Rhythm: Rhythm (from Greek ῥυθμός-rhythmos, "any regular recurring
Rhythm: Rhythm (from Greek ῥυθμός-rhythmos, "any regular recurring
Rhythm: Rhythm (from Greek ῥυθμός-rhythmos, "any regular recurring
Rhythm
Rhythm (from Greek rhythmos, "any regular recurring motion, symmetry"[1]) generally means a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions."[2] This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time can apply to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or frequency of anything from microseconds to millions of years. In the performance arts rhythm is the timing of events on a human scale; of musical sounds and silences, of the steps of a dance, or the meter of spoken language and poetry. Rhythm may also refer to visual presentation, as "timed movement through space."[3] and a common language of pattern unites rhythm with geometry. In recent years, rhythm and meter have become an important area of research among music scholars. Recent work in these areas includes books by Maury Yeston,[4] Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, Jonathan Kramer, Christopher Hasty,[5] Godfried Toussaint,[6] William Rothstein, and Joel Lester.
Rhythm, a sequence in time repeated, featured in dance: an early moving picture demonstrates the waltz.
Simple [quadr]duple drum pattern, against which duration is measured in much popular music: Play.
Compound triple drum pattern: divides three beats into three. Play Contains repetition on three levels.
Rhythm
Anthropology
In his series How Music Works, Howard Goodall presents theories that human rhythm recalls the regularity with which we walk and the heartbeat we heard in the womb. Other research suggests that it does not relate to the hearbeat directly, but rather the speed of emotional affect, which also influences heartbeat. London writes that musical metre "involves our initial perception as well as subsequent anticipation of a series of beats that we abstract from the rhythm surface of the music as it unfolds in time" (London 2004, Percussion instruments have clearly defined dynamics that aid the creation and 4). The "perception" and "abstraction" of perception of complex rhythms rhythmic measure is the foundation of human instinctive musical participation, as when we divide a series of identical clock-ticks into "tick-tock-tick-tock".[7] Joseph Jordania recently suggested that the sense of rhythm was developed in the early stages of hominid evolution by the forces of natural selection.[8] Plenty of animals walk rhythmically and hear the sounds of the heartbeat in the womb, but only humans have the ability to be engaged (entrained) in a rhythmically coordinated vocalizations and other activities. According to Jordania, development of the sense of rhythm was central for the achievement of the specific neurological state of the battle trance. This state was crucial for the development of the effective defense system of early hominids against major African predators, after hominids descended from the safer tree branches to more dangerous ground. Rhythmic war cry, rhythmic drumming by shamans, rhythmic drilling of the soldiers, and contemporary professional combat forces listening to the heavy rhythmic rock music[9] all use the ability of rhythm to unite human individuals into a shared collective identity where group members put the interests of the group above their individual interests and safety. Some types of parrots can know rhythm.[10] Neurologist Oliver Sacks states that chimpanzees and other animals show no similar appreciation of rhythm yet posits that human affinity for rhythm is fundamental, so that a person's sense of rhythm cannot be lost (e.g. by stroke).[11] Human rhythmic arts are possibly to some extent rooted in courtship ritual.[12] The establishment of a basic beat requires the perception of a regular sequence of distinct short-duration pulses and, as subjective perception of loudness is relative to background noise levels, a pulse must decay to silence before the next occurs if it is to be really distinct. For this reason the fast-transient sounds of percussion instruments lend themselves to the definition of rhythm. Musical cultures that rely upon such instruments may develop multi-layered polyrhythm and simultaneous rhythms in more than one time signature, called polymeter. Such are the cross-rhythms of Sub-Saharan Africa and the interlocking kotekan rhythms of the gamelan. For information on rhythm in Indian music see Tala (music). For other Asian approaches to rhythm see Rhythm in Persian music, Rhythm in Arabian music and Usul - Rhythm in Turkish music and Dumbek rhythms.
