriptions obtained in experiments require more contextual information, for which the
notion of the grounding box may be useful in further work.
In essence, this proposal may be useful in that it (1) allows a lot of room for cross-cultural,
cross-linguistic, and individual diversity in creating musical concepts, but also (2) provides the
tools to capture the motivation behind the construction of such seemingly diversified responses.
68	 Musicae Scientiae 22(1)
As such, the approach might help deconstruct the sometimes too rigid epistemological distinctions
in (musical) concept formation, such as the cleft between intramusical and extramusical
meaning, or the disputes between universalism and relativism.
Figure 3.  Conceptualization of the violin trills in Vivaldi’s Spring.
Antović	 69
Further work should involve both theoretical and empirical efforts. Theoretically, the notion
of the grounding box should be developed further, possibly no longer as a single construct, but
as a multi-layered, hierarchical system incorporating biological, linguistic, and social contextual
factors. Antović (2016) and Athanasopoulos and Antović (this issue) have now taken the
first steps in this direction. Also, the approach proposed here would be more valuable if corroborated
experimentally, and not used just as a means for post-hoc analysis. In this regard,
Antović et al. (2017) have now obtained pilot results in which nonmusician participants seem
to prefer various cross-culturally conditioned representations of pitch movement in a scale
based on underlying postulated schemas, rather than the final form of the stimulus. More specifically,
participants seem to strongly prefer a visual presentation of a musical scale in which
both discrete movement and unidirectional path underlie the animation, irrespective of
whether that animation reflects the concept in their mother tongue (a square going upward) or
not (a square thinning in width or shrinking in all directions). So, the presence of strictly
ordered image schemas in families seems more important to participants than their experiential,
cultural knowledge of what the concept is normally “called” in their native language.
Another possible option for future work is to experiment on musical elements conceptualized
in isolation, as opposed to those appearing in context. This might be a good way to study
why, in the West at least, two adjacent tones are “close” to one another in a single-part melody,
but indeed very “distant” in chords in a modulation, as of course keys are metaphorically
“close” in terms of the number of pitches they have in common and not the proximity in frequency.
Cross-cultural differences should also always be carefully taken into account. For but
one example, the force schema, discussed in the present work, may not have the same contextual
implications in all communities. Reportedly, BaYaka Pygmies sing louder when putting
their babies to sleep (Lewis, 2013), which may sound counterintuitive to Western listeners.
In effect, many interesting questions on conceptualizing music remain open. Hopefully, this
article has suggested that an approach based on conceptual blending may be useful in such
future endeavors.
Funding
This research was supported by the Serbian Ministry of Science (project number 179013).
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