In addition to being an artist and singer/songwriter I am doing a PhD in music performance at the southern university of Norway (Agder University). It is a crazy idea to keep up with writing blogs when there is so much to work on as it is, but the way I see it is “the more I write, the more I get done writing”.

The PhD project is one of the first of its kind in Europe, where performing artists are allowed to do research on their own work. As I am an artist and singer/songwriter within popular music I get to do research on popular music. Some people are curious about what my project covers, and answering this could easily turn into a long and complicated story. This is the short version.

I don’t think my PhD project is too “nerdy” and academic for most people. It is about the human mechanism of communicating with each other by using metaphors. The working title of the dissertation is: Metaphor as a communication strategy within an album recording setting. When we recorded my previous album (The Anchor And The Dream) I taped everything that was said between the producer, the sound engineers, the musicians and myself, while arranging and recording the songs. Now I am transcribing the taped dialogue searching for examples where we use metaphoric language about sound, dynamics and vocal expression. The research is based on what is “off the record” (colourful discussions and unexpected language images) – which is part of the process leading up to what we can hear “on the record” (the finished CD).

A metaphor is when we let one thing say something about something else. My producer and musicians often use food-metaphors about guitar-sound for example. “I think we need a more creamy guitar here” (producer). “Dark cream!” (drummer). Here we are letting food/dairy products say something about guitar-sound. At one point the producer asked me to sing with the kitten’s paw on one of the songs: he wanted me to sing softly and gently. Thus he compared me (my vocal expression) with a cat/kitten.

When working on something creative together, something that may not be too clearly defined, we speak together by letting the language switch into a more “creative mode”. This is not a musician’s thing exclusively, this happens everywhere and with everyone – especially when the work includes abstracts and less tangible things. Throughout history the philosophers and poets have tried to capture in words things like life, love, time, sorrow, passion, etc. Like in the case of musicians recordings an album, they are sometimes making quite a “verbal party” of it…

This is just scraping the surface of a much larger research dimension. When we use metaphors in my context it is not only to describe and analyze, but also to negotiate. And in trying to influence each other with words – we create metaphor codes about music together. (Below are some pics from the reording by Astrid Lunke)