Vijay Iyer

Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound:

Embodied Cognition in West African
and African-American Musics

Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.

1998

List of Audio Examples .......................................................................................................................4

Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................................7
1. Introduction......................................................................................................................................9
2. Defining Terms ..............................................................................................................................11
3. New Paradigms: Embodied Mind, Situated Cognition..................................................................18
Cognitivism & Traditional Cognitive Science...............................................................................19
Embodied Cognition ......................................................................................................................20
Situated Cognition .........................................................................................................................21
4. Music Cognition and Embodiment ................................................................................................23
Time and Timing............................................................................................................................24
Kinesthetics....................................................................................................................................25
Musical Bodies in Culture..............................................................................................................28
Embodiment and Metamusical Language......................................................................................29
Paralinguistics, Performativity, Signifying....................................................................................33
Time and Temporal Situatedness...................................................................................................36
The Temporality of Musical Performance .....................................................................................37
Temporal Situatedness & Musical Form .......................................................................................38
Embodiment as a Complement to Cognitivism .............................................................................39
5. On the Perception of Meter............................................................................................................42
Rhythmic Timescales.....................................................................................................................42
Pulse Perception.............................................................................................................................43
Meter ..............................................................................................................................................43
Models of Meter Perception...........................................................................................................46
Rhythm and Meter in West African Music....................................................................................47
Meter Perception and Culture ........................................................................................................52
Summary ........................................................................................................................................55
6. Microtiming Studies.......................................................................................................................58
Rhythmic Expression in African and African-American Musics ..................................................58
Previous Microtiming Studies........................................................................................................59
Examples of Expressive Microtiming............................................................................................61
Asynchrony ....................................................................................................................................61
Streaming .......................................................................................................................................62
Spreading .......................................................................................................................................62
Coding for Invariance ....................................................................................................................63
Swing .............................................................................................................................................63
In the Pocket: Backbeat Delay .......................................................................................................64
Rhythmic Expression: Two Musical Examples .............................................................................65
7. Describing Rhythmic Behavior, Representing Rhythmic Structure ..............................................68
Rhythmic Tapping..........................................................................................................................68
A Subtactus Clock..........................................................................................................................69
A Tripartite Model .........................................................................................................................70
Representation & Implementation .................................................................................................70
Modularity......................................................................................................................................71
Applications ...................................................................................................................................72
8. Implications for Music Cognition, Musicology, and Computer Music .........................................73
Bibliography.......................................................................................................................................79
Discography .......................................................................................................................................84

Original Table of Contents (with hyperlinks) from the online version

Chapter

page

List of Audio Examples

iv

Acknowledgements

vi

1.

Introduction

2.

Defining Terms

3.

New Paradigms: Embodied Mind, Situated Cognition

19

4.

Music Cognition and Embodiment

30

5.

On the Perception of Meter

71

6.

Microtiming Studies

105

7.

Describing Rhythmic Behavior, Representing Rhythmic Structure

127

8.

Implications for Music Cognition, Musicology, and Computer Music

137

Bibliography

149

Discography

159

http://archive.cnmat.berkeley.edu/~vijay
http://www.vijay-iyer.com

List of Audio Examples

A compact disc containing the audio examples cited throughout the text is available at the Center
for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), 1750 Arch Street, Berkeley, CA 94720, (510)
643-9990 x 300. However, the text is understandable without this supplementary material. All
musical selections are small excerpts from original recordings, unless otherwise indicated.
Selections in parentheses were created by the author.

Track# chapter

page #

artist or (example)

title

1.

Ch. 2

17

Art Tatum

"This Could Be Love"

2.

Ch. 3

21

James Brown

"Give it Up or Turn it Loose"

3.

Ch. 4

37

Thelonious Monk

"Misterioso"

4.

"Let's Call This"

5.

"Four in One"

6.

Charlie Parker

"52nd Street Theme"

7.

Thelonious Monk

"Monk's Point"

8.

"Light Blue"

9.

"Gallop's Gallop"

10.

"Trinkle, Tinkle"

11.

Ch. 4

48-49

John Coltrane

"Spiritual"

12.

Ch. 4

50

Anlo Ewe drumming

kaganu pattern

13.

Ch. 4

52

Cecil Taylor Orchestra

rehearsal excerpt

14.

Ch. 4

58

Eric Dolphy

"Out There"

15.

Ornette Coleman

"Check Out Time"

16.

Miles Davis

"In a Silent Way"

17.

James Brown

"Talkin' Loud & Sayin' Nothing"

18.

De La Soul

"Down Syndrome"

19.

De La Soul

"Wonce Again Long Island"

20.

Busta Rhymes

"Do My Thing"

Duke Ellington

"Diminuendo & Crescendo in Blue"

22.

John Coltrane

"Chasing the Trane"

23.

Aruna Sayeeram

"Mahaganapatim"

James Brown

"Get Up (I feel like being a) Sex Machine"

John Coltrane

"Transition"

21.

24.

Ch. 4

Ch. 4

63

64

25.
26.

Ch. 4

65

T. Monk feat. Coltrane

"Trinkle, Tinkle"

27.

Ch. 4

69

Ahmad Jamal

"Poinciana"

28.

Ch. 5

79

Los Muequitos

"Fundamento Dilanga"

James Brown

"I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing"

29.
30.

Ch. 5

89-90

(Anlo-Ewe bell
pattern)

31.

(Yoruba bell pattern)

32.

(other bell pattern)

33.

(Yoruba bell pattern,

grouped)

34.

Ch. 5

90

(3:4 composite
rhythm)

35.

Ch. 5

92

(RTP examples)

36.

Ch. 5

100

Mustapha Tettey Addy

"Oshika"

37.

Ch. 6

111

Los Muequitos

"Oyelos de Nuevo"

38.

Ch. 6

112

(asynchrony part 1)

39.
40.

(asynchrony part 2)
Ch. 6

113-114

41.
42.

(streaming part 1)
(streaming part 2)

Ch. 6

115

(spreading part 1)
5

43.

(spreading part 2)

44.

Ch. 6

116

John Chowning

45.

Ch. 6

118

(swing part 1)

46.
47.

vibrato & auditory scene analysis demo

(swing part 2)
Ch. 6

118-119

48.

(backbeat part 1)
(backbeat part 2)

49.

Ch. 6

121

Thelonious Monk

50.

Ch. 6

122

excerpt of same

51.

Ch. 6

123

Ahmad Jamal

52.

Ch. 6

124

excerpt of same

53.

Ch. 9

142

John Coltrane

"Chasing the Trane"

54.

Ch. 9

144

Busta Rhymes

"Dangerous"

55.

Ch. 9

145

Squarepusher

"Journey to Reedham"

56.

Ch. 9

145

Terminator X

"Vendetta... The Big Getback"

57.

Ch. 9

146

Miya Masaoka

live duo with pianist Vijay Iyer

58.

Ch. 9

147

David Wessel

live duo with vocalist Shafqat Ali Khan

59.

Ch. 9

147

George Lewis

"Voyager Duo II"

60.

Ch. 9

148

Madonna

"Frozen"

61.

Ch. 9

148

James Brown

"Please, Please, Please"

"I'm Confessin'" (complete)

"But Not for Me" (complete)

Acknowledgements
I followed a circuitous path to this degree, and
it would not have been possible without the
tremendous support and guidance of the
dissertation committee members. Since I met
Professor David Wessel, he has been a
wonderful friend, colleague, and mentor, as
well as a fellow avid music buff. When I left
physics in 1994 and was casting about in
search of a career, he graciously took me on
and introduced me to many exciting new
ideas. It was his consistently innovative vision
that led to the construction and execution of
this interdisciplinary program. As is the case
with his direction of the Center for New
Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT),
my degree program exemplifies Professor
Wessel's extraordinary ability to create novel,
nurturing environments for new kinds of
research. I am extremely fortunate and grateful to have enjoyed the benefits of his
brilliance and generosity.
Professor George Lewis is a similarly
visionary and inspiring individual. In addition
to his awesome prowess as an improvising
trombonist, he has initiated and facilitated a
remarkable variety of interdisciplinary discourses on improvised music through his
teachings and writings. A pioneer improviser,
computer musician, theorist, and composer,
not to mention an astute cultural critic,
Professor Lewis has influenced my thought
profoundly both as an artist and an academic.
His clear guidance, advice, and friendship
have proven invaluable throughout this
process, and I especially thank him for his
help with the manuscript itself. I also thank
Professor Olly Wilson for instilling in me a
true appreciation for the continuity between
West African and African-American cultures.
This notion became the foundation for the
thrust of this work, and for that I am indebted
to him. In addition, I am thankful for his input
in the initial stages of the application process
for this interdisciplinary program, and for his
deft leadership of the qualifying exam.
Overall he has been a source of wisdom and
common sense not just in terms of content,

but also with regards to negotiating the

bureaucratic hurdles. Professor Ervin Hafter
has served as my scientific conscience
throughout this endeavor. I learned a great
deal by observing his methods of inquiry in
the hearing-sciences seminar. In terms of my
own work, his commitment to rigor and his
high standards kept me on my toes, but his
generous spirit and his respect for my ideas
saved me from getting raked over the coals.
For his input and supportive comments I am
extremely grateful. Professor Don Glaser has
shown great open-mindedness and warmth
over these few years. I am truly honored to
have interacted with a scientific mind of his
caliber, a Nobel laureate who has been on the
cutting edge of a number of disparate research
fields. Like the others on this committee, he is
an eminent renaissance man with a wide
range of interests, and has served as an
inspiration for me.
At CNMAT in 1995-96 we had an ongoing
discussion group in rhythm. One of the
central individuals in this group was the
bassist, composer, and computer scientist Jeff
Bilmes. Jeff has influenced my work in
profound ways, both as an artist and as a
scientist. Some of the work here used his MIT
masters thesis as a foundation, and my quartet
from 1995 to 1997 featured his bass playing
as a different sort of foundation. We have had
a number of heated but productive arguments
over the years about how best to articulate
and represent these musical ideas that we hold
intuitively to be self-evident. Matt Wright
also took part in the rhythm research group
and blessed us with a wonderful down-toearth approach and utmost clarity. I wish also
to thank CNMAT and its people for indulging
me with space, support, and friendly vibes.
The people include Adrian & Eleanor Freed,
Sami Khoury, Cyril Drame, Amar Chaudhary,
Ron Smith, and Edmund Campion, who was
the other half of an interesting series of
exploratory two-piano improvisations. I
especially thank CNMAT administrators
Richard Andrews and Leslie Delehanty for
keeping the U.C. bureaucracy at bay and for
making sure the checks came in on time. I am
extremely grateful to Gibson Guitars, whose
7

