Acknowledgements

Several people have contributed to the present work. Without their help, this work would not have been possible.

I would like to thank Doris Schönefeld who provided many crucial comments on the present work and whose critical eye and wide-ranging knowledge has helped me grow as a researcher. I would also like to thank my colleagues from Prof. Dr. Doris Schönefeld’s group at Leipzig University, Antje Quick, Anne Lerche and Jakob Neels for their thoughts and comments. I would like to thank Beate Hampe for providing valuable comments on conference presentations and the final form of the present work. I also want to thank my friend Paula Pérez-Sobrino for essential comments and many discussions on metaphor, music and academia. I would also like to thank Christian Burgers, the editor of the series, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for providing extremely valuable comments and for helping to turn my PhD manuscript into this monograph.

Many people have helped me in carrying out the research presented in this book: I would like to thank Stefanie Vogelbacher for coding part of the data. I want to thank Bodo Winter for helping me to collect data for the rating study and for providing helpful comments on the study’s design. I want to thank Michael Klenner for writing the php-code for the web-based rating experiment on soscisurvey.de. I am also grateful to Jeannette Littlemore for distributing the survey among her students, and Sarah Turner and Rachel Hatchard for distributing the survey among their fellow musicians in the respective orchestras they play in. Furthermore, I am highly indebted to Anne Lerche for her help and support with the statistical analyses. I also want to thank Diana Michl for providing helpful comments on previous drafts of Chapter 6 and 7. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for letting me do what I do, and Ingmar for his unconditional support.