Rhythm
Terminology
Pulse, beat and measure
(See main articles; Pulse (music), Beat (music)) Most music, dance and oral poetry establishes and maintains an underlying "metric level", a basic unit of time that may be audible or implied, the pulse or tactus of the mensural level,[13][14] or beat level, sometimes simply called the beat. This consists of a (repeating) series of identical yet distinct periodic short-duration stimuli perceived as points in time.[15] The "beat" pulse is not necessarily the fastest or the slowest component Metric levels: beat level shown in middle with division levels above of the rhythm but the one that is perceived as basic: it and multiple levels below. has a tempo to which listeners entrain as they tap their foot or dance to a piece of music (Handel, 1989). It is currently most often designated as a crotchet or quarter note in western notation (see time signature). Faster levels are division levels, and slower levels are multiple levels (Wittlich 1975, chapt. 3). "Rhythms of recurrence" arise from the interaction of two levels of motion, the faster providing the pulse and the slower organizing the beats into repetitive groups (Yeston 1976, 5052). "Once a metric hierarchy has been established, we, as listeners, will maintain that organization as long as minimal evidence is present" (Lester 1986, 77).
Rhythm first and counting the pulses until the next accent (MacPherson 1930, 5; Scholes 1977). A rhythm that accents another beat and de-emphasises the down beat as established or assumed from the melody or from a preceding rhythm is called syncopated rhythm. Normally, even the most complex of meters may be broken down into a chain of duple and triple pulses (MacPherson 1930, 5; Scholes 1977) either by addition or division. According to Pierre Boulez, beat structures beyond four, in western music, are "simply not natural".[17] Western rhythms are usually arranged with respect to a time signature, partially signifying a meter usually corresponding to measure length and grouped into either two or three beats, which are called duple meter and triple meter, respectively. If the beats are in consistently even or odd groups of two, three, or four, it is simple meter, if by admixtures of two and three it is compound meter. In other systems of music such as Indian classical music rhythms may be grouped into various number of beats. In some music styles such as Yakshagana even group rhythms into fractional beats.
Rhythm generalization of note (Xenakis' ministructural time scale); fraction of a second to several seconds, and his Microsound (see granular synthesis) down to the threshold of audible perception; thousands to millionths of seconds, are similarly comparable to Moravcsik's "short" and "supershort" levels of duration.
Metric structure
(See main articles; Metre (music), Bar (music), Metre (poetry)) The study of rhythm, stress, and pitch in speech is called prosody: it is a topic in linguistics and poetics, where it means the number of lines in a verse, the number of syllables in each line and the arrangement of those syllables as long or short, accented or unaccented. Music inherited the term "meter or metre" from the terminology of poetry.[25]
Notation of a clave rhythm pattern? Each cell of the grid corresponds to a fixed duration of time with a resolution fine enough to capture the timing of the pattern, which may be counted as two bars of four beats in divisive (metrical or symmetrical) rhythm, each beat divided into two cells. The first bar of the pattern may also usefully be counted additively (in measured or asymmetrical rhythm) as 3 +3+2
The metric structure of music includes meter, tempo and all other rhythmic aspects that produce temporal regularity against which the foreground details or durational patterns of the music are projected (Wittlich 1975, chapt. 3). The terminology of western music is notoriously imprecise in this area (Scholes 1977). MacPherson (1930, 3) preferred to speak of "time" and "rhythmic shape", Imogen Holst (1963, 17) of "measured rhythm". Dance music has instantly recognizable patterns of beats built upon a characteristic tempo and measure. The Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (1983) defines the tango, for example, as to be danced in 2/4 time at approximately 66 beats per minute. The basic slow step forwards or backwards, lasting for one beat, is called a "slow", so that a full "right-left" step is equal to one 2/4 measure.[26] The general classifications of metrical rhythm, measured rhythm, and free rhythm may be distinguished.[27] Metrical Notation of three measures of a clave pattern preceded by one measure of steady or divisive rhythm, by far the most common quarter notes. This pattern is noted in double time relative to the one above, in one instead of two four-beat measures Four beats followed by three Clave patterns. in Western music calculates each time value as a multiple or fraction of the beat. Normal accents re-occur regularly providing systematical grouping (measures). Measured rhythm (additive rhythm)also calculates each time value is a multiple or fraction of a specified time unit but the accents do not recur regularly within the cycle. Free rhythm is where there is neither (Cooper 1973, 30), such as in Christian chant, which has a basic pulse but a freer rhythm, like the rhythm of prose compared to that of verse (Scholes 1977) See Free time (music). Finally some music, such as some graphically scored works since the 1950s and non-European music such as Honkyoku repertoire for shakuhachi, may be considered ametric (Karpinski 2000, 19). Senza misura is an Italian musical term for "without meter", meaning to play without a beat, using time to measure how long it will take to play the bar (Forney and Machlis 2007, ).
