CEFContemporary Education Frontiers3029-18793029-1860Bio-Byword Scientific Publishing Pty. Ltd.10.26689/CEF.v4i5.15110ArticleThe Body and the Mind in Piano Teaching: Bodily Perception and Mental Representation through Embodied Metaphorhttps://artdesignp.com/journal/CEF/4/5/10.26689/CEF.v4i5.15110HaoHuiying2026452026-05-26Piano teaching has long relied on metaphorical language such as “like a feather settling gently” or “hang the weight of the arm on your fingertips” to guide students. Traditional views of piano pedagogy have treated such expressions as unverifiable impressionistic talk. This article draws on embodied cognition and conceptual metaphor theory to reconsider the cognitive work that such language does in piano teaching. It argues that embodied metaphor is not decorative rhetoric that could be dispensed with, but the intermediate link that ties the performer’s bodily sensations to mental representation. The discussion first reviews the embodied turn in cognition and the bodily roots of musical meaning, showing how the “musical motion” described by Johnson and Larson, and the “musical forces” that Larson proposes, including melodic gravity, magnetism and inertia, derive from the body’s experience of force and movement [1]. It then treats, in turn, the dimensions of bodily perception in piano teaching that center on touch, proprioception, weight and gesture, and the dimensions of mental representation that center on auditory imagery, motor imagery, motor anticipation and affective imagery. On this basis, it puts forward a “perception–metaphor–representation” coupling model, showing that embodied metaphor, through two-way translation, encodes inarticulate bodily experience as stable mental representation and projects that representation back onto bodily movement. The article offers an integrative theoretical framework for understanding the coupling of body and mind in piano teaching, and gives grounds for turning metaphor from a tacit habit of practice into a teaching tool that can be used deliberately.Embodied metaphor,Piano teaching,Bodily perception,Mental representation,Conceptual metaphor,Musical forces

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