Scale as relation: musical metaphors of geographical scale

Abstract

Summary The concept of geographical scale, despite being one of geography's foundational concepts, has been undertheorized compared to other core concepts such as environment, space and place. Two aspects of the concept of geographical scale (size and level) are relatively well recognized. A third aspect (scale as relation) is not. In this exploratory paper, the implications of the metaphors conventionally used to think and write about scale are considered, and some musical metaphors of geographical scale are used to sketch out the importance of scale as a relation.