When you hear a melody, your perception is shaped by the associated shapes and movements.

How long does it take for you to conjure the image of Beyoncé dancing on stage when you hear her sing? Or when Jimi Hendrix's guitar solo starts playing, can you visualize Hendrix and his guitar poses?

Whether you're mimicking in front of a mirror, using a banana as a microphone, or swaying while cleaning the room with music on, the movements associated with the music influence what you hear. This is because music is not just a good piece of lyrics or melody. Music is the interaction between everything you feel.

"Think about it, when someone sings very high notes, what do you feel?" says music researcher Tejaswinee Kelkar. "What we actually notice is the effort the singer is putting in. We realize this because it's tangible. We don't even need to see the singer because we are very sensitive to subtle differences in sound - sound shows us the singer's inner emotions."

Kelkar studies the shapes we associate with music and investigates this by studying gestures people make while listening to music. Facial expressions and the positioning of one's legs are just a few things she believes influence a person's auditory experience. When singing, you also use your arms. Kelkar, a performer herself, became interested in gestures when she realized there were differences in how people use their hands when singing Western music compared to Indian music.

"As a child, we learned to sing North Indian folk songs. There, using gestures to help children learn to sing was very common. When you're on stage, you're supposed to sing in the same way as during rehearsals. You focus on the song you're singing, not on the audience." When she later received training in Western classical singing, she started using similar gestures. "But someone firmly told us that it's not right." She became curious: What do these gestures actually mean?

"You might think these movements provide you with some anatomical help or they shape the way you use your voice. In this case, some gestures may be suitable for Indian music but not for Western music." For Kelkar, the different rules for gestures also prove something else: To understand music, you need to think about how it fills space.

Music affects all our senses because it is multimodal - it operates in different modes. For Kelkar, the primary mode is spatial. She mentions mathematician René Thom's quote: "To understand something, we need to understand its geometry."

We believe he's right: everything has a spatial aspect. Time, crucial in music, is a good example. We connect the past and future with our bodies - something is in front of us or behind us. To understand more about how music is perceived in space, Kelkar conducted several experiments. In one, she asked participants to listen to the same piece of music multiple times and draw or explain what they imagined in their minds.

People often perceive specific shapes or use motion metaphors. Some participants described or drew the music as waves passing by them, like sound waves or an ECG (electrocardiogram), while others imagined it as a circle, especially when they noticed a theme repeating in the melody. In another experiment, she asked participants to move their arms in ways they thought matched the music. She recorded everything using motion capture tracking technology to look for patterns.

Several people tried to draw the contours of the music going up or down. This reflected pitch but also other features of the music, such as timbre, themes, and patterns.