ABSTRACT
Some music, contrapuntal music, combines simultaneous “lines” or “voices” that can be heard as simultaneous melodies. Compared to hearing a chord or hearing a meter or recognizing a motive, hearing sound as melody entails building a mental image of a relatively long fragment of music and one which approaches eidetic qualities of vividness and detail. Music appears to move and to move with continuity even where music’s sound changes in discrete steps. Posture and movement may draw on many channels of communication with the visual predominating. Music shares the body’s capacity for expression by capturing the body’s temporal energy shapes or “envelopes.” Manfred Clynes’s theory of essentic forms provides a way of understanding gesture in musical representation. Clynes studies finger pressure envelopes as indices of particular emotions and speculates that performed music incorporates identical patterns.
