Introduction

1Gesture has been demonstrated to be a powerful means for communication in instructional contexts (De Nooijer et al. 2013, 2014; Cook & Fenn 2017). A plausible explanation for the beneficial effect of gesture on learning lies in both the ability of the gestural mode to guide the locus of (visual) attention and its ability to synchronize with speech (Wakefield et al. 2018). In combination with speech, gesture adds a representational format that stimulates abstraction and generalization because it highlights certain components of an action while leaving out other context-bound details (Goldin-Meadow 2015). With respect to schematic learning, however, it is necessary to also verify such hypotheses in contexts that allow for a maximum of ecological validity. Moreover, the ability of gesture to align with other forms of embodied action is understudied (see, however, Ladewig & Müller 2013 in dance lessons). In singing classes, gestures are paired with singing performances and herein lies a great opportunity to investigate how they communicate more conceptual meanings in concert with bodily action.

2Singing teachers regard gesture as a helpful tool for making musical concepts more tangible (Nafisi 2013). It has also been demonstrated that the imitation of musical gestures boosts the development of musicality and the coupling of perception and action in children (Filippa et al. 2020). More pedagogically oriented works recommend the conscious use of gesture for both teachers and students to represent a particular sensation, enhance active engagement or facilitate assessment amongst other instructionally defined purposes (Wis 1999; Kayes 2004). To illustrate this point, such recommendations include ‘pointing upwards while singing a descending line’ so as ‘to assist intonation and prevent a dead tone’ (Wis 1999: 28) and, while singing an ascending line, ‘invite the singers to raise their arms in a relaxed fashion and slowly press down, palms towards the floor, and to pair this very different gesture with the vocal line’ (ib.: 31).

3Liao and Davidson (2007) relied on these suggestions to design a ‘follow game’ experiment which required children (native speakers of English) to reproduce a melody and copy the researcher’s hand gesture. Afterwards, the children had to invent a melody and a corresponding gesture themselves, which was imitated by the researcher in turn. In line with Wis (1999), descending melodies were consequently accompanied with upward pointing gestures by the researcher. However, some children came up with a descending melody, moving their hands from top to bottom. This demonstrates that these children were biased by a conventional vertical conception of pitch, as apparent on the lexical level in English with instances such as ‘high and ‘low’ tones or ‘descending’ melodies. Moreover, they were able to activate that conception together with complex body action, involving both singing and gesturing. This paper explores how such co-performance gestures are actually used by singing teachers to represent a particular embodied conception of pitch contours as a strategy to improve the student’s singing skills.

Communicating embodied knowledge about musical pitch

Pitch as conceptual verticality

4Languages around the world use a variety of metaphors to lexicalize the concept of musical pitch. In Bantu languages, for example, pitch is being referred to in terms of gender and age (e.g. ‘old’ and ‘young’ tones) whereas in Farsi, pitch qualifications are recruited from the domain of categorical material aspects as in ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ tones (Shayan et al. 2011). Other languages, like African Manza (Ashley 2004), make use of expressions for kinship relations to distinguish different tones, etc. Probably the most prominent source domain feeding into metaphorical expressions for pitch is spatial height (or verticality), which provides the conventional pitch reference documented in all Western languages, including English, and instantiated in expressions like ‘high’ and ‘low’ tones or ‘rising/ascending’ and ‘falling/descending’ melodies.

5This lexical variation across languages has been argued to reflect a conceptual variation (Dolscheid et al. 2014 ; Casasanto 2017), that is, the different linguistic expressions used to talk about musical pitch reveal the different ways people think about it. We adopt a cognitive linguistic perspective on musical meaning (Cox 2016 ; Zbikowski 2017 ; Spitzer 2018 ; Antovic 2019) and we refer to the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT, Lakoff & Johnson 1980 ; Lakoff 1987 ; Kövecses 2015 ; Gibbs 2015 ; Kok & Cienki 2016) to describe this phenomenon. In CMT, metaphors are regarded as systematic cognitive mappings between two distinct conceptual domains, one of which, the so-called target, qualifies as a complex, not necessarily abstract domain. On the basis of an analogy, the (conceptualized) ontology and inner logic of the target domain is represented in terms of expressions representing the inner logic of another, experientially well-accessible domain, which is the so-called source domain. Metaphoric mappings like these structure our experience as much as they structure the way in which we communicate about our experiences through the use of verbal metaphors. In the process of meaning-making, the experiential physical basis of a metaphor can be activated, a phenomenon referred to as ‘embodied simulation’ (Barsalou 1999 ; Hostetter & Alibali 2019 ; Casasanto & Gijssels 2015 ; Cuccio & Fontana 2017). If we can show how metaphorical meaning is motivated on this embodied level, we can speak of an embodied metaphor. In order to do that, we need to investigate how spatial height is related to sound in our experience.