Rhythm
Composite rhythm
A composite rhythm is the durations and patterns (rhythm) produced by amalgamating all sounding parts of a musical texture. In music of the common practice period, the composite rhythm usually confirms the meter, often in metric or even-note patterns Bach's Sinfonia in F minor BWV 795, mm. 1-3 Play original Play with composite. identical to the pulse on a specific metric level. White defines composite rhythm as, "the resultant overall rhythmic articulation among all the voices of a contrapuntal texture."[28]
Rhythm notation
Worldwide there are many different approaches to passing on rhythmic phrases and patterns, as they exist in traditional music, from generation to generation.
African music
In the Griot tradition of Africa everything related to music has been passed on orally. Babatunde Olatunji (19272003), a Nigerian drummer who lived and worked in the United States, developed a simple series of spoken sounds for teaching the rhythms of the hand drum. He used six vocal sounds: Goon Doon Go Do Pa Ta. There are three basic sounds on the drum, but each can be played with either the left or the right hand. This simple system is now used worldwide, particularly by Djembe players. It is noteworthy that the debate about the appropriateness of staff notation for African music is a subject of particular interest to outsiders, not insiders. African scholars from Kyagambiddwa to Kongo have, for the most part, accepted the conventionsand limitationsof staff notation, and gone on to produce transcriptions in order to inform and make possible a higher level of discussion and debate. Agawu (2003: 52)[29] John Miller Chernoff 1979 has argued that West African music is based on tension between rhythms. This tension between rhythms is called polyrhythms and is created by the simultaneous sounding of two or more different rhythms. Often there is a dominant rhythm interacting with an independent competing rhythm, or rhythms. These often oppose or complement each other, and combine freely with the dominant rhythm creating a rich rhythmic texture not limited to any one set meter or tempo. A set of moral values underpins a full musical system based on repetition of relatively simple patterns that meet at distant cross-rhythmic intervals and call and answer schemes. Values also show up in collective utterances such as proverbs or lineages appear either in phrases that translate as drum talk or in the words of songs. People expect musicians to stimulate participation of all present, notably by reacting to people dancing the music. Appreciation of musicians is related to the effectiveness of their upholding community values.[30]
Rhythm
Indian music
Indian music has also been passed on orally. Tabla players would learn to speak complex rhythm patterns and phrases before attempting to play them. Sheila Chandra, an English pop singer of Indian descent, made performances based on her singing these patterns. In Indian Classical music, the Tala of a composition is the rhythmic pattern over which the whole piece is structured.
Western music
In the 20th century, composers like Igor Stravinsky, Bla Bartk, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich wrote more rhythmically complex music using odd meters, and techniques such as phasing and additive rhythm. At the same time, modernists such as Olivier Messiaen and his pupils used increased complexity to disrupt the sense of a regular beat, leading eventually to the widespread use of irrational rhythms in New Complexity. This use may be explained by a comment of John Cage's where he notes that regular rhythms cause sounds to be heard as a group rather than individually; the irregular rhythms highlight the rapidly changing pitch relationships that would otherwise be subsumed into irrelevant rhythmic groupings.[31] LaMonte Young also wrote music in which the sense of a regular beat is absent because the music consists only of long sustained tones (drones). In the 1930s, Henry Cowell wrote music involving multiple simultaneous periodic rhythms and collaborated with Lon Thrmin to invent the Rhythmicon, the first electronic rhythm machine, in order to perform them. Similarly, Conlon Nancarrow wrote for the player piano. Use of polyrhythms in American music is generally traced to the influence of black culture through Dixieland and Jazz styles. The effect of multiple soloing in these forms, often utilizing cross-rhythms comes directly from the underlying aesthetics of sub-Saharan African music. These complex rhythmic structures have been widely adopted in many current forms of western popular music.
