Music as a Person

Spring 2010
Jen Pider

This paper explores the metaphor of music as a person

“The problem with this version is that it’s been dumbed-down,” he said, after watching Across the Universe a movie comprised of Beatles’ song remakes, “The songs lack balls.” The reference creates a vision of a eunuch singing in high tones, but it also carries impressions of being sterile and unfruitful. This example of a metaphor enables an understanding of music in terms of the experience of being a castrated male. In this illustration, the ontological metaphor is one of personification: music is a person. By examining this metaphor, we gain a deeper understanding of the way society perceives music. Though personifying music allows for a collective agreement of the experience of listening to music, it also highlights the aspects of music that can be personified while hiding the characteristics that don’t fit with the metaphor.

In order to gain a deeper understanding of the way society personifies music consider these examples found in Fran Lebowitz’s book The Sound of Music: Enough Already:

There was a time when music knew its place. No longer. Possibly this is not music's fault. It may be that music fell in with a bad crowd and lost its sense of common decency. I am willing to consider this. I am willing even to try and help. I would like to do my bit to set music straight in order that it might shape up and leave the mainstream of society. The first thing that music must understand is that there are two kinds of music--good music and bad music. Good music is music that I want to hear. Bad music is music that I don't want to hear. ("The Sound of Music: Enough Already," Metropolitan Life, E.P. Dutton, 1978)

Lebowitz gives music human qualities by using these terms: music knew, music’s fault, music fell, set music straight, shape up and leave, music must understand and music can be good or bad. These examples identify methods of understanding music as a person who makes decisions and should be held accountable for them. Viewing music in this way enables us to reference the person of music and the decisions this person has made. As Lakoff and Johnson state in Metaphors We Live By, once we identify our experiences as entities, we can refer to them, categorize them, group them and quantify them and by this means, reason about them. This statement helps us to grasp the advantage of using a metaphor to communicate a certain meaning.

Still, if music is a person, then music can do all the things a person can do. Music can think, move, speak, eat, sleep and procreate. There are many examples of music indicated in this way, such as: that song spoke to or touched me, the birth of a song, music eats away at me, music made me do it, it was a sleepy tune… et cetera. Embodying music not only shapes society’s understanding of music, but the experience of listening to a song. Though a song isn’t a tangible object which can be held, but instead, is something experienced through listening and understood by translating the experience in terms of the individual’s emotional response, through the lens of other experiences. Therefore, personifying an individual’s encounter with a selection of music enables that individual to communicate the experience in term which others will understand. Thus, speaking in metaphorical terms facilitates a collective understanding of an experience.

However, music isn’t a person. Though it’s difficult to describe the way we experience music without creating an ontological metaphor of sorts, we also must admit that discrepancies exist in the comparison. In actuality, music is an art form whose medium is sound. This art form is not a person; it is created by a person. A musical composition is created and can be captured in the form of memorization, recording or written notation. Music as an art form is a deliberate arrangement of sounds which affect the senses and/or emotions of those who experience it. The creator of the arrangement uses it as an expression. Therefore, a song has an intended representation determined by the creator.

Even so, society accepts the personification of music as though the composition is alive, that it is growing and changing, that it interacts with those who hear it and causes them to respond to it. This is an example of how a metaphor, understanding one thing in terms of another, highlights the aspects of the comparison that are true while hiding those that are not. In identifying music as an entity with its own consciousness, the value of the creator and the creator’s intended expression of the art form is lost.

Though collectively humanity may not realize the effect of accepting the personification of music, diminishing the role of the creator is a devilish exploit. The idea that music is its own entity affords society to relate to each composition as a friend or foe. A song might be understood to draw emotion out of a person as they connect in the listening experience. Bonding emotionally with a song, the listener begins to take ownership of it. Terms like ‘our song’ or ‘this is my jam’ creep into our speech. In these instances, the point to note is not entirely the hidden creator, but the demonstration of how a culture interacts in relationships.

By examining personifying metaphors for music, greater insight is gained about how people relate to one another. Because emotional bonds can only be experience between two living entities, the terms used to describe emotional reactions to music are telling of the possibilities between individuals. Contemplating these metaphors and the possibilities they expose, leads to a theory that people might feel a sense of ownership over those with whom they have emotionally bonded. This introduces the concept of objectification of humans.

A simpler way of looking at how metaphor leads to humanity’s objectification: if music is a person and music is an object, then a person is an object. (Though the ontological metaphor of music as an object is not the main thesis of this paper, a few examples of this are music is a building and music is rhetoric.) Considering the progression of logic above, with metaphors of music conspiring to objectify humans, the weight of one’s words is identified. Seemingly harmless ways of using word pictures to draw parallels between experiences could have lasting effects on the way humans treat each other.

In conclusion, the personification of music is an ontological metaphor which society accepts as a means to describe the way musical composition is experienced. By establishing music as a person, a greater depth of understanding can be achieved. However, society is affected by the personification of music as this metaphor shapes the way we interact with music and with each other. Understanding a song in terms of having its own identity ignores the fact that the composition was created by an individual with a specific expression in mind. Moreover, understanding music in terms of ontological metaphors shapes the way culture interacts in relationships even so much as to change the value of a person to be equal to that of an object.