Grounding conceptual verticality in the body

6To corroborate experiential correlations between the domains of spatial height and audible pitch, mainly two methods have hitherto been followed. A first line of research assumes that the vertical pitch mapping is grounded in the upright position of the human body, which is used as an instrument to produce tones (Zbikowsky 2002 ; Shayan et al. 2011). That is, different ranges of pitch resonate in different anatomical parts of the body, which are ordered in a vertical way. This idea has been further developed by Cox (2016), who identified bodily experiences with pitch that involve either literal or metaphorical height. Literal correlations between pitch and height are to be found in, for instance, the sensory difference between head and chest voice, our capacity to hear the position from where a sound is emitted and staff notation. Concerning metaphorical height, on the other hand, the conceptual metaphor GREATER IS HIGHER is identified as the underlying organizing cognitive structure for conventionalized patterns of verticality as apparent in frequency notations (Hz) or in the vertical design of the volume button on many audio systems. As such, this metaphor is related to MORE IS UP (Lakoff & Johnson 1980 : 15 ; Kövecses 2015 : 5), which concerns the physical experience that the more entities one adds to a pile, the higher its level goes up. However, the alternative formulation GREATER IS HIGHER suits our purpose better because the experiential basis involved does not pertain to substances or entities being added onto each other and thus piling up in space. The relevant bodily experiential basis, rather, can be formulated as ‘a greater effort, or muscle exertion is needed to produce a high-pitched sound’. Hence, the higher tone is experienced as the stronger one. In the case of ‘more’, it would not be clear which quality is perceived more. In the case of propagation, by way of illustration, lower tones cause more vibration on a surface, which is perceived as more granular. By contrast, higher tones ‘grow smoother’ (wachsende Tonglätte, Stumpf 1883 : 203) or less granular. They are experienced as being under a greater tension, allowing less free movement, very much like a string being tied up more strongly.

7Second, the association of height with pitch is empirically validated by a substantial degree of psychological evidence. In his review of experiments carried out on cross-modal correspondences, Spence (2011) concludes that high-pitched sounds are associated with sharp-edged, bright and highly placed objects. In a follow-up experiment, high pitch was associated with small size, but ascending pitch was associated with growing size, thus demonstrating that dynamic, evolving pitch conceptually differs from stable tones (Eitan et al. 2013). In a similar way, Jeschonek et al. (2013) have observed that pre-linguistic infants associate rising pitch with increasing height rather than static high pitch with a high location in space. Moreover, the congruity of the correspondences does not only result from a polarity effect (Evans & Treisman 2010 ; Dolscheid & Casasanto 2015), which suggests that activating the appropriate spatial schema is essential ; antonyms like ‘tall-short’ or ‘front-back’ apparently do not have an effect on the mapping. This finding is consistent with Antovic et al. (2020), who have demonstrated that the conceptualization of pitch sequencing is informed by discrete distances, that is stepwise movement in accordance with pitch intervals, and scalar change, even if the directionality is reversed. Notably, pitch is not the only audible quality that is conceptualized in terms of HEIGHT. Loudness relations, for instance, are categorized according to the GREATER IS HIGHER metaphor as well and spatial height is associated with both high pitched and loud tones (Eitan 2013 : 173-176).