financial support via CNMAT made this

entire effort possible.
In forming the ideas in this work, I have
drawn a great deal from my experiences as a
professional musician. Among the most
important influences in this part of my life
over the last four years is saxophonist Steve
Coleman. In our many lengthy discussions,
emails, and musical interactions, we
exchanged a vast amount of information on a
wide range of subjects. He helped direct and
focus my thinking on rhythm (particularly on
the notion of "feel"), improvisation, and
intuition. His input has been as important as
that of any of the committee members. I also
wish to thank all the musicians I have worked
with since 1992, including Liberty Ellman,
Elliot Humberto Kavee, Jeff Brock, Brad
Hargreaves, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Derrek
Phillips, Will Power, Mohammed Bilal,
Simone White, DJ Pause, Miya Masaoka, E.
W. Wainwright, Robert Rhodes, Eric Crystal,
Aaron Stewart, Sean Rickman, Anthony Tidd,
Chander Sardjoe, Rahsaan Fredericks, Devin
Hoff, J. D. Parran, Kevin Ellington Mingus,
Kash Killion, Francis Wong, Harold Lee Yen,
D Armous Boone, John Tchicai, Cecil Taylor,
and many, many others. All of my musical
collaborations have influenced my thinking
for this thesis. I was fortunate to have a few
colleagues in the field of music perception
and cognition who were willing to discuss my
work, including Ed Large and Bruno Repp.
Before I began this program, I enjoyed a
healthy two years in the physics department.

During this time I benefited from the wisdom

and guidance of the late Professor Leo
Falicov, the warmth and kindness of the
department employees Anne Takizawa,
Donna Sakima, and Mercy Wang, and
important friendships with Lorin Benedict
(with whom I enjoyed many extracurricular
activities) and Rob Carpick. I also thank
Professor Alan Portis for accomodating me as
his GSI during my transition year.
I thank my immediate family (Raghu, Sita,
Pratima, and Kurt) for being extremely
supportive throughout this process. It is
probably because of my parents that I did not
leave graduate school entirely in 1994; it is
also thanks to them that I had the perseverance to try something off the beaten path.
My sister helped to remind me of who I was
during my California years; I might have lost
my moorings without the luxury of laughing
and commiserating with her. I thank Kurt for
his exemplary groundedness and stability.
And most importantly, I have no idea what
would have become of me had it not been for
one charmed moment in Sproul Hall when I
met Christina Sunita Leslie. The time since
then has brought countless moments of pure,
unspeakable joy, which managed to ease the
lengthy gestation of twin doctorates. For her
immeasurable understanding, emotional support, companionship, balance, depth, and
ongoing dedication to our life together, I will
always feel utterly blessed.

1. Introduction
The fundamental claim of this thesis is that
music perception and cognition are embodied
activities. This means that they depend
crucially on the physical constraints and
enablings of our sensorimotor apparatus, and
also on the sociocultural environment in
which our music-listening and -producing
capacities come into being. This claim shows
a strong similarity to that of John Blacking
(1973), who wrote, "Music is a synthesis of
cognitive processes which are present in
culture and in the human body: the forms it
takes, and the effects it has on people, are
generated by the social experiences of human
bodies in different cultural environments."
(Blacking 1973: 89) I shall present some
further evidence in its support, by showing
how exemplary rhythms of certain kinds of
music may relate to such embodied processes.
I shall argue that rhythm perception and
production involve a complex, whole-body
experience, and that much of the structure
found in music incorporates an awareness of
the embodied, situated role of the participant.
The claim that music perception and
cognition are embodied activities also means
that they are actively constructed by the
listener, rather than passively transferred from
performer to listener. In particular, the
discernment of entities such as pulse and
meter from a given piece of music are not
perceptual inevitabilities for any human
being, but are strongly dependent on the
person's culturally contingent listening
strategies. In addition, I argue that certain
kinds of rhythmic expression in what I shall
call groove-based music are directly related
not only to the role of the body in musicmaking, but also to certain cultural aesthetics
that privilege this role.
The work in this thesis lies on the outskirts of
most contemporary research in rhythm
perception and cognition. In particular, it
avoids the Pandora's-box searches for beatfinders (Large 1994) and models of
expressive tempo variation (Todd 1989,

Desain & Honing 1996, Clarke 1988), in

favor of a focus on somewhat different
elements of rhythm. The aforementioned
work has tended to focus on models derived
from European classical music, which are
valid but do not apply as universally as they
might claim. Many of the aspects of rhythm
that I discuss here have direct relevance to the
performance and perception of popular
musics, dance musics, and music that lacks a
concept of "score" or "composer." The musics
that concern me most directly in the present
work are those that have arisen from African
cultures, both in their native and diasporic
manifestations. To this end I have drawn
extensively from the writings and teachings of
the Ghanaian master percussionist C. K.
Ladzekpo (1995), as well as the theoretical
and empirical discourses of many other
musicians working in these genres. This work
thus represents a nexus of cognitive-scientific
ideas with cultural and artistic considerations.
I wish to make clear immediately that I
myself am a professional pianist, improviser,
and composer, associated with the vast genre
known as jazz. (The term "jazz" is an
ambiguous and even controversial one, which
I accept, for now, as referring to a certain
African-American cultural model with hugely
varied manifestations.) Many of the ideas in
this thesis grew out of my experiences
working in jazz, funk, and hip-hop bands over
the last decade. I entered this field because I
saw it as a way of studying what fascinated
me the most about the music of which I am a
part namely, its rhythmic vitality. As I
became acquainted with the rather young field
of music perception and cognition, I became
frustrated by the overwhelming incompatibility between the priorities of the music
cognition research program and my own
musical experiences. A majority of research
on rhythm perception and cognition has either
focused on a style of music that exists in a
rather rarefied form in the world today,
namely European classical music from the
Renaissance period to the pre-modern period.
If any sense of urgency is detected in these
pages, it is most probably because of my
desire to surmount this issue, which I see as a
9

problem of scope. I hope the reader will

indulge me in such instances.
This thesis is divided into somewhat
independent sections. Chapter 3 consists of a
summary of the twin theoretical frameworks
of embodied and situated cognition. These
relatively recent paradigms frame cognition in
terms of the body, its physical and temporal
situation, and its social and cultural moment.
They provide the raw materials for a more
expansive view of music cognition that
involves all of these dimensions, as elaborated
at length in chapter 4. I argue that these ways
of framing music cognition complement the
abstract, symbolic models set forth in this
area of research so far.
The remainder of the thesis applies the
framework of embodied musical cognition to
a few different specific concerns. Chapter 5 is
a discussion of meter, in which I study the
crucial role in attention that meter can play,
and address the cultural contingency of meter
perception. Chapter 6 is a summary of some
kinds of expressive timing that appear in
groove-based musics, including some simple

10

audio examples. These examples lead into

Chapter 7, which touches on different models
of the physical activity of rhythmic tapping,
before summarizing a paper that was given at
the 1997 International Computer Music
Conference, co-authored by Jeff Bilmes, Matt
Wright, and David Wessel. We set forth a
rhythmic representation that allows explicit
control of expressive microtiming in the
presence of an isochronous pulse. It was
software using this representation that
facilitated the construction of the examples in
Chapter 6. Finally, chapter 8 wraps up this
project by exploring some of its implications.
We must begin with some preliminary
groundwork. The following chapter, a
definition of relevant terms, provides an
opportunity to examine some basic problems
that we encounter in a multidisciplinary study.
In the course of defining the terms that are
relevant to our studies of rhythm cognition, I
point out some of the assumptions, implications, and limitations inherent in their multivalent usage.

