Across disciplines, metaphor allows teachers to communicate with learners to visualise abstract concepts, clarify complex concepts, and label difficult concepts. This role potentially intensifies venturing into the intangible realms of musical meaning and expression. While it is clear that metaphor is used extensively in music education, little research to date has examined how metaphor is applied in music instruction at advanced levels. In such levels, extramusical referents explain not just the structure of music, but the expressive performance features used to make one interpretation more meaningful to listeners than another. This study explores the sound world of music teachers through the lens of the language they use, building on increasing evidence in applied linguistics and cognitive linguistics regarding the value of metaphor in educational settings. Using the tools of applied linguistics, it brings a collection of real-life data to a research territory where empirical evidence meets philosophical debate to account for metaphor in language and underlying thought. From the study, it is clear that metaphor is highly conventionalised in teacher talk during advanced music instruction. There are hitherto undetected structures and patterns in the use of metaphor, in the vehicles and specific topics referred to in its linguistic expression, as well as in source to target domain correlations. On the surface, there is an apparent diversity in the way teachers describe musical sound, while on a deeper level, a striking systematicity is evident. This allows for developing an investigative approach which enables new insights into the nature and function of metaphorical language in advanced music instruction.