Activating bodily experience for communication

8People move their bodies when producing or perceiving music (Leman & Maes 2014 ; Küssner et al. 2014 ; Sambre & Feyaerts 2017). Jensenius (2017) asked participants to stand absolutely still in both a quiet condition and when music was played. As a complete stand still seemed to be impossible, a constant micro-motion of ca. 6.5 mm per second was measured. Interestingly, in the condition with music being played, the participants moved significantly more. More strikingly, Baptist (2014) has reported that participants make congruent vertical head movements when reproducing rising and falling melodies. Body movements in response to music are to be regarded as physical manifestations of embodied simulations (Margetis & Bergen 2014 ; Hostetter & Alibali 2019) in that the metaphorical source domain is accessed and made relevant through motor action.

9In singing classes, this analogical bodily behavior is found to be interfering with good practices of singing as it sometimes decreases tone quality. More specifically, singers are often confronted with the problem of the head moving up or stretching out when attempting to sing a rising melody (Van Ingelgem 2002, Kayes 2004). Accordingly, a major challenge for singing teachers lies in improving sound quality through adjusting the student’s bodily behavior, for instance with physical exercises (Lloyd 1986). Teachers have also been shown to be creative in disrupting the undesired behavior both by introducing new metaphors such as mapping melodies onto forwardly directed vectors or onto substances with particular qualitative properties (such as weight, texture and color, Thurman & Welch 2000) and, second, by creatively exploiting the HEIGHT metaphor itself. Examples (1) and (2), both taken from the corpus by Van Ingelgem (2002), represent such creative elaborations on the verbal level that associate vocal sound with verticality, but fleshing it out with imagery evoking sensorial experience with vertical relations and force.

(1)	Your voice is a little ball on a water fountain : on top it is light, but you have to keep the pressure up from below.
(2)	If you make that jump downwards, don’t go as far as the basement, stay on the first floor and keep the door to the basement and the attic open.

10We analyze verbal elaborations of this type according to the approach developed by Müller and Tag (2010), who propose a dynamic view on metaphor and argue that the metaphoricity of a linguistic element can be activated to different degrees in discourse by different foregrounding techniques. In their account, the interactional focus of attention functions as a measure for cognitive activation. Kolter et al. (2012) distinguish between three dynamic categories of metaphoricity. A monomodal metaphor without any elaboration passes almost unnoticed and potentially activates metaphoricity only to a very low degree (it is sleeping). Second, a multimodal expression results in a waking metaphor, but the metaphorical meaning remains implicit. The most extreme case is a multimodal metaphor accompanied by explicit meta-communication, as a result of which the degree of activation is at its highest point. If the experiential basis of a metaphor is activated, it becomes available for reinterpretation and contextual development.

11Although gesture can be argued to provide a better window onto the felt experience of metaphorical meaning than words do, this dynamic view on metaphor does not imply a hierarchy in the potential of these two semiotic modes to activate sensorimotor memory. It is rather the amount of effort, either as temporal overlap of two semiotic modes or as extensive elaboration in one of the two, which activates the metaphor. To build on this idea of overlap, we investigate the overlap of bodily action (singing) and representational action (gesture). Hence, we formulate our first hypothesis :

12H1 : Singing teachers accompany their student’s or their own performances with gestures that represent a non-conventional metaphorical mapping to improve singing skills. These co-performance gestures activate embodied analogy-making by temporally aligning a more conceptual action with the action of singing.

13Singing teachers also demonstrate physical exercises to improve their students’ singing skills. Although the students imitate these exercises while singing, the goal is to be able to sing better without the exercise. Hence, the students need to make an analogy between bodily experience and voice control and retain that mapping. This could lead to a metaphor involving a meaning transfer from a well-accessible source domain (the body as felt during the exercise) to a more complex and highly specific target domain (the body as a musical instrument). However, CMT limits our understanding of such mappings because both the source and target concept originate from the ‘domain’ of the felt body (Ladewig & Müller 2013). Zlatev & Devylder (2020) recently addressed this issue and they argue that the term ‘conceptual domain’ is not adequate because, in their account, a metaphor is a sign (a) with at least two different interpretations that imply a degree of tension, which (b) stand in an iconic relationship to each other. If the extended meaning of a sign is not contextually appropriate, some aspects of it are highlighted and transferred to the more relevant interpretation in the communicative context. Hence, what matters is a tension between two interpretations and not a natural distinction between two domains. As soon as this tension emerges, the degree of metaphoricity depends on the effort that is required for (embodied) analogy-making. In this paper, we use the CMT terminology, but we draw on the notion of ‘tension’ to formulate our second hypothesis :

14H2 : The fact that the contextual focus in singing classes alternates between the ‘literal’ body in physical exercises and the ‘sound-making’ body in singing performances results in a tension between two interpretations of co-performance gestures. Such gestures are reminiscent of a physical experience and they become available as an action scheme that retains relevant components of one action to communicate about another. Therefore, they are metaphorical signs.