2. Defining Terms
Given that this is an interdisciplinary work
with a multiperspectival audience, it is
necessary to assure ourselves that we are all
talking about the same things. Cognitive
science, itself an interdisciplinary field, is
plagued by the slippage caused by multiple
simultaneous meanings of commonly used
terms. Philosophers and neuroscientists can
barely agree on the meaning of the word
"mind," the supposed primary object of study.
Similarly, the commonly used terms of music
theory and music psychology are clouded by
imprecise connotations. Often their scientific
meanings, vague as they are, are eclipsed by
their colloquial and artistic usages. We must
be careful and thorough when using such
terms in a scientific context, especially when
attempting
to
describe
cross-cultural
phenomena. Invariably, these terms have
multiple dictionary meanings, multiple
meanings implied by common usage, and
multiple meanings agreed upon by a
community of scholars in the field of music
perception and cognition.
In this section I examine a number of terms
that arise in the study of rhythm perception,
cognition, and production. I will focus on the
last body of definitions, and will attempt to
remain aware of the slippage among these
three kinds of meaning. The nature of an
interdisciplinary work makes such semantic
mismatches inevitable, as does the nature of
an interdisciplinary field such as cognitive
science.
Cognitive science. The field of cognitive
science consists of an interdisciplinary study
of the structures of the human mind. These
structures include our sensory/perceptual
apparatus, such as vision, audition, olfaction;
internal mental processes such as language,
thinking, reasoning and problem solving;
motor control and the organization of skilled
behavior such as speech and musical
performance;
memory;
consciousness;
attention; and many other aspects of mind. All
of these subfields are clearly intertwined.
Disciplines included are psychology, biology,

neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology,

linguistics, sociology, and computer science;
more recently, the academic music world has
devoted some of its resources to the study of
the cognitive science of music.
Often the claim is made that cognition is
information processing: "Cognitive science is
the study of information processing, and
insofar as a discipline studies that, then it is
part of cognitive science." (Hardcastle 1996:
8) This claim is true in the most general
sense, in that the mind is continually taking in
information and dealing with it in some way.
In the past, the further claim was made that
the mind is merely an example of a formal
symbol-manipulating device that executes
mental programs, where any such device
would do (e.g. von Neumann 1951). As such,
it was assumed that one could ignore the
physical and biochemical particulars of the
brain. Theories of mental processes then
consisted of abstract mathematical models
that had the correct input-output characteristics and various functional or causal
relations. This kind of theorizing suggested a
fundamental dichotomy that was assumed
between the body and the mind a problematic dichotomy that dates back to Plato.
Eventually the neurosciences began to make
enough advances that it became advantageous
to adopt the perspective that an organism's
cognition is intimately connected with its
strategy for survival within particular
ecological environments. Nervous systems are
not von Neumann's idealized general-purpose
computers. Rather, our neural architecture
evolved to fulfill a certain range of specific
needs and to facilitate certain activities. For
example, the general organization of the brain
is best explained if we view the nervous
system as a generator of motor output. The
cerebellum is connected almost directly to all
areas of the brain sensory transmissions,
reticular (arousal/attention) systems, hippocampus (episodic memories), limbic system
(emotions, behavior). All areas of our brain
seem geared to coping with their functions as
they pertain to problems of motor control.
The brain is understood in enough detail that

11

one can model them computationally at a

fairly low level. (Hardcastle 1996: 6-7)
And furthermore, recent authors (e.g. Shore
1996) have viewed cognition as inextricably
linked with the environment that gives rise to
it. It has been suggested that "there is reason
to suspect that what we call cognition is in
fact a complex social phenomenon...
'Cognition' observed in everyday practice is
distributed stretched over, not divided
among mind, body, activity and culturally
organized settings (which include other
actors)... [Cognitive] 'activity' takes form
differently in different situations." (Lave
1988: 1)
Overall, the field of cognitive science consists
of research on parallel fronts: to name a few,
we have the neuroscientific study of the
structure of the brain, the psychological study
of
mental
abstractions,
and
the
socioanthropological study of the shaping of
these mental structures by culture.
Cognition. In view of the above description,
this term operates as a frame for a huge
variety of activities and mental processes. It is
occasionally distinguished from perception, to
denote "higher"-level abstractions. The term
also carries the implication that these
processes can be described scientifically; i.e.
the use of the term "cognition" references the
discipline of cognitive science and all of its
elaborations.
Perception. Perception typically refers to the
activity of processing physical input (e.g.
pressure waves, photons) into convenient
abstractions (e.g. pitch/timbre, color). In the
past, the term has been seen as a set of
processes distinct from cognition, but in
modern terms (in part due to the research
agenda of the vast field of cognitive science)
seen as subsumed under the umbrella term
cognition. But this distinction is often blurred;
hence we have a journal called Music
Perception, and a Society for Music
Perception and Cognition, both of which are
concerned with the same research agenda.

12

Perception and cognition are often used in

ways that attempt to transcend the influence
of culture. However, it has been argued more
recently that what is commonly called
"perception" should be viewed as a practice
an open-ended, intentional activity that is
accomplished actively by the musical
participants, while profoundly influenced by
the perceivers social context. (Berger 1997,
Bourdieu 1977) Perception should not be seen
simply as a raw, sensory inevitability, like a
sensation. Nonetheless, there are aspects of
perception that are universal, attributable to
the human sensory apparatus alone, and can
be studied in this way. In the work that
follows, I appeal to both sides of this
incarnation of the nature/nurture debate.
Cognitive model. A cognitive model may
comprise a "circle & arrow theory" of how
some aspect of cognition is structured (e.g.
information processing stages), or a set of
equations with the proper input-output
specifications and some internal structure that
is believed to represent some aspect of
cognition. In studying a cognitive model, one
considers issues such as predictive power and
model uniqueness. In other words, one
examines whether the model can foresee any
traits of the aspect of cognition it claims to
govern, and also whether success of the
model logically excludes other possible
models with the proper I/O mapping.
Representation. A representation is nothing
more than some way of organizing,
manipulating, and storing information.
Because of the overlap between cognitive
science and computer science, a cognitive
representation is often discussed in the same
terms as a computational data structure, or a
set of such structures usually seen as a
disembodied, symbolic abstraction, possibly
shared by some group of computational or
mental processes. The internal organization of
a representation, i.e. its data structures and
attributes, might be meant to reflect a theory
of mind. In such cases, to propose a certain
cognitive representation, say for rhythm,
means to posit an assertion about cognition; in
this sense a representation can be a kind of
model. The use of representations is linked

traditionally to the information-processing or

"cognitivist" view of the mind.
Varela et al. (1991) describe the "cognitivist"
view of cognitive science as follows:
Intelligent behavior presupposes the ability to
represent the world internally; an agent acts
by representing relevant features from its
environment; the success of the agent's
behavior depends on the accuracy of its
representations. While this may not seem
terribly controversial, the added claim of
cognitivism might: namely, that these
representations are physically realized in the
form of a symbolic code in the brain or in a
machine. (Varela et al. 1991: 40)
More recently, Clancey (1997) has broken
down this distinction by exploring the
difference between a mechanism and a
descriptive model. He says that "the
descriptive modeling literature often equates
knowledge,
knowledge
representations,
representations, mental models, knowledge
base, concepts..." (Clancey 1997: 50) but
claims that instead, "we have a memory for
coordinated, interacting processes, not for the
descriptions of them per se. These processes
correspond to the activation, recategorization,
and coordination of perceptual-conceptualmotor sequences and other temporal relations,
including rhythm and simultaneity." (ibid.:
68-69) The distinction is made between actual
information and the description of that
information, akin to the distinction between a
city and a map of that city. Clancey also
points out that descriptions are not the only
form of representation involved in cognition,
and storage is the wrong metaphor for
memory. (ibid.: 221) As an alternative
example he invokes the self-organization with
memory of neurobiological systems, where
the information lies in the physical
organization of interconnected neural
pathways, qualitatively different from the
mechanism of storage and retrieval systems.
(ibid: 224) In such cases it is unclear where
one would locate the role of a representation,
other than as a purely descriptive picture of
the system.

Music. A definition of music would seem to

be necessary, but I will not attempt such a
maneuver. However, it is enlightening to
discuss problems one might encounter in
constructing such a definition.
(1) Many disparate activities may be
classified as musical. The two primal soundgenerating activities of rhythmic motion of
the limbs and melodic outpourings of the
voice form a basis for many kinds of music. A
whole continuum of instruments in the wind,
string, and percussion families derive from,
and even refer to, these two fundamental acts.
Also, musical activities can appear nonmusical in certain contexts, and vice-versa;
furthermore, the designation "musical/nonmusical" is highly culturally contingent. What
passes for non-music (e.g., sine-tone
sequences in psychoacoustic experiments) can
still be perceived musically, i.e., perceptually
organized according to a listener's culturally
contingent music-listening strategies. It is not
clear where in our perceptual/cognitive
systems we would mark the cutoff between
sociocultural contingency and psychological
fact. Hence, some such experiments may not
be as close to measuring cognitive universals
of music as some experimenters might
believe.
(2) Music possesses different status and roles
in different cultures and subcultures. In the
west we have many musics associated with
various communities: concert music's highculture spectacle, the colloquial pulsating
functionality of an urban hit single, a
Hollywood film score's emotional manipulations, the precise environmental design of
elevator music. In many such cases it does not
make sense to discuss "the musical object"
divorced from its context. A full
understanding of the perception and cognition
of music must include these disparate
functions of music. For one rarely attends to
elevator music with the attention that one is
obliged to give in a concert hall, nor does one
often give concert music the level of physical
engagement normally expected on a dance
floor. It appears that these sociocultural
boundaries often serve to delimit not only
music's functionality but also our reception,
13

attention, and understanding. When speaking

of music cognition, we should also address
musical functionality, and hence we should
keep these social factors in mind.
Grouping. By grouping usually we mean the
perceptual or cognitive unification of some
series of contiguous events or stimuli, due to
proximity and/or similarity (Lerdahl &
Jackendoff 1983). It can also mean a
unification of non-contiguous events or
stimuli due to periodic or non-periodic
repetition (Parncutt 1994). In musicperception studies, grouping usually refers to
the temporal domain, though synchronous
tones can be perceptually grouped also, to
form a complex timbre or harmony.
Rhythm. I propose that we construe rhythm
broadly, as any perceived or inferred temporal
organization in a series of events. The
organization itself need not be cognized
thoroughly; it may merely be perceived to
exist. The perception of rhythm occurs
usually because of some kind of perceptual
grouping of events. Rhythm need not evoke a
sensation of pulse (e.g. circadian rhythms,
conversational
speech,
most
Western
contemporary concert music), nor need
rhythm be "intended" by the producer of these
events (ocean waves, sewing machines); nor
need it be constrained to any sensory
modality, social context, or timescale. In
particular, rhythm can be but need not be a
raw sensory phenomenon. Note that this
listener-centered definition allows that one
person may perceive rhythm where another
does not.
Pulse. Literally, pulse denotes any periodicity
inherent or perceived in any rhythm or
combination of rhythms. It also strongly
connotes isochrony (i.e., a fixed tempo), often
connotes some degree of perceptual
"salience," and weakly connotes an
approximate frequency range between 1.2 and
3.3 Hz (a fuzzy category known as the tactus
range, also the range of the human heartbeat
pulse, human locomotion, and the infant
sucking reflex). However, from a scientific
perspective, these connotations could be
dispensed with entirely in the definition; they
14

