The act of standing still: stillness or standstill?

](/images/2011/03/12stillstand_a_c7.jpg) As mentioned previously (here and here), I have been doing some experiments on standing still in silence. One thing is to do it, another is to talk (or write) about it. Then I need to have words describing what I have been doing. To start with the simple; the word silence seems to be quite clearly defined as the “lack of sound”, and is similar to the Norwegian word stillhet. There is also the broader concept of stille, which, in addition to quiet, also covers metaphorical uses of the term, e.g. calm, but I do not want to get into more trouble by using that word. ...

October 26, 2011 · 3 min · 504 words · ARJ

Movement versus motion

Terminology is always challenging. I have previously written about definitions of actions and gesture several times (e.g. here, here, and here) and chapter 2 in the book Musical gestures: sound, movement, and meaning (Routledge, 2010). Movement and motion There are, however, two words/terms that I still find very challenging to define properly and to differentiate: movement and motion. In Norwegian, we only have one word (bevegelse) for describing movement/motion, which makes everything much simpler. But when writing in English, which word should be used? And what is the difference? ...

October 2, 2011 · 4 min · 662 words · ARJ