Data and methods

15For the current study, we filmed seven lyric singing classes, conducted in Dutch, that took place in the course of one week at the Lemmens Institute and the LUCA School of Arts in Leuven (Belgium). This provided us with ca. five hours of recordings, including four different teachers, two types of course settings (individual and group session) and two educational levels (secondary school and academic master). In all settings, a Sony HDR-CX160 camera was positioned on a tripod so as to film the full body of all participants in one shot and in profile (960x540, 25 fps). Typically, the teacher sat on a chair behind the piano and the student stood right in front of it. However, the teacher very often stood up and walked around in order to perform a demonstration. The researcher was co-present in the room, sitting down on a chair, but co-participation in the interaction was kept to a minimum.

16After data collection, we made a basic transcript of each singing class applying the GAT2 guidelines (Selting et al. 2011) and the ELAN annotation software (Wittenburg et al. 2006). Subsequently, we selected gestures that temporally co-occurred with musical performance and we annotated some formal features upon visual inspection with the sound turned off. In this paper, we adapted the conventions proposed by Mondada (2018) in order to align our annotations of the gestures with the transcription of speech. We take a form-based perspective on gesture (Bressem & Ladewig 2014 ; Müller et al. 2013 ; Novack et al. 2016) and we define a gesture as any articulatory effort of the body that motivates meaning by its spatial and kinetic features. The hands are the body’s most prototypical articulators for gesture, but any body part can be involved in a gesture (e.g., shoulder shrug, head nod). We used the terminology developed by Bressem (2013) to annotate the position of the hand in the gesture space (McNeill 1992) and the movement type, direction and character.

17In singing classes, teachers attempt to ameliorate their students’ singing quality through both verbal-conceptual structures and physical depictions. We side with Clark (2016) in qualifying depiction as a method of communication, which is semiotically different from describing and indicating as it involves people representing a scene by staging a physical analog, which is designed to facilitate the addressee’s imagination : “[d]epictions, I argue, are physical analogs of what they represent. They are visible, audible, tactile, or proprioceptive models of things that one could actually see, hear, touch, or feel” (ib. : 327). It is apparent in ubiquitous everyday-life communicative categories like iconic and facial gestures, direct quotations, full-scale demonstrations or children’s make-believe play, among other phenomena. In our corpus, with a lot of imitations (of suboptimal students’ behavior) and demonstrations (of desired singing behavior) going on, we expect depictions to play a major methodological role in the analysis of these instructional interactions.

18To conclude, we use the notion of ‘learnable’ (Zemel & Koschmann 2014 ; Reed & Szczepek Reed 2014) as a way to methodologically escape the traditional view on knowledge transfer in instructional contexts, where information is transferred from a sender to a receiver. Whereas this communication model mainly focuses on the coding and decoding of a well-delimited message, learnables highlight the online co-construction of shared knowledge as a process. They qualify as “[i]mplicitly or explicitly negotiated matters for correction and improvement” (Reed & Szczepek Reed 2014 : 447). In the context of singing classes, they may include technical aspects such as sound quality, phrasing and dynamics as well as articulatory issues and suggestions about the learner’s artistic expression or interpretation of the musical piece. They emerge as a local phenomenon, initiated by the negotiation between the participants involved in the process of instruction and they are not to be confused with lesson plans or preparations. In her latest developments of the term, Szczepek Reed (2021) has distinguished between body-focused and concept-focused learnables in singing classes. The first type focuses on the body as a musical instrument. As the body is explicitly referred to, the negotiation of the learnable involves touching, manipulating and moving both the instructor’s and the learner’s body parts. On the other hand, conceptual learnables focus on the sound as a result of an embodied activity. As pure descriptions often fall short to describe how a certain sound quality should be like, it is made visible through the body. Hence, the body is offered up for either direct or interpretative engagement in singing classes.