seem to derive from the stricter meaning via

linguistic and cultural usage of the term itself.
Beat is roughly equivalent to pulse, except
that it is more variable; in some contexts it
more strongly connotes the tactus range,
whereas in others it functions at any
timescale. Beats can also function as an
abstract quantity, so that notes may last
fractions of a beat. Some authors (Lerdahl &
Jackendoff 1983) have insisted that beats are
to be seen as points in time, rather than as
intervals of time. However, common usage
suggests other possible meanings. Hence
beats can both mean the discrete time point at
which the interval occurs (as in "start this note
on the beat") and the continuous interval
between such time points (as in "hold this
note for three-and-a-half beats").
Tactus. The tactus has been long understood
to mean the moderate-tempo pulse present in
most rhythmic music. Typically when asked
to tap a finger or foot to a piece of music,
listeners choose a regular time period that is
in the approximate range of 300 to 800
milliseconds, averaging a little slower than 2
beats per second (Fraisse 1982). As the music
gets faster, a listener is inclined to find
progressively slower pulses such that they fit
within this range, and vice-versa. The tactus
range is also the range of "spontaneous"
tempo, that is, of the tempo produced by the
typical person asked to tap a steady pulse.
This range coincides with a moderate walking
pace, a human heartbeat, the rate of jaw
movement in chewing, and the infant sucking
reflex. It is also a fairly comfortable rate at
which to tap a foot or a finger, since it is
neither too fast for motor control, nor too
slow for accurate, regular timing. Hence the
tactus seems to correspond to natural
timescales involved with human motion; we
might imagine a chipmunk to have a faster
tactus.
Polyrhythm. This term literally means
multiple rhythms appearing simultaneously; it
is simply polyphony viewed in its rhythmic
dimension. Polyrhythm also frequently
connotes multiple cyclically recurring
rhythms, but only because the term is used
often in conjunction with African musics, in

which cyclic rhythms are commonplace.

Cyclicality itself is not inherent in
polyrhythm. Contrary to how it is often
discussed in the literature, the individual
rhythms in musical polyrhythm are usually
more complex than mere periodic pulses. (I
would call the latter construct polycycle, or
trivial polyrhythm, not because it is trivial to
reproduce but because it is assembled from
trivial individual rhythms; an example would
be what we call "three-against-four.")
Meter. Most generally, meter is a periodic
grouping of a musical time unit. Traditionally
in European concert music, meter connotes a
hierarchy of weak and strong beats. However,
as I shall elaborate in chapter 5, meter can
exist without such a hierarchy. Meter denotes
a subharmonic (or grouping) of a pulse, and
might also imply a higher harmonic (or
subdivision) of the same pulse. That is, it can
simultaneously group and subdivide pulses
into regular units. For example, the time
signature 6/8 denotes a cycle of two pulses
each divided into three equal subunits. Note
that meter is treated as a periodic grouping of
pulses i.e. as a cognitive/perceptual phenomenon, not as an objective reality of the
acoustic signal. However, this distinction is
often elided, so we might speak of the meter
of a piece of music. (See chapter 5 for more
on this issue.)
Expressive timing. Some theorists have tried
to divide music into its structural and
expressive components. This distinction also
tends to fall along the same lines as discrete
versus continuous elements. Expressivity in
performance is taken to mean that which
deviates from regularity; one can be
expressive with intonation, with dynamics,
with tempo and other kinds of timing. The
regularity of a group or unit can be taken to
mean, according to Seashore (1938), the norm
set by the unit itself; hence the understanding
of expression amounts to a kind of statistics.
Expressive timing has come to mean the ways
in which performers deviate from strict
metronomicity.
The separation of the structural and the
expressive is of course a problematic

distinction, for it (1) suggests that composers

cannot be expressive, and (2) presupposes a
distinction between the fixed and the regular,
between
the
composition
and
the
performance. At worst, however, this
distinction amounts merely to an unfortunate
choice of wording, or an impoverished
definition.
But
just
as
the
term
"representation" has been appropriated by the
cognitive-science community, so the term
"expression" has been redefined provisionally
by the cognitive-musicology community to
refer to a subset of what is typically seen as
expressive performance. While I am aware of
this issue, I will use the terminology as it is
used in the literature on expressive timing.
Namely, the term refers to the differences,
along the temporal dimension, between a
"score" and a "performance," or in the case of
improvised groove-based music, between
regularity of the underlying meter and fluidity
of the performed rhythms.
Microtiming. Microtiming, as I have been
using it, refers to expressive timing at the subtactus level, characterized by high-frequency
activity. It is complementary to tempo
modulation, which has a low-frequency
emphasis. It corresponds to Bilmes's (1993)
concept of deviation, but microtiming is more
general since it doesn't connote an ideal
metric referent (as in deviation from
something). Microtiming refers to the entire
range of sub-tactus, non-notatable rhythmic
expression, pertaining both to music and to
speech, from which much musical rhythm
originates.
Groove. I believe that African and AfricanAmerican dance musics and their descendant
genres should be treated in terms of a
"groove" which might be described (but not
defined) as an isochronous pulse that is
established collectively by an interlocking
composite of rhythmic entities. A groove
tends to feature a high degree of regularity but
also conveys some sense of animation.
Groove involves an emphasis on the process
of music-making, rather than on the syntax
(Keil & Feld 1994). The focus is less on
coherence and the notes themselves, and more
on spontaneity and how those notes are
15

played. Groove concerns the animation and

decoration of time as it is shared by musicians
and audience. This relates to the functional
role of African and African-American musics
in their communities. It is worthwhile to point
out the common observation that both African
and African American peoples exhibit a
cultural tendency to treat music on a functional basis. That is, music is not merely treated
as a work of art for art's sake, but as an
activity that is integral to life, partially
structuring everyday reality.
A salient feature of groove-based musics
seems to be the attentiveness to an additional
unifying rhythmic level below the level of the
tactus. For example, if the quarter note is the
tactus, one may also focus on the sixteenth
note to heighten rhythmic precision. It is
verified experimentally that discrimination of
long temporal intervals is more variable than
discrimination of short ones (Weber's law),
and the sum of the variances of n subdivisions
is a factor of n smaller than the variance of
the total interval. Hence we actually gain
accuracy in timing a moderate pulse by
subdividing it. According to Fraisse (1982),
music listeners typically divide rhythmic
intervals into two categories, long and short.
These intervals are usually in the ratio of 2:1,
indicating that the smaller interval is a
subdivision of the larger one; also, the long
interval is usually in the tactus range, whereas
the short one lies in the subtactus range.
Fraisse notes that these two categories have
different perceptual implications. During the
long intervals, we can be aware of the passage
of time, whereas we do not sense temporal
extent during the short intervals. However, we
can have qualitative awareness of the
grouping of numbers of such brief intervals
(Fraisse 1956, cited in Clarke 1999), such as
their "two-ness or three-ness, [or] accentedness or unaccentedness" (Brower 1993: 25).
For this and other reasons, the smallest
operative musical subdivision of the tactus
has been referred to as a "temporal atom,"
which was then abbreviated by Bilmes (1993)
to "tatum" in homage to the master pianist,
Art Tatum [CD-1].

16

Groove has no correlate in European concert

music, and is therefore indescribable by
models derived from it. Groove-based musics
do not often feature the phrase-final
lengthening, ritardandi, accelerandi, rubati,
or other expressive tempo modulations of
European classical music; rather, they involve
miniscule, subtle microtiming deviations from
rigid regularity, while maintaining overall
pulse isochrony. This mode of rhythmic
expression has a whole tacit grammar unto
itself, with its own set of esthetics,
techniques, and methods of development. To
our knowledge, while much research effort
has focused on the investigation of the
aforementioned tempo-modulating phenomena (e.g. Longuet-Higgins 1982, Todd 1989,
Repp 1990), very little attention has been
devoted to expressive timing in the context of
an isochronous pulse or groove. Sometimes
they are described as "small accelerations and
decelerations," (Magill & Pressing 1997), i.e.
in terms of a larger construct called tempo, as
if to imply the existence of some kind of
musical time independent of the musical
events that shape it.
Bilmes (1993) developed a model for groovebased expressive timing that features two
simultaneous isochronous pulses, one at the
foot-tapping tactus level (with a period
typically between 300 and 800 ms), and
another, the temporal atom or tatum, at the
smallest operative subdivision of that pulse
(typically 80 to 150 ms). The onset time of a
note occurring on a specific tatum (i.e. a
specific sixteenth, twenty-fourth, or other
such note) can be transformed by a continuous deviation from perfect quantization.
Hence rhythmic expression can occur at the
tatum level without perturbing the overall
tactus or tempo. This representation is described and expanded upon in chapter 7.
Attention. Attention can be described or
defined in numerous ways. As Jones & Yee
(1993: 70) put it, "Ultimately, definitions of
attention become theories of attention." It has
been described variously as the allocating of
info-processing resources to a specific source
of information, frequently to the neglect of
others; the differential processing of simultan-

eous sources of information; or simply, the

mind's ability to focus and concentrate. It is
believed by many that musical meter provides
us with an attentive mechanism a temporal
template against which to process information
in time, reducing demands on memory. This
issue is discussed in chapter 5.
Now, armed with these terms, we will turn
our attention to the cognitive science of
rhythm perception and cognition.

