Sounding the metaphor: music and non-verbal sound in iPhone advertising

The study presents a corpus-based analysis of the role of music and non-verbal sound in multimodal metaphors in iPhone commercials (2016–2025). In a corpus of 100 commercials, 15 metaphorical ads were identified for detailed analysis. Combining Conceptual Metaphor Theory with social-semiotic sound studies and Aristotelian rhetoric, the study develops a functional approach for classifying and interpreting sonic material. The analysis shows that music and non-verbal sound can contribute to metaphor construction by cueing source and target domains or by specifying mappable features. Their contribution is shaped by properties specific to sonic material, especially its affective, temporal and immersive dimensions. The findings suggest that music and non-verbal sound are crucial to metaphor design and integral to the cognitive and rhetorical force of iPhone’s deliberately verbal-claim-minimalist advertising.