Detailing a non-conventional conceptualization of pitch as height

19The goal of this paper is to investigate how singing teachers avoid pernicious singing behavior related to a vertical conceptualization of pitch by reworking the verticality scheme with physical action and gesture. In this section we present an in-depth analysis of tokens in our corpus that (1) include a learnable related to singing ascending or descending pitch, and (2) which is being worked on by depicting a non-conventional, embodied representation of pitch. First, we will select instances where pitch is being mapped upon inverted vertical space with gestures that temporally align with overlapping musical performance. Second, we will discuss how such ‘co-performance’ gestures are used to schematize bodily action, as apparent in physical exercises, and retain a relevant feeling associated with that action in a more abstract format.

Musical performance and a ‘counteracting’ gesture

20The first token under scrutiny is situated in an individual, secondary school course. As can be read from line 01 in excerpt (1), the teacher (TEA) comments on the student’s (STU) previous performance in a positive (‘very beautiful’) and encouraging (‘once more’) way. In turn, the student repeats the same exercise melody on the word michelangelo (line 02), which has a falling pitch contour at the end, and the teacher synchronically gestures as if sweeping up some substance in the air. The onset of the stroke of this gesture (Figure 2) coincides with the onset of the falling part of the melody (line 02, Figure 1) and the teacher’s flat right hand makes a zigzagging, upward movement in the upper periphery of the gesture space, changing its horizontal direction on each successive note. Because of the perfect temporal alignment of the teacher’s gesture and the student’s performance, we assume that both interlocutors co-participate in producing the melody as musical joint action (Phillips-Silver & Keller 2012). The countermovement of the gesture, as conceptionally opposed to the conventional metaphorical direction of the melody, and the acting mode (sweeping up) of this representation format make it reasonable to coin the term ’counteracting gesture’ to refer to gestures that motivate their meaning by both countermovement and force.

(Thu , 07 :30-07 :47)
(1)	01	TEA	heel mooi | en nog
			very beautiful | and once more again
	02	STU	#((singing performance)) Figure 1#

		TEA	#Figure 1 +hand ; upper ; zigzag ; up ; enlarged+#
	03	TEA	((plays chord on piano))
	04		((singing performance))
	05		ja opletten voor uw eerste mi-hi
			yes take care of your first mi-hi
	06		das mi-hi geen haartje ertussen | e :n
			it’s mi-hi no single hair in between | a :nd

21To flesh out the action scheme of the ‘sweeping’ gesture in excerpt (1), we analyze a similar gesture made anterior to it in the same course. In line 01 of excerpt (2) the teacher (TEA) depicts how a student should sing the michelangelo melody we already encountered in excerpt (1). During this vocal demonstration, she moves her right hand back and forth on the horizontal axis in front of her body as if she were spreading a viscose substance. On each tone interval the movement direction of the gesture is changed. The depiction is then verbally elaborated in lines 02 and 03 with reference to the manual action of spreading a slice of bread. The metaphor evokes a sticky and elastic substance which keeps the imagined knife always closely attached to the imagined bread. With regard to the musical learning process, the student should not leave small pauses between the different notes, a technique which is known as legato in music theory. In terms of the metaphorical source domain of physical substance, the learnable of singing legato is profiled as gluing the notes together, which represents a conceptual mapping of a tactile onto an audible quality. The gesture is reminiscent of the physical experience of spreading and as such it activates the metaphor, which is then resumed as a tool for working on sound quality in the course of this singing class as evidenced by excerpt (1).

(Thu, 05 :54 : 06 :11)
(2)	01	TEA	((singing)) +mi-i-ke-la-an-ge-lo+
		TEA	+hand ; center ; back-forth ; horizontal ; fluent+
	02		nen boterham me choko maar uw mes gaat eraf nee uw mes
			a slice of bread with chocolate spread but your knife is
	03		gaat eraf | nee uw mes blijft erop en maar smeren
			off | no your knife stays on the bread | keep spreading