17

3. New Paradigms: Embodied

Mind, Situated Cognition
Music provides an especially interesting
laboratory for the study of cognition. Because
so much musical behavior is non-linguistic in
nature, music tends to challenge dominant
linguistic paradigms, which reduce all
cognition to rational thought processes such
as problem solving, deductive reasoning, and
inference. Unfortunately, most research in
music perception and cognition has focused
on a very narrow band of human musical
phenomena, namely the tonal concert music
of pre-20th-century Western Europe, as
filtered through contemporary Europeanderived performance practices. Hence we
have an abundance of tonal-music-inspired
models and representations for perceptual and
cognitive phenomena, focusing almost
entirely on pitch organization in the largescale time domain. Some examples are
theories of recursive formal hierarchies
(Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983) and of musical
meaning from deferred melodic or harmonic
expectations (Narmour 1990, Meyer 1956).
Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983) contend that in
the way that information-processing stages
are organized, musical cognition is fully
analogous to linguistic cognition. Such
models suppose that the cognition of music
consists of the logical parsing of recursive
tree structures to reveal greater and greater
levels of hierarchical organization.
A side effect of the traditional linguisticsbased approach has been the adoption of a
major tenet of the Anglo-American "analytic"
philosophical tradition, namely that rational
language as a logical system has been taken to
form the basis of virtually all thought and
meaning (Prem 1996). Even in the work of
Lakoff (1987, discussed in the following
chapter), which purports to frame linguistic
understanding and meaning in terms of the
human body and its environment, the theory
centers around language. Such work would
have it that no non-linguistic modes of
discourse exist, and that all meaning is
attached to language. However, music pro18

vides a clear counterexample, with its basis in

bodily activity and its strong emotional
component.
To be sure, some musical features may have
elements in common with language. Bregman
(1990) and Handel (1990) suggest
independently that similar functions operate
in the perception of both speech and music at
early levels of processing in order to organize
the complex acoustic signal into extended
patterns of events, presumably subject to
some rules. At a higher level, the expressive
manipulation of rhythmic timing in musical
performance invites comparison with the use
of timing in speech for semantic emphasis.
Similarly, the regular grouping of pulses into
an intelligible template occurs both in music
and in metered verse. But such functions are
of a different order from the abstract
formulations of linguistic theories. Expressive
timing and grouping have less to do with rules
governing sentence structure than they do
with either low-level auditory processing or
the high-level shades of meaning possible in
spoken language. Although aspects of musical
behavior may have elements in common with
linguistic behavior, a large part of musical
understanding seems to operate overall quite
separately from the realm of rational language
and inferential reasoning.
Though often posited as musical universals,
many of the results of Lerdahl and Jackendoff
(1983) do not carry over effectively to the
vast majority of non-Western musics, nor do
they account fully for the perception and
cognition of Western tonal or atonal music.
The inapplicability of these linguisticsderived models to other musics is quite
glaring in the cases of West African and
African-American musics such as jazz,
rumba, funk, and hip-hop. In these cases,
certain salient musical features, notably the
concept of groove, seem to have no analogue
in rational language. Although groove is a
highly subjective quality, music that grooves
can sustain interest or attention for long
stretches of time to an acculturated listener,
even if "nothing is happening" on the musical
surface. A prime example is James Brown's
music [CD-2], which frequently has precious

little melodic or harmonic material and is

highly repetitive, but would never be
described as static. The fact that groove
carries enough weight to override other
musical factors in certain kinds of musical
experience suggests that the traditional
linguistics-based viewpoint does not suffice in
describing the entirety of music cognition.
A major reason for this mismatch between
tonal-music grammars and most music of the
world is not (as is commonly thought)
differing levels of musical sophistication or
complexity, but rather a major cultural
disparity in approaches to rhythmic organization and musical form. I claim that an
essential component of this disparity is the
status of the body and physical movement in
the act of making music. The role of the body
in various musics of the world becomes
clearer when one observes the function that
music and dance assume in these cultures, the
common cultural/linguistic metaphors associated with musical activity. All of these
observations have led us to study the role of
the body in cognition in general.
Cognitivism & Traditional Cognitive
Science
Until the late 1980s, generally in cognitive
science, and particularly in artificial
intelligence, the logic paradigm had prevailed.
The cognitivist or objectivist point of view
involved the assumption that thought
amounted to the mechanical manipulation of
abstract symbols, and that the mind was an
abstract machine, manipulating symbols by
algorithmic computation in the way a
computer does. All meaning arose via
correspondences between symbols (words,
mental representations) and things in the
external world. These symbols formed
internal representations of external reality,
independent of any limitations of the human
body, the human perceptual system, and the
human nervous system. The mind was seen as
a mirror of nature, and human thought as
abstract and disembodied. Human bodies and
their environments were thus incidental to the
nature of meaningful concepts or reason. The
materials (or "hardware," in computer

terminology) with which brains think and

senses perceive were believed irrelevant to
the abstract processes ("software") that these
systems conduct. The brain was merely a
specific instance of a computing engine, of
which all such manifestations would be
formally equivalent (von Neumann 1951).
Hence, in principle, a brain could be replaced
by a computer, and in particular computers
can do anything that brains can do; machines
that mechanically manipulate symbols that
correspond to things in the world were
believed capable of meaningful thought and
reason. (Lakoff 1987: xii-xiii) The concept of
a representation, an abstract data structure for
storing and manipulating such symbolic
information, is central to such cognitivist
theories of mind. Typically, a cognitive
representation has taken the form of a
"message board" a disembodied abstraction
whose shared contents provide an interface
among various independent informationprocessing units.
These tacit assumptions spawned generations
of experiments in artificial intelligence in
which symbolic, language-based reasoning
was taken to be the cornerstone of intelligent
behavior. A classic example of this approach
appears in the medical consultation program,
MYCIN (Shortliffe 1976). As a so-called
"expert system," the program was provided
with task-specific data taken from real-life
experts, thereby enabling it to achieve
substantial competence in a restricted domain
of analytical reasoning. However, when
running such an expert-system program, the
computer merely manipulates abstract
symbols according to a body of explicitly
formulated rules and guidelines. One could
never claim that the program "understood" the
ins and outs of human health issues, but
merely that it contained a representation of
such information and a model for manipulating this information based solely on its
symbolic characteristics. Furthermore, its
expected input was highly restricted in range,
such that grammatical errors or ambiguous
terminology could, for example, cause it to
diagnose a rusty Chevy as having the measles
(Lenat and Feigenbaum 1992: 197; see also
Clancey 1997: 29-45). Such text-inspired
19

approaches to knowledge have modeled

intelligence as disembodied symbol manipulation.
The above description raises the hotly debated
issue of the difference between "real"
intelligence and "simulated" intelligence.
Presumably, MYCIN could pass some
restricted kind of Turing test, in which an
impartial expert might judge the computer's
input-output behavior to appear intelligent.
However, I must stress that a microworld
representation of intelligence is not human
intelligence. For intelligent behavior encompasses not just symbolic manipulation and
deductive reasoning, but also interaction with
others, attunement to one's surroundings, and
awareness of the relationship between oneself
and one's world, not to mention intelligent
action, creativity, physical coordination,
emotion, and countless other behavioral
manifestations. One finds that in traditional
cognitive science, the emphasis on things
"mental" has been at the expense of the
physical, and the disproportionate attention
paid to "the rational" has often occurred in
opposition to the emotional and the intuitive.
Yet everyday human intelligence includes all
of these dimensions.
Embodied Cognition
Thankfully, recent conceptual developments
in cognitive science move towards the
inclusion of such dimensions. In particular,
cognitive scientists have begun to infer
connections between the structure of mental
processes and physical embodiment. The
viewpoint known as embodied or situated
cognition treats cognition as an activity that is
structured by the body and its situatedness in
its environment that is, as embodied action.
In this view, cognition depends upon
experiences based in having a body with
sensorimotor capacities; these capacities are
embedded in an encompassing biological,
psychological, and cultural context. Sensory
processes (perception) and motor processes
(action), having evolved together, are seen
therefore as fundamentally inseparable,
mutually informative, and structured so as to

20

ground our conceptual systems. (Varela et al.

1991: 173)
The embodiment hypothesis suggests an
alternative basis for cognitive processes.
Perception is understood as perceptually
guided action. Our eyes move to frame the
visual field and to focus on regions of that
field; our heads move to facilitate binaural
localization. Such behavior is facilitated
through elaborate feedback mechanisms
among sensory and motor apparatus. Hence,
cognitive structures emerge from the recurrent
sensorimotor patterns that enable the
perceiver to guide his or her actions in the
local situation. That is, the emergent,
reinforced neural connections between the
senses and the motor system form the basis
for cognition. The mind's embodiment
provides natural biases for inductive models
and representations, and thus automatically
grounds cognitive processes that might
normally be considered disembodied. This
view provides a sharp contrast from the
standard information-processing viewpoint, in
which cognition is seen as a problem of
recovering details of the pre-given outer
world. (Varela et al. 1991: 173)
In this light, the mind is no longer seen as
passively reflective of the outside world, but
rather as an active constructor of its own
reality. In particular, cognition and bodily
activity intertwine to a high degree. In this
perspective, the fundamental building blocks
of cognitive processes are control schemata
for motor patterns that arise from perceptual
interaction with the body's environment. The
drives for the cognitive system arise from
within the system itself, in the form of needs
and goals. (Prem 1996)
Neuroscientific evidence corroborates this
viewpoint. As was pointed out earlier, we can
make more sense of our brains and bodies if
we view the nervous system as a system for
producing motor output. The cerebellum is
connected almost directly to all areas of the
brain sensory transmissions, reticular
(arousal/attention) systems, hippocampus
(episodic
memories),
limbic
system
(emotions, behavior). All areas of our brain

