Conceptual Metaphor: A Central Process in the Perception and Analysis of Music Conceptual Metaphor: A Central Process in the Perception & Analysis of Music Alexandra Jandausch Introduction Music and language are two cognitive systems that are unique to humans. For both cases, the structuring, conceptualization, categorization, and integration of the re-spective auditory stimuli is the precondition for an \"understanding\".Music is a temporal art, it is multidimensional, and we are dealing with different parameters: time, pitch, rhythm/meter, harmony/tonality, and timbre. To analyze music, or to reason about music, requires language. For the step from perceiving a piece of music to talking about it we need to bridge the gap from a domain that is non-linguistic in nature – music – to the domain of language. This gap between the two cognitive domains is bridged by conceptual metaphor. The following paper takes a cognitive semantic approach, and two hypotheses shall be examined: 1.When a piece of music is described, the person who describes what he or she has heard gives a verbal record that contains vocabulary from the eld of structure, architecture, movement of objects in space, and so on. For cer-tain conceptual metaphors to arise, there must be a mechanism in the do-main of music which gives rise to these metaphors in the domain of lan-guage. As we experience and reason about abstract concepts in terms of ac-tual and concrete images, there might be an image schematic connection between the domains of music and language.2.The Event-Structure Metaphor and the MUSIC IS ARCHITECTURE Meta-phor are fundamental processes for our understanding and analysis of mu-sic.Conceptual Metaphor and its Implications for Music The conception of metaphor in linguistics contradicts the conception of metaphor from literary studies in fundamental ways: Metaphor is not a mere stylistic device,