MUSICAL PITCH SPACE ACROSS MODALITIES: SPATIAL AND OTHER MAPPINGS THROUGH LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Western societies strongly associate musical register (pitchheight) with verticality in physical space, so that “low” notes are represented spatially as nearer the ground and “higher” notes further away. This concept is so strongly instantiated in Western cultures as to seem natural, innate, or inevitable. However, cross-cultural investigation challenges this notion. A survey of pitch representations from music cultures around the world, as seen in the morphology of musical instruments, pitch naming systems, and musicians’ gestures, makes this connection between pitch and verticality problematic. Evidence is produced from three primary sources: the mapping of pitch space onto the geometries of musical instruments, different cultures’ name systems for pitch space, and musicians’ physical, manual gestures when referring to musical space. In each of these, conceptions different from the Western mapping from pitch to verticality is shown. This issue is related to work dealing more broadly with the influence of language and culture on mappings of concepts onto physical space.