seem geared to coping with their functions as

they pertain to problems of motor control.
(Hardcastle 1996: 7) Such evidence from
neuroscience allows for postulating shared
mechanisms for low-level control of
embodied action and higher-level cognition;
motor plans for limb movement could interact
with goal-oriented abstract plans. The mind
thereby becomes a distributed entity, an
emergent characteristic of the whole sensorycentral-motor neural system, existing in the
elaborate network of interconnections that
extend throughout the body.
Situated Cognition
The above characterization of the embodied
mind covers merely half of the picture. If we
grant that cognition is structured at least to
some degree by bodily experience, then we
must understand the body to be immersed in
an environment that shapes its experience.
Hence the philosophy of embodiment also
stresses temporal, physical, and sociocultural
situatedness.
It has been shown that the framing of
cognition in terms of the body and its
environment provides not only limiting but
also enabling constraints for cognition. Work
in animal behavior has addressed the potential
links between sensory and motor systems, as
in the classic experiment by Held & Hein
(1958). In this study, a group of kittens were
raised in the dark and exposed to light only
under controlled conditions. A first group of
animals was allowed to move around normally, but each of them had to pull around a cart
in which rode a member of the second group.
The two groups thus shared nearly identical
visual experience, but one group experienced
the world actively and the other passively.
Upon release after a few weeks, the first
group of kittens behaved normally, but the
second group behaved as if blind, bumping
into objects and falling over edges. Hence
objects in the world are apprehended not
simply by visual extraction of features, but
rather by the visual guidance of action.
(Varela et al. 1991: 175) In a similar but more
humane fashion, it has been observed that
infants who can walk have qualitatively

different reactions to certain stimuli, such as

slopes and falloffs, than infants who can't
(Thelen & Smith 1994: 217-220).
There is reason to believe that such
programmability of the brain extends far
beyond childhood. While it is commonly
known that cognitive development proceeds
rapidly along with brain growth and cortical
myelinization during the crucial first years of
life (Passingham 1982: 112ff), it is not often
recognized that many networks of the brain
retain a susceptibility to reprogramming
throughout an individual's life (Laughlin et al.
1992: 41). The remarkable case studies of
Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1998) and
Sacks (1985) further attest to the adaptability
and plasticity of the brain throughout
adulthood. Hence we may discern a continuum of neural structures ranging from "hardwired" evolutionary traits to highly flexible,
environmentally adaptive features (Shore
1996:17). The existence of this continuum
supports the embodied cognitive paradigm,
which encompasses the body and its environment.
In addition to the universals of cognition
based upon having a body and its
sensorimotor systems, we study the particular
social and cultural factors that contribute to
the development of mind:
There is reason to suspect that what we call
cognition is in fact a complex social
phenomenon... The point is not so much that
arrangements of knowledge in the head
correspond in a complicated way to the
social world outside the head, but that they
are socially organized in such a fashion as
to be indivisible. 'Cognition' observed in
everyday practice is distributed stretched
over, not divided among mind, body,
activity and culturally organized settings.
(Lave 1988: 1)
We may rely upon various attributes of our
physical, social, and cultural environment to
support or augment our mental capacities.
Lave (1988) studied the arithmetic of adults
of various backgrounds in the grocery store.
Lave's results showed that in making purchase
21

decisions, these situated agents employed a

flexible real-time arithmetic in order to select
better prices per unit weight, continually
taking into account the constraints imposed
by the layout of the stores, the capacities of
their home refrigerators, and the dietary
requirements of their family members. Such
shopping prowess skill at situated arithmetic
was rarely reflected in subjects performance
on grade-school math problems. Cognition as
demonstrated in practice was found to be not
at all in the same realm as cognition in an
abstract, un-situated setting. Similarly, Clark
(1997: 213-216) discusses the ambiguity of
the boundary between "mind" and "world,"
along the lines of a distinction between "user"
and "tool." When a bird drops a nut from a
great height to crack it open, does the ground
become a tool? (Clark 1997: 214) Rather, the
bird is exploiting an aspect of its environment
to extend its physical capabilities; the concept
of a tool dissolves.
Along with the embodied/situated paradigm
came the gradual recasting of the notion of a
representation. In a classic paper entitled
"Intelligence without Representation," Brooks
(1991) reported research in situated robotics,
in which artificial intelligence was
"approached in an incremental manner, with
strict reliance on interfacing to the real world
through perception and action" such that
"reliance on representation disappears."
(Brooks 1991: 139) In Brooks's view, the
intelligent system is decomposed into independent, parallel activity producers, which all
interface directly to the environment (rather
than to each other) such that their respective
perceptions and actions can override one
another in the system's resultant observed
behavior. Brooks aimed to simulate entire
embodied, situated intelligent systems.
Abandoning the cause of simulating human
intelligence, he considered simulated insect
intelligence to be the most feasible first step.
In doing so, he cast his work in an
evolutionist's light; in his opinion, nature has
conducted research on situated agents for
billions of years, so he modeled his work after
the gradual accrual of complexity in the
evolution of species.

22

While rather extreme in its views, Brooks's

work broke down the traditional notion of a
representation. In particular, an important
distinction is made in the embodied viewpoint
between the point of view of the subject and
that of an "objective" observer of the subject
in its environment. (Prem 1996) The notion of
a representation was seen to stem directly
from this supposedly objective position of the
observer, and hence its actual role in
cognition for the situated agent was
questioned. Later, Coelho (1995) suggested
that we not throw out the baby with the
bathwater. While it was granted that purely
representational accounts were probably "too
limited for modelling the recurrent processing
that is the norm in the brain" (Coelho 1995:
311), the validity of the partial role of
representations in the mind is proven by our
capacity for memory formation and recall.
Above all, the notion of representation has
been retained as a valuable descriptive tool in
the study of cognition, but not as a structural
necessity in many cases of cognition itself.
Hence caution must be used in relying on
representations to define a cognitive model.
In sum, the theory of embodiment encompasses both neuropsychological and socioenvironmental views of cognition. Embodied
cognition stresses physical, temporal, and
functional
situatedness,
and
enforces
interaction between the agent's body and its
environment. Such a holistic view prevents
some inappropriate simplifications and unrealistic assumptions because it enforces dealing
with unexpected contingencies, provides
specificity, and incorporates energetic and
resource considerations. (Mataric 1996) And,
quite significantly, the embodied view of
cognitive science allows for direct cultural
interaction, which is undeniably crucial for
both language and music.

4. Music Cognition and

Embodiment
How might we connect the theoretical
framework of embodied cognition with the
study of music? First, we should examine the
role of the body in music perception,
cognition, and production, and attempt to take
into account the realities of our perceptual
systems. Let us address connections between
aspects of musical time rhythm, timing,
meter, phrasing and the body. People often
speak of a musical groove as something that
induces motion. In describing his aesthetic
criteria for rhythm tracks, a colleague of mine
involved in hip-hop music distinguished
between a musical excerpt that "makes me
bob my head" and one that doesn't (Bilal
1997). Many of us have witnessed motion
induced in infants or toddlers via music, but
this behavior is not universal, involuntary, or
even reliable. This capacity to entrain to a
regular aural pulse may be an evolutionary
vestige of a previously useful ability that has
more recently fallen into disuse. While
nobody can account directly for this phenomenon, it clearly involves regular, rhythmic
bodily movement as a kind of sympathetic
reaction to regular rhythmic sound that is, as
a kind of dance.
Recent neuropsychological studies of music
perception have affirmed the cognitive role of
body motion in music perception and
production. From a meta-analysis of studies
of brain-damaged patients with lesions
localized in various regions of the brain, it
was suggested that the "rhythmic component
... of an auditory image cannot be activated
without recruiting neural systems known to be
involved in motor activity, especially those
involved in the planning of motor sequences"
(Carroll-Phelan 1994; see also Peretz 1993).
Such neuropsychological data have allowed
hypotheses about the induction of a sense of
beat or pulse in terms of the so-called
sensorimotor loop, which includes the
posterior parietal lobe, pre-motor cortex,
cerebro-cerebellum, and basal ganglia. In the
sensorimotor perspective, a perceived beat is
literally an imagined movement; it seems to

involve the same neural facilities as motor

activity, most notably motor-sequence planning. (Todd 1997) Hence, the act of listening
to music involves the same mental processes
that generate bodily motion.
One might suppose that musical gestures
might be more efficacious in eliciting such
sympathetic behavior if they represent aspects
of human motion somehow. Such sounds
might include the dynamic swells associated
with breathing, the steady pulse associated
with walking, and the rapid rhythmic
figurations associated with speech. Note that
each of these three examples occurs at a
different timescale; characteristic frequencies
of the first regime might fall in the range of .1
to 1 Hz, the second 1 to 3 Hz, the third 3 to 10
Hz. In fact, it is interesting to observe the
correspondences in frequency range in these
groups of behaviors:
1) breathing, moderate arm gesture, body
sway "phrase" 0.1 - 1 Hz
2) heartbeat, sucking/chewing, locomotion,
intercourse, head-bob "tactus" 1 - 3 Hz
3) speech/lingual motion, hand gesture,
digital motion "tatum" 3 - 10 Hz
Versions of this list were suggested by Fraisse
(1982) and Todd (1997). It is a plausible
hypothesis that musical activity on these three
timescales might exploit these correspondences.
A variety of simple truisms support this view.
For example, most wind-instrument phrase
lengths are naturally constrained by lung
capacity. Tactus-heavy urban dance music
often makes sonic references to foot-stomping
and to sexually suggestive slapping of skin.
Blues guitarists, jazz pianists, and quinto
players in Afro-Cuban rumba are said to
"speak" with their hands and fingers. All such
instances involve the embodiment of the
musical performer and the listening audience.

