Shape, drawing and gesture

This chapter provides a critical overview of how people map sound features and musical excerpts onto the visual, visuo-spatial and kinaesthetic domains. Starting with a brief discussion of why cross-modal correspondences may exist in the first place, the chapter illuminates the rationale of traditional paradigms in experimental psychology before highlighting the revelatory potential of cross-modal drawing and gesture studies, both with children and adults. The influence of personal factors such as musical training as well as experimental factors pertaining to the type of stimulus, setting, instruction and task are highlighted and considerations for future experiments within the embodied cognition research programme are provided. It is concluded that studying systematically the perceived shapes of sound and music by means of drawings and gestures is an overdue step towards understanding linear and spatial aspects of human musical experience.