22We also find the counteracting gesture in contexts where ascending pitch coincides with a downward gesture. Excerpt (3) originates from a transcript of a group session in secondary school where the teacher (TEA) demonstrates how a student (STU) should sing a melody of four tones (line 01). As illustrated in Figure 3, the third note of the sequence is the highest and therefore the most difficult one. While the teacher demonstrates how to sing it, she performs a downward pointing gesture, the stroke of which ends in an accentuated way right at the onset of her highest note (line 01). The trajectory of the gesture is short and it stays within the lower periphery of the gesture space, close to the lower part of the teacher’s stomach. As the student repeats the melody, she fails to sing the highest note (the teacher sings it at 496 Hz, Figure 3, and the student’s version is only 463 Hz, Figure 4) and she does not even sing the fourth note of it (line 02). While the student tries to sing that particular note, the teacher performs a similar hand gesture and her full body moves because she also bends her knees (line 02, Figure 5). Crucially, the movement direction of this full body gesture is down and its apex temporally coincides with the highest note. Since the student is not imitating the leg movement, we argue that the depiction in line 02 does not offer the body for direct interpretation in the sense of a physical exercise. Rather, it should be regarded as a cue for analogy-making : ‘sing as if you were to bend your knees.’ In addition, a gestalt of elastic resistance becomes apparent. If one bends the knee, a controlled muscular tension is needed until a rest position is reached again. This is very different from the manual mode, where tension is more easily released.

(3)

01

TEA

#Figure ((singing demonstration))#

		TEA	+hand ; lower ; straight ; down ; acc+
	02	STU1	#Figure 4 ((repeats))# | ((laughs))

		TEA	#Figure 5 straight ; down ; acc-->#
		TEA	#Figure 5 £legs ; bend ; down ; acc-->#
	03	TEA	[oke helpen eh kga] je helpen he
			[okay help er i’ll] help you right
	04	STU1	[((looks down to the floor))]

Physical exercises and schematization

23In the previous subsection, we analyzed gesture in concert with co-occurring musical action. As a next step in our analysis, we discuss how gesture is paired with other forms of bodily action in singing classes, that is, physical exercises. We selected a teacher who uses Alexander Technique (Lloyd 1986) as a method to adjust the use of the body through posture alignment and awareness. This method is relevant for our purposes because it requires the teacher to explicitly refer to concrete body parts and to demonstrate postures for the student to imitate. We analyze these demonstrations as actor depictions (Clark 2016) because the teacher enacts their addressee’s body as a character that functions in the scene that is represented and is expected to guide the student’s interpretation. The analogy between the staged scene as performed in the here and now of the teacher and the represented scene consists of an explicit and direct mapping of the teacher’s moving body parts on the student’s body parts.

24In excerpt (4), a knee bending exercise emerges as a solution for working on the vocal quality of a very high-pitched tone. It should be noted that the class is situated on MA level and it is all about finetuning vocal techniques the student already has a good control over. The teacher (TEA) initiates the exercise by asking the student which joint she would use to bend forward (line 01-03), which calls upon the explicit body memory of the student. As the student does not seem to be able to answer the question immediately (line 04), the teacher suggests a gesture as an answer (line 05-06). Subsequently, the student gives the requested answer quite fluently by touching her hip with both hands (line 07), which suggests that the student has imagined herself bending forward. After, the teacher explains that the other limb joints such as the knees and the ankles automatically move along when bending the hip (lines 08-10). Finally, the teacher and the student perform the exercise together as illustrated in Figure 6. At this moment, the focus is on the anatomical body and a sensorimotor feeling of flexibility in the limb joints.

(FriA, 07 :05-07 :23)
(4)	01	TEA	als ge het euh de gewrichten eh
			if you the eh the joints eh
	02		met welk gewricht zou je voorover kunnen buigen
			which joint do you use to bend forward
	03		waar zit da gewricht denk ge
			where do you think that joint is
	04	STU	((looks up)) voorOver ;
			((looks up) fOrward ;
	05	TEA	als ge nu spontaan zou zeggen
			if you would tell me spontaneously
	06		ge legt uw handen op het gewricht waar dat da zit
			you put your hands on the joint where it is
	07	STU	((lays her hands on her hip and bends)) ja da-
			((lays her hands on her hip and bends)) well there-
	08	TEA	-ja hier als ge hier zou willen buigen
			-yes if you would bend here
	09		dan doet gaan die knieën naar voor dit gaat naar achter
			than it does the knees go forward and this goes backward
	10		maar hier ((touch ankle)) zit ook een gewricht dat meedoet
			but here (touch ankle)) is also a joint that goes along