23

Time and Timing

Let us return to the domain of expressive
timing. In groove-based contexts, rhythmic
expression occurs at an extremely fine
timescale rapid enough to rule out a simple
auditory-feedback
mechanism
for
its
implementation (Fraisse 1982). This relates to
an age-old question in neuroscience, known
as the problem of serial order in behavior
(Lashley 1951). The question is how to
explain our assimilation and production of
very fast sequences of events in time, given
that human reflexes and neural transmission
speeds would seem to be too slow to account
for them. Lashley cites the common
experience of mistakes in serial order of rapid
sequences, such as typing, as evidence of
hierarchical organization in this kind of
behavior.
There is evidence that temporal, rhythmic,
and grouping judgments and productions
employ different modes of processing for
times under roughly one half-second than
they do for longer times (Fraisse 1956: 29-30,
cited in Clarke 1999; also Preusser 1972,
Michon 1975). These short-time processes are
described variously as "pre-cognitive,"
"sensory," or "immediate" as a kind of
sensation, recognition, or gestalt perception,
rather than a kind of analytical or counting
process. It has been suggested that this cutoff
corresponds to the transition between socalled echoic and short-term memory, as
indicated by the timescales involved and by
other experiments (Michon 1975, Brower
1993).
Consequently, these different regimes of
memory should distinguish musical rhythms
above and below this approximate cut-off as
qualitatively different phenomena. For pulsebased music, this cut-off lies in the middle of
the tactus range, about 300 to 800
milliseconds; rhythmic material below this is
perceived categorically as combinations of
subdivisions of a main regulating pulse, and
durations above it are considered to be on the
level of metric grouping of pulses. By this
division, as I shall discuss in the next chapter,
echoic memory covers the immediate
24

timescale of rhythmic activity, whereas shortterm or working memory covers meter and
phrases. These different types of memory
involve different kinds of processing. We
entrain to a pulse based on the echoic storage
of the previous pulse and some matched
internal oscillator periodicity; we feel the
relationships among strong and weak beats
(accentual meter); we count times between
phrases or bars (metric grouping); and we
recognize sub-pulse rhythms qualitatively
(Brower 1993). An embodied account of
rhythm perception and cognition would need
to factor in these inherent distinctions of
human memory.
The role of different kinds of memory points
to the need for different models to explain
rhythmic expertise at such a fine scale. A hint
comes from bat and owl echolocation, in
which neural delay-line architectures serve to
give the creatures much higher temporal
resolution than neural transmission would
seemingly allow (Feldman 1997). One could
say that the animals' temporal acuity exists
"in" these long neural pathways in the
physical structure of the perceptual apparatus.
A working hypothesis, inspired by the
existence of such structures, is that precisely
timed rhythmic activity involves the entire
body in a complex, holistic fashion,
combining audio, visual, and somatosensory
channels.
According to the embodiment hypothesis,
cognitive structures emerge from reinforced
inter-modal sensorimotor coupling. In this
view, short-time rhythm cognition might
include physical sensation, visual entrainment, and sonic reinforcement, unmediated by
a symbolic representation. Cognition on the
part of musicians especially on polyphonic,
multi-limb instruments such as drums or
piano apparently involves the physical act
of making music as a primary ingredient.
Consider the components of the sensorymotor image associated with rhythm
perception that are rooted in echoic memory:
a phrasal/body-sway-oscillator component
(respirator-based), a tactus/foot-tap-oscillator
component (locomotor-based) (Todd 1994),
and a tatum/multiple-finger-tap-oscillator

component
(speechor
digit-based).
According to the embodied-cognition viewpoint, what have been previously called our
internal representations may consist of no
more than these very sensorimotor couplings.
Kinesthetics
Words like kinesthetic, haptic, and proprioceptive refer to the psychology of bodily
feedback. They all refer to the sensation of
bodily position, presence, or movement
resulting from tactile sensation and from
vestibular input. We rely on such awareness
whenever we engage in any physical activity;
it helps us hold objects in our hands, walk
upright, lean against walls, guide food into
our mouths, and swallow it. In these cases,
there is a strong interaction between
kinesthetic and visual input. Similarly, in the
playing of musical instruments, we must treat
sonic and kinesthetic dimensions as interacting parameters; we must bear in mind the
spatio-motor mode of musical performance.
All too often, theorists and psychologists have
treated musical motion in terms of abstract,
time-varying auditory images, while ignoring
the motions exerted by the performer. Musical
motion is seen as bound up with structural
abstractions in pitch space or other sound
worlds, involving the play of forms against
one another. A typical view is evident in the
following quote from noted composer-theorist
Roger Sessions. "The gestures which music
embodies are, after all, invisible gestures; one
may almost define them as consisting of
movement in the abstract, movement which
exists in time but not in space, movement, in
fact, which gives time its meaning and its
significance for us." (Sessions 1950: 20,
quoted in Shove & Repp 1995: 58) A recent
review of the concept of musical motion by
Shove and Repp (1995) highlights the often
overlooked fact that musical motion is, first
and foremost, audible human motion. To
amplify this view, Shove and Repp make use
of Handel's (1989: 181) three levels of event
awareness: the raw psychophysical perception
of tones, the perception of abstract qualities of
the tones apart from their source, and lastly
the apprehension of environmental objects

that give rise to the sound event. This last

level is aligned with the "ecological level" of
perception as suggested by Gibson (1979). At
this level, "the listener does not merely hear
the sound of a galloping horse or bowing
violinist; rather, the listener hears a horse
galloping and a violinist bowing." (Shove &
Repp 1995: 59) In this ecological framework,
the source of perceived musical movement is
the human performer, as is abundantly clear
to the listener attending to music as a
performance event (ibid : 60). We connect the
perception of musical motion at the ecological
level to human motion. This suggests that
musical perception involves an understanding
of bodily motion that is, a kind of
empathetic embodied cognition.
For musicians, a major part of musical
competence involves the bodily coordination
of limbs, digits, and for wind instruments,
breathing. Such bodily awareness is most
demanding on polyphonic instruments, where
multiple sonic streams are generated
simultaneously. (In this way, drums and
keyboard instruments are the paradigm for
body-centered polyphony. The drum set and
the organ are the only four-limb instruments;
piano should be considered a three-limb
instrument including the use of the pedals,
which are often coordinated strongly with the
sounds generated by the hands.) For musical
performers, the difference between musical
and human motion collapses; the rhythmic
motions of the performer and of the musical
object are essentially one and the same
(Shove & Repp 1995: 60).
Blacking (1973) raised the issue of
kinesthetics in musical performance in
comparing two types of kalimba ('thumb
piano') music among the Venda community of
South Africa. One very physical type,
practiced by amateur boys, featured complex
melodies that appeared to be secondary
artifacts of patterned thumb movements; the
regularity of the movements generated the
jagged melodic result. The other type, a more
popular style practiced by professional
musicians, had simpler melodies with small
intervals and flowing contours, directed more
by an abstract melodic logic than by a
25

spatiomotor one. Baily (1985, 1989) and

Baily & Driver (1992) have studied the
ergonomic factors that constrain and shape
performance and musical structure for various
Western and Persian plucked string
instruments. They argued that "the spatiomotor mode should be regarded as a
legitimate and commonly used mode of
musical thought" and that musical creativity
may involve "finding new ways to move on
the instrument." (Baily & Driver 1992: 59)
Especially in instances of American rock
guitar, they observed, "musical patterns are
remembered and executed not solely as aural
patterns but as sequences of movements, and
that the music is therefore represented
cognitively in terms of movement patterns
which have visual, kinaesthetic, tactile, as
well as auditory repercussions." (ibid. : 62)
From this it was concluded that "the spatial
layout of notes and the physical structure of
the guitar provides a framework for
musical conceptualization, a compositional tool used for the development of
musical ideas, an interface to be manipulated and acted upon in certain specific
ways." (ibid. : 70)
From my experience with jazz improvisation on the piano, I have found that the
kinesthetic/spatiomotor approach and the
melodic approach form dual extremes of a
continuum. One augments one's aural
imagination by exploring the possibilities
suggested by the relationship between the
body and the instrument, and one judges the
result of such experimentation by appealing to
one's abstract musical processing capacities
and aesthetics. Among pianists who have
exploited this relationship in jazz, Thelonious
Monk has been the most influential. His
compositions and improvisations provide an
exemplary nexus of kinesthetics and
formalism. Often his pieces contained
explicitly pianistic peculiarities, including the
repeated use of pendular fourths, fifths, sixths,
and sevenths (as in "Misterioso" [CD-3] and
"Let's Call This" [CD-4]), whole-tone runs
and patterns ("Four in One" [CD-5], bridge to
"52nd Street Theme" [CD-6]), major- and
minor-second dyads ("Monk's Point" [CD-7],
"Light Blue" [CD-8]), and rapid figurations
26

and ornamental filigrees ("Gallop's Gallop"

[CD-9], "Trinkle, Tinkle" [CD-10] - see
below). All of these idiosyncrasies fit, so to
speak, in the palm of the pianist's hand, while
often wreaking havoc for horn players (or,
even worse, vocalists). Frequently, Monk's
use of such kinesthetically derived material
juxtaposed their relative ease of delivery on
the piano with their melodic or harmonic
ambiguity. He incorporated these elements as
fundamental pieces of his improvising style.
Also, when transferred to other instruments
such as the saxophone, many of his pianoinspired compositions had revolutionary
implications for the improvising soloist.
Among the most exemplary of Monk's
recorded work of this nature are his versions
of "Trinkle Tinkle" with saxophonist John
Coltrane. (Recordings of the compositions
mentioned above can be found on Monk
1986, 1994).