Rhythm in linguistics
In linguistics, rhythm or isochrony is one of the three aspects of prosody, along with stress and intonation. Languages can be categorized according to whether they are syllable-timed or stress-timed. Speakers of syllable-timed languages such as Spanish and Cantonese put roughly equal time on each syllable; in contrast, speakers of stressed-timed languages such as English and Mandarin Chinese put roughly equal time lags between stressed syllables, with the timing of the unstressed syllables in between them being adjusted to accommodate the stress timing. Narmour[32] describes three categories of prosodic rules that create rhythmic successions that are additive (same duration repeated), cumulative (short-long), or countercumulative (long-short). Cumulation is associated with closure or relaxation, countercumulation with openness or tension, while additive rhythms are open-ended and repetitive. Richard Middleton[33] points out this method cannot account for syncopation and suggests the concept of transformation.
Rhythm
Sources
[1] (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 04. 0057:entry=r(uqmo/ s), Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus project [2] The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. II. Oxford University Press. 1971. p.2537. [3] "Art, Design, and Visual Thinking" (http:/ / char. txa. cornell. edu/ language/ principl/ rhythm/ rhythm. htm). . Retrieved 2010-03-16. [4] Yeston, Maury (1976). The Stratification of Musical Rhythm. Yale University Press. ISBN0-300-01884-3. [5] Hasty, Christopher (1997). Meter as Rhythm. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510066-2. [6] Toussaint, Godfried (2013). The Geometry of Musical Rhythm, Chapman & Hall/CRC. [7] Scholes, Percy (1977). "Metre" and "Rhythm", in The Oxford Companion to Music, 6th corrected reprint of the 10th ed. (1970), revised and reset, edited by John Owen Ward. London and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-311306-6 [8] Joseph Jordania. Why do People Sing? Music in Human Evolution. Logos, 2011 [9] Jonathan Pieslak. Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War. Indiana University Press, 2009 [10] April 30, 2009. " Parrots have got rhythm, studies find (http:/ / www. world-science. net/ othernews/ 090430_rhythm. htm)", World-Science.net. [11] Patel, Aniruddh D. (2006), "Musical rhythm, linguistic rhythm, and human evolution", Music Perception (Berkeley, California: University of California Press) I (24): 99104, ISSN0730-7829, "there is not a single report of an animal being trained to tap, peck, or move in synchrony with an auditory beat." as cited in Sacks, Oliver (2007). "Keeping Time: Rhythm and Movement". Musicophilia, Tales of Music and the Brain. New York Toronto: Alfred a Knopf. pp.239240. ISBN978-1-4000-4081-0. "No doubt many pet lovers will dispute this notion, and indeed many animals, from the Lippizaner horses of the Spanish Riding School of Vienna to performing circus animals appear to 'dance' to music. It is not clear whether they are doing so or are responding to subtle visual or tactile cues from the humans around them." [12] Mithen, Steven (2005). The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body. (http:/ / www. epjournal. net/ filestore/ ep03375380. pdf). London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.. ISBN0-297-64317-7. . [13] Berry, Wallace (1976/1986). Structural Functions in Music, p.349. ISBN 0-486-25384-8. [14] (Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983). Fitch, W. Tecumseh and Rosenfeld, Andrew J. (2007). "Perception and Production of Syncopated Rhythms", p.44, Music Perception, Vol. 25, Issue 1, pp. 4358, ISSN 0730-7829. [15] Winold, Allen (1975). "Rhythm in Twentieth-Century Music", Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music, p.213. Wittlich, Gary (ed.). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: PrenticeHall. ISBN 0-13-049346-5. [16] *Winold, Allen (1975). "Rhythm in Twentieth-Century Music", Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music. Wittlich, Gary (ed.). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Chapter 3 ISBN 0-13-049346-5. [17] In Discovering Music: Rhythm (http:/ / www. bbc. co. uk/ radio3/ discoveringmusic/ ram/ cdm0401slat1of4. ram) with Leonard Slatkin at 5:05 [18] Winold, Allen (1975). "Rhythm in Twentieth-Century Music", Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music. Wittlich, Gary (ed.). Englewood [19] Moravcsik, Michael J. (2001). Musical Sound: An Introduction to the Physics of Music, p.114. ISBN 978-0-306-46710-3. [20] P. Fraisse, Les Structures Rhythmiques, Erasme Paris 1956, H Woodrow Time Perception in "A Handbook of Experimental Psychology", ed. S.S. Stevens, Wiley, NY 1951, both quoted at http:/ / www. zeuxilogy. home. ro/ media/ manifesto. pdf ( zeuxilogy.home.ro (http:/ / www. zeuxilogy. home. ro/ )) [21] Scholes, Percy A., The Oxford Companion to Music Oxford University Press 1977, article; Form [22] Macpherson, Stewart, Form in Music, Joseph Williams, London, 1930 [23] MacPherson, Stewart (1930). Form in Music. London: Joseph Williams Ltd., page 3 [24] Roads, Curtis (2001). Microsound. MIT. ISBN 0-262-18215-7. [25] Scholes, Percy (1977). "Metre" and "Rhythm", in The Oxford Companion to Music, 6th corrected reprint of the 10th ed. (1970), revised and reset, edited by John Owen Ward. London and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-311306-6 : Latham, Alison. 2002. "Metre", The Oxford Companion to Music", edited by Alison Latham. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-866212-2. [26] The Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (1983). Ballroom Dancing, Hodder and Stoughton. [27] Cooper, Paul (1973). Perspectives in Music Theory: An Historical-Analytical Approach. New York: Dodd, Mead. ISBN 0-396-06752-2, page 30 [28] White, John D. (1976). The Analysis of Music, p.136. ISBN .0-13-033233-X. [29] Agawu, Kofi (2003: 52). Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions. New York: Routledge. [30] Chernoff, John Miller (1979) African Rhythm and African Sensibility -- Aesthetic and Social Action in African Musical Idioms. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press [31] Sandow, Greg (2004). "A Fine Madness", p.257, The Pleasure of Modernist Music. ISBN 1-58046-143-3. [32] Narmour (1980), p14753. Cited in Winold, Allen (1975). [33] Middleton, Richard (1990). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN0-335-15275-9.
Rhythm
Further reading
McGaughey, William (2001). Rhythm and Self-Consciousness: New Ideals for an Electronic Civilization. Minneapolis: Thistlerose Publications. ISBN0-9605630-4-0. Honing, H. (2002). "Structure and interpretation of rhythm and timing." (http://www.hum.uva.nl/mmm/ abstracts/mmm-TvM.html) Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie [Dutch Journal of Music Theory] 7(3): 227232. Humble, M. (2002). The Development of Rhythmic Organization in Indian Classical Music (http://www.scribd. com/doc/25227226/The-Development-of-Rhythmic-Organization-in-Indian-Classical-Music), MA dissertation, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Lewis, Andrew (2005). RhythmWhat it is and How to Improve Your Sense of It. San Francisco: RhythmSource (http://rhythmsource.com/dev/books/) Press. ISBN 978-0-9754667-0-4. London, Justin (2004). Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter. ISBN 0-19-516081-9. Williams, C. F. A., The Aristoxenian Theory of Musical Rhythm, (Cambridge Library Collection - Music), Cambridge University Press; 1st edition, 2009. Toussaint, G. T., The geometry of musical rhythm, In J. Akiyama, M. Kano, and X. Tan, editors, Proceedings of the Japan Conference on Discrete and Computational Geometry, Vol. 3742, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg, 2005, pp.198212.
External links
Melodyhound has a "Query by Tapping" search that allows users to identify music based on rhythm (http:// www.melodyhound.com/query_by_tapping.0.html) Louis Hbert, "A Little Semiotics of Rhythm. Elements of Rhythmology", in Signo (http://www.signosemio. com/semiotics-of-rhythm.asp)
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