Metaphor as a signal: amplitude, boundaries and contrast

A client draws their life as a sociogram: circles, lines, distances between figures. One person draws a certain figure as a huge circle pressed hard into the paper at the very edge of the sheet. Another draws a barely visible dot in the corner. Neither will say aloud “this figure matters more to me” or “this one hardly registers”. Both have already said it. They said it through size, pressure and distance from the centre.

That is the first and most basic layer of describing any metaphor. The question here is not what the image means. The question is which signal characteristics it has.

This matters well beyond therapy rooms. Every buyer who talks to you, writes to you or fills in a survey is sending signals with a size and a pressure. Most companies record only the words. In Russia, where a lot of what matters is said in the gap between the words and the way they are delivered, that habit costs more than it does in most Western markets.

The parameters of a signal

Before a metaphor becomes a story or a system of values, it is a signal. A signal has measurable physical parameters, and a metaphor inherits all of them.

Amplitude. How strongly the image sounds.

Level. How much it is raised above the general background.

Wavelength. How stretched or compressed in time the experience it carries is.

Boundaries. Where the signal begins and where it ends.

Signal-to-noise ratio. This is the same thing as stability: how clear the image stays against interference, or whether it drowns in it.

Intensity and contrast. How sharply it stands out from everything around it.

This is the lowest level of analysis and the least judgemental. Nobody asks “why” yet, and nobody asks “what does it mean”. You simply record the physics of the image, as if you were measuring the parameters of a real electrical signal.

What a sociogram makes visible

On a sociogram you can see this directly. When a client draws their own defence mechanisms, they do not describe their protective strategies. They express them through exactly these signal parameters.

A thick line, pressed hard into the paper between two figures, is high amplitude. It speaks of significance and intensity of connection, and possibly of a conflict so strong it could not be drawn with a thin line. A faint, half-transparent line is a low signal-to-noise ratio. The connection exists, but it is sinking in noise and uncertainty.

Gradations and shades of grey give a far finer and more accurate picture than a black-and-white scale of “present or absent”. If you record only binary categories, such as conflict versus no conflict or closeness versus distance, you lose a huge amount of information carried by the level of the signal. The useful question is how intense the tension is compared with the other lines on the same sheet. Whether tension exists at all tells you much less.

Two clients can draw a conflict line the same way. For one, it is half as thick again as the line of love towards the same figure. For the other, it is half as thick. Formally, “conflict is present” in both cases. In fact these are two completely different inner arrangements.

Hearing signal parameters in conversation

In everyday life the same principle works without any sociogram. It is enough to listen to the signal parameters of speech along with the words.

When someone describes a problem in a quiet, even voice with long pauses, that is one level of signal. When the same person says a short phrase sharply and loudly, breaking off halfway through, that is a completely different level, even if the content is almost the same. The meaning of “everything’s fine with us” does not come close to conveying what its amplitude conveys, together with its contrast against the speaker’s usual tone.

The practical skill is to compare contrast rather than absolute loudness or speed: how much this particular signal differs from the usual background of this particular person. A quiet person who suddenly speaks loudly sends a signal of the same weight as a usually loud person who suddenly drops to a whisper. Both are a sharp jump in amplitude against a baseline. The jump carries the information. The absolute value does not.

You can apply this to yourself as well. Before working out what exactly stung you in a conversation, take a second to note the signal parameters of your own reaction. How sharply did tension rise? How narrowly or widely did attention focus? How clear or blurred is the line between “this is about me” and “this is not about me”? The body reads these parameters before the mind can form an answer to “what happened”. They often indicate how much the event mattered more accurately than the rational explanation that follows.

Why this matters more in Russia

Here I move from the source material to my own reading of the market, so treat what follows as interpretation drawn from practice, not measured data.

In interviews with Russian buyers, the content of an answer is often the least informative part of it. A direct question about a supplier, a price or a competitor tends to draw a flat, socially safe phrase: “normal”, “it works”, “no complaints”. A Western research brief will code that as neutral-to-positive and move on. Read as a signal, the same phrase may have been delivered in a clipped tone, after an unusually long pause, by a respondent who had been talkative up to that point. That is a spike in contrast against their baseline, and it is where the real finding sits.

The practical conclusion is about method. A questionnaire that captures only answers on a scale throws the signal layer away at the collection stage. So does a transcript with the pauses cleaned out, and so does a summary written by someone who did not hear the recording. The richer channels are the ones where delivery survives: recorded calls, voice messages in Telegram and WhatsApp, which are common in Russian business communication, and long free-text answers where you can see a respondent’s usual length and then the one answer that suddenly doubles it.

Behavioural data has the same structure. Yandex Metrica includes Webvisor, a session recording tool, which lets you watch how a visitor moves through a page: where they slow down, where they return, where they stop. Google Analytics has no built-in equivalent, so teams coming from a Google stack often skip this layer. Watched as a signal, a session tells you less about what a visitor clicked and more about where their attention jumped against their own pace on the page.

What a company selling into Russia from abroad should do

Calibrate to the person before comparing people. Every interview needs a baseline: how this respondent usually speaks, how long their answers usually run, how much they usually hedge. Only then does a sharp or faint moment mean anything. Comparing respondents against one fixed scale mixes quiet people with loud ones and hides both signals.

Do not run the signal layer through a translator. Content survives translation reasonably well. Amplitude and contrast mostly do not, because pauses, emphasis and the distance between a phrase and its tone disappear when an interpreter restates the answer in neutral English. Either the interviews are done in Russian, or the recordings go to a native listener before anyone draws conclusions.

Keep the grey scale. Resist the report format that sorts every answer into “positive, negative, neutral”. The finding you need is usually “this objection was twice as loud as the others for this person”, and a three-bucket coding scheme erases exactly that. This is the core of how I run customer research for foreign companies.

Apply the same lens to your own messages. Your ad, your landing page and your sales email are signals too, and a Russian buyer reads them against a background of competitors in the same results page or the same inbox. Contrast works relative to that background. A claim that sounds bold in your home market may sit at the same level as every other message around it in Russian search, or it may run into restrictions: Russian advertising law requires superlatives such as “the best” to be substantiated. Where your signal stands out is a question about your brand positioning, and it has to be answered against the local background, not the one at home.

Why start with the signal and not the meaning

The temptation to jump straight to meaning is strong. It is more interesting to ask “what does this mean” than to measure “how loudly did it sound”. Yet the lower, signal layer is more honest than the upper ones, because the censorship of meaning and social acceptability has not reached it yet.

Before asking a person what they meant, it is worth pausing for a second on how exactly it was said, drawn or shown. There, in amplitude, boundaries and contrast, you will often find an answer that the content has not had time to ripen into.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Метафора как сигнал: амплитуда, границы, контраст