Opening bars of Thelonious Monk's

composition "Trinkle, Tinkle" (author's
transcription, piano right hand only)
Upon examination of the first two measures
of this passage, one notices that amidst all its
rhythmic complexity, it repeatedly employs
consecutive fingerings. Such physical patterns
are simpler and apparently more primal for
finger coordination than any nonconsecutive
pattern. Monk was able to place these simple
patterns in unconventional rhythmic and
melodic relationships to yield new compositional and improvisational possibilities.
For non-polyphonic instruments (winds,
brass, and many bowed and plucked strings)
the role of kinesthetics may be different.
Playing involves less "split" consciousness
among limbs; for the most part, the two hands
act together. But in groove-based music, there
is an implicit challenge of relating what one is

playing to an internally generated pulse the

metronome
sense
(Waterman
1952)
mentioned below in the chapter on meter
perception, or the imagined movement (Todd
1997) described above. The legendary
trumpeter Doc Cheatham spoke of this
relationship: "[Playing]'s like dancing; it's the
movement of the body that inspires you to
play. You have to pat your foot; you get a
different feeling altogether than when you
play not patting your foot." (quoted in
Berliner 1994: 152) Here he is speaking not
of tapping the rhythm he is playing, but
tapping the underlying pulse in contrast to
what he is playing. Similarly, a colleague who
plays bass in numerous dance-oriented salsa
bands noted the new dimension of rhythmic
awareness that he experienced once he had
learned the dance steps associated with the
music he was playing. (J. Bilmes, private
communication, 1996) All musicians in the
group perform these rudimentary salsa dance
steps while playing onstage; this elicits a
compound rhythmic consciousness along the
lines of Cheatham's playing-while-tapping.
Evidently, part of what it means to groove or
to swing involves the continual, embodied
awareness of the relationship of the pulse to
the generated musical material. Different
musicians have different opinions about the
necessity of physically generating the pulse;
for example, in my collaborations with
saxophonist Steve Coleman, he has often
asked me to stop tapping my foot, apparently
because it distracts him. But most musicians,
including Coleman, seem to agree about the
importance of feeling the pulse in one's body.
Hence we can regard the sense of groove as at
least partially kinesthetic; it involves relating
actions and sounds to the sensation of pulse,
which we treat as a virtual movement.
Indeed, it should be seen as no coincidence
that one's sense of rhythm is referred to as
"feel." A certain kind of awareness is required
to be able to tap into this embodied sense of
groove. Often musicians believe that this
sense can vanish if one attempts to scrutinize
it. Musicians often instruct each other not to
"think too much" about rhythm, apparently
meaning not to analyze it symbolically with
numbers or words. Instead, acute rhythmic

prowess tends to be a skill that is developed

over time, generally in a mindful but
undeliberate fashion. Overall, a fair amount of
mystique is attached to rhythm perception and
performance; there is a relative poverty of
terminology or pedagogy associated with
these finer points of rhythm.
No treatment of the kinesthetics of musical
performance would be complete without at
least a mention of dance. Dancing to music is
found in all cultures in a vast diversity of
manifestations, in secular, religious, and ritual
contexts. In many societies music and dance
are bound up in one general practice, such
that it may be immaterial to suppose one or
the other to be the primary activity (Gregory
1997: 127). Arom (1991) describes music in
sub-Saharan Africa as a motor activity, almost
inseparable from dance, and comments that
hearing music often instantly induces body
motion among many inhabitants of this
region. Many Central and West African
vernacular languages have no word for music
alone, and few dissociate the concept of
rhythm as an abstract component of music.
Rhythm is thought of as the stimulus for the
bodily movement to which it gives rise, and is
given the name of the dance (Gregory 1997:
127). In the Anlo-Ewe culture of southern
Ghana, the term that most closely approximates our usage of "music" has been
translated by Ladzekpo (1995) as "dancedrumming."
Our understanding of music is enhanced if we
interpret our common practices of foottapping, head-bobbing, and finger-snapping
as a generalized kind of proto-dance, one that
arises from the imagined movement
associated with beat perception. If we frame
groove-based music as meant to be danced to,
even in these minute ways, then a possible
explanation of the elusive sense of groove
begins to reveal itself. The physical sensation
of groove, either in performance as a
musician or in co-performance as a listener,
involves both the real bodily movement and
the imagined movement supplied by the
perception of the isochronous pulse. The
former entrains to the latter via both auditory
and kinesthetic feedback. Over time, the
27

physical motion is strongly reinforced through

repetition; cognitive structure emerges from
this reinforced, cross-modal sensorimotor
coupling. Hence, groove as performed may
stem from this kind of overlearned kinesthetic
pattern or sensorimotor program.
Musical Bodies in Culture
The embodied-cognition viewpoint suggests
that a musician's internal representations are
intimately tied to his or her connection with
the instrument, which forms part of the
music-making environment. Musical abstractions certainly exist, but I claim that how an
individual musician chooses over time to
interact with that instrument gives rise to the
majority of the musician's cognitive
apparatus. The musician's relationship with
the instrument can leave its trace on the music
itself that is, it can be communicated
musically. Barthes made such an observation
from a listener's point of view:
I can hear with certainty the certainty of
the body, of thrill that the harpsichord
playing of Wanda Landowska comes from
her inner body and not from the petty digital
scramble of so many harpsichordists (so
much so that it is a different instrument). As
for piano music, I know at once which part
of the body is playing if it is the arm, too
often, alas, muscled like a dancer's calves,
the clutch of the finger-tips (despite the
sweeping flourishes of the wrists), or if on
the contrary it is the only erotic part of a
pianist's body, the pad of the fingers whose
'grain' is so rarely heard... (Barthes 1977:
189)
Barthes believed that he could hear an
essential bodily approach in a given
musician's music that he was able to "know
the dancer from the dance," as in Yeats's
famous line. Such interpretations are only
possible given a substantial amount of
detailed background knowledge about the
specific music and the technique of playing
the instrument. One would require an
understanding of how the gross bodily traits
to which he refers could be encoded in music.

28

The emergent structure communicated therein

is informed largely by cultural norms. Again,
when we speak of cognition via the body and
its interaction with its physical environment,
we must also discuss the social and cultural
forces that construct the concept of the body.
An important culturally based conceptual
distinction between European and African
musics involves precisely this status of the
body the degree to which the physical
situatedness of the music-making or listening
body is acknowledged. A journeyman jazz
pianist might observe and employ different
aspects of the piano from those that a
journeyman classical pianist might exploit.
Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor have
treated pianos quite differently from Glenn
Gould and Vladimir Horowitz, in part because
of differences among these artists' respective
cultural sensibilities.
The difference between this AfricanAmerican dance-music model and the
European concert-music model relates to the
role of the body in these respective cultures
and genres. In a witheringly sharp description
of this contrast, McClary (1991) writes,
In many cultures, music and movement are
inseparable activities, and the physical
engagement of the musician in performance
is desired and expected. By contrast,
Western culture with its puritanical,
idealist suspicion of the body has tried
throughout much of its history to mask the
fact that actual people usually produce the
sounds that constitute music. As far back as
Plato, music's mysterious ability to inspire
bodily motion has aroused consternation,
and a very strong tradition of Western
musical thought has been devoted to
defining music as the sound itself, to erasing
the physicality involved in both the making
and the reception of music... (McClary
1991: 136)
(It was precisely this puritanical tendency that
inspired Barthes's writing on the grain of the
voice (1977), discussed below.) This
description recalls the aforementioned tendency of theorists, cognitive psychologists, and
Western composers to prevent the reality of

embodied performance movement from

entering into the abstract concept of musical
motion. By contrast, many musics of the
world that are not associated with a socially
strict high-art tradition, and especially West
African and African-American music, feature
a body-based approach to music-making. By
this I mean that they do not regard the body as
an impediment to ideal musical activity, and
that instead, many musical concepts develop
as an extension of physical activities such as
walking or repetitive tasks. The above
discussion of Thelonious Monk suggests that
his highly experimental musical techniques
emerged in an environment where he felt
perfectly at ease exploring the relationship
between his body and the piano, even
allowing his musical ideas to be subject to
this relationship.
This distinction between cultural models
pertains particularly to the respective
approaches to rhythm. In my experiences both
as a European-style orchestral violinist and as
a keyboardist in jazz and hip-hop/funk
contexts, I have noticed a strong cultural
disparity in the respective roles of the body in
rhythmic activity. As youths in violin sections
of school and community orchestras, my
peers and I were often discouraged from
tapping our feet or swaying rhythmically.
Such behavior was made to seem gauche and
inappropriate, and moreover it threatened to
draw attention away from the conductor's
visual pulse. But in many contemporary
dance-oriented bands in which I work, we
often quite purposefully employ a kind of
rhythmic bodily entrainment. This serves not
only to allow interpersonal visual-rhythmic
interaction to facilitate a collective groove,
but also to help each musician to feel the
relationship of his part to his own internally
generated physical pulse.
Note that in both models, the sense of pulse is
continually reinforced; all participants are
microadjusting constantly. However, in the
conducted case, as is necessary with an
unamplified group of such large physical
extent, the visual dimension is primary,
whereas in the latter, collective case, the
groove is maintained chiefly through the

sonic dimension and supplemented with

visual input. In reviewing preliminary studies
of asynchrony among ensemble musicians,
Rasch (1988) observed in a survey of
recorded classical chamber works that for
ensembles of 10 or more persons, on average,
conducting is required, and not for 9 or fewer.
But while the classic baroque ensemble, jazz
big bands and modern salsa bands can have
15 to 20 members, such groups rarely have
true conductors; rather, they chug along
rhythmically via a collective sense of pulse,
deferring to a single designated musician in
passages with fermatas or rubati. In the great
swing-era jazz bands, the role of a conductor
was often merely ornamental, fulfilling no
crucial function for the execution of the music
aside from the possible cueing of entrances.
This suggests that other musical elements
contribute to