25As a next step in the exercise, the knee bending (downward) movement is combined with singing a rising melody specifically so that the apex of the movement coincides with the highest note of the melody. In line 01 of excerpt (5), the teacher (TEA) brings the awareness of the body weight in the knees into the focus of attention. The student (STU) agrees with that, as it can be read from her feedback (line 02). Furthermore, the teacher explains that there is a direct causal relation between the experience of weight in the lower limbs (line 04), the loosening of the pelvic floor muscles (line 05) and some supple movement above the head, which is depicted with the upward gesture made by the teacher (line 06). Immediately following this explanation, she demonstrates how the student should perform the exercise (line 07), singing the melody and depicting how the student should do that. First, the teacher’s right hand touches the upper part of the right leg (Figure 8). When she reaches the highest point of the melody, she extends the note, as illustrated by the graph in Figure 7, and she uses the same hand to point to the floor, while her legs (bent down) hold the same end position (Figure 9). As her legs enter the retraction phase, she performs a more reduced upward gesture with her left hand in the upper periphery of the gesture space, while still holding her right hand in the lower periphery (10).

(FriA, 10 :45-11 :04)
(5)	01	TEA	en het gewicht hangt helemaal [op uw knieën]
			and the weight is totally [on your knees]
	02	STU	[ja da voel ik wel]
			[yes i can feel it]
	03	TEA	dus hier en hier op uw schouders | voila
			so here and here on your shoulders | that’s right
	04		en dan zou je moeten voelen
			and then you should be able to feel
	05		dat je die bekkenbodemspieren loslaat
			that you loosen those pelvic floor muscles
	06		en dan gaat +het hier eeeh soepeler gaan+
			and then it +will be going eeerh more supple here+
			+hand pointing ; upper periphery ; arced ; up ; enlarged+
	07		# 7 ((singing)) a-a-a-£a-a-£a-a-#

		Fig 8	£legs ; bend ; down--£
		Fig 9	+hand ; point ; straight ; down ; accentuated------+
		Fig 10	+hand ; point ; arced ; up ; reduced+

26It is important to note that the right-handed and the left-handed gesture movements have a different articulatory character. The movement of the right hand shares a particular tension with the leg movement because both movements are executed in parallel and the hand holds the end position of the leg. As such, the right hand builds up a tension and holds it like an elastic at its point of maximal extension. The left-handed gesture (Figure 10) does not overlap with the leg gesture and this ‘elasticity’ is missing.

27Yet, in many ways this complex gesture serves a practical, almost literal depiction of a physical technique which helps the singing and in which the role played by metaphor needs to be clarified. Consider the excerpt (6) which is only 10 seconds after excerpt (5). In the meantime, the student has done the exercise multiple times. The teacher evaluates this performance in a positive way (line 02) and she specifies that ‘it came through at once’. From her gesture, as described in line 02 and illustrated in Figure 11, we deduce that she relates this audible breakthrough with a bi-directional action scheme, i.e., the downward movement (of the trunk and the legs) and the upward movement (of the melody) are integrated in a complex gesture. In this multimodally elaborated utterance, the focus is drawn on the explosive (‘wham’) and abrupt (‘at once’) effect of ‘something coming through’. This becomes even more clear in line 03 and 04, where she vocalizes this effect (‘tata pA’). Immediately after that, she contends that ‘the depth should be built up from the beginning’ (line 04, 07) in order to avoid the ‘booming effect’ (line 05-06). Figure 12 and Figure 13 illustrate two gestures that incorporate this idea. The first one (line 04) is complementary to speech, since the idea is only expressed in the gesture (‘it should from the beginning’). In line 07, its semantic content is doubled in speech (‘gradually build up’).

(Friday A, 11 :13-11 :33)
(6)	01	STU	((singing)) a-a-a-a-[a-a-a]
	02	TEA	[ah wauw] heb je het gehoord | +ineens voem+ erdoor
			[ah wauw] did you hear it | +at once wham+ it got through
			#Figure 11 +2H ; pointing ; straight ; vertical out ; acc+#
	03		das op zich heel goed ma da zou eigenlijk nie mogen
			in itself that’s very good but it should not be
	04		nu is da tata +pA+ | +da zou eigenlijk in het begin+
			now it is like tata +pA+ | +it should from the beginning+
			+2H ; straight ; horizontal out ; acc+
			#Figure 12 +2H ; acting ; straight ; vertical out ; dec+
	05		alleen als de toon lager is natuurlijk
			except if the tone is lower of course
	06		hebt ge al minder da knaleffect maar de diepte zou
			you have less of a bang effect but the depth should
	07		+van het begin+ heel geleidelijk moeten opgebouwd worden
			+right from the beginning+ be built up gradually
			#Figure 13 +2H ; acting ; straight ; vertical out ; dec+

28Crucially, this gesture combines an upward action (right hand) and a remaining tension in the opposite direction (left hand), since the left hand stays in a hold position in the lower gesture space. Because of the opposite movement directions and the hold phase of the lower-located hand, these gestures are very similar to the gestures in line 07 of excerpt 5 (Figure 9 and Figure 10). What is different, however, it that the depiction is the teacher’s reaction to the explosive tone quality of the student’s last performance, and not to her body posture, which is not explicitly referred to anymore. In line with Szczepek Reed (2021), we can conclude that a body-focused learnable has shifted to a concept-focused learnable. Or in the terms of Zlatev & Devylder (2020), the teacher’s gestures are reminiscent of the physical exercise on the embodied level, but there now is a tension between this literal meaning and the contextual meaning of tone quality. Hence, the target of this complex depiction has metonymically shifted away from the body to the sound as a product or consequence of a particular conceptualization of the sound-making body. In this sense, the association of elastic motion towards lower space with rising pitch has emerged from a concrete bodily experience and it is now available as a metaphor in a gestural format.

Conclusion

29Our analysis shows how gestural depictions (Clark 2016) are a powerful communicative resource for (lyric) singing teachers to adjust the use of the body of students who have difficulties with high- and low-pitched tones. Singers do not have explicit referential access to their vocal apparatus so that sound production is conceptually mapped upon an experientially well-accessible domain, which is often vertical movement in the case of pitch contours. In most Western languages, this mapping is reflected in the lexicon used to talk about pitch and the activation of this association may cause an unbalance in vocal technique. This suboptimal behavior has been characterized by a decreasing tone quality or a loss of vocal support while singing a decreasing pitch contour. Conversely, high-pitched notes in a melody trigger students to increase muscular tension thus blocking optimal sound quality.

30In the first place, we showed how gesture counteracts suboptimal singing behavior that is related to an iconic inference with the conventional pitch reference as documented in Western languages (‘ascending’ and ‘descending’ pitch). This is possible, as demonstrated, through representing countermovement, inverting the conceptual axis advanced by the conventional metaphor, and aligning this non-conventional scheme with the musical performance itself. Such ‘co-performance’ gestures guide the student’s use of their body and they are perfectly paired in time with their referent, that is, the embodied action of sound production. Hence, the gestural representation of the desired behavior directly ties in with the embodied activation of the mental representation it is meant to counteract. The question to what extent the students benefit from this remains to be investigated.

31A second argument concerns the ability – or should we say ‘nature’ – of gesture to represent and schematize action (Goldin-Meadow 2015 ; Hostetter & Alibali 2019). We showed how co-performance gestures are locally motivated by physical action. In the instances we have discussed, the singing teacher uses a complex gesture to retain a sensorimotor feeling of tension and to map it on an inverted conceptualization of the vertical pitch axis. The feeling is first induced by a physical knee bending exercise and then schematized to highlight the tension and countermovement components of this action. As a result, this action scheme becomes more readily available for communicating about pitch as an audible, yet more abstract and intangible, product of the sound-making body.

32As such, we have proposed two ways to think of gestural metaphor as a strategy in singing instruction. We investigated mechanisms that had already received attention in the case of gesture-speech alignment (Wakefield et al. 2018), but we chose a different context that allows for more ecological validity and that is a perfect testbed for exploring gesture-action relations.