Do we think about music in terms of space? Metaphoric representation of musical pitch.

We often talk about musical pitch using spatial language. In English, pitches can be high or low, melody lines can rise or fall, and we can sing at the top or the bottom of our range. Are spatial metaphors for pitch merely linguistic conventions, or is it possible that patterns in language reveal something fundamental about the way we mentally represent pitch? There are several reasons to suspect that pitch and space are importantly related in the brain and mind. Auditory nuclei are organized tonotopically: changes in pitch correspond to analogous changes in the localization of activity on a neural map (Schreiner & Langer, 1997). PET data show that the same regions in right prefrontal cortex are engaged during attention to sounds that vary in musical pitch or spatial location (Zatorre, Mondor & Evans, 1999). Right hemisphere damage that compromises visuospatial memory also impairs the learning of new melodies (Samson & Zatorre, 1991). Linguistic metaphors suggest that the relationship between pitch and space may be highly specific. We tend to borrow unidimensional, vertical spatial terms to describe pitch (e.g., up, down). Do we think about pitch in terms of vertical space? A nonlinguistic psychophysical paradigm, used previously to explore the spatialization of temporal representations (Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2002), was adapted to investigate the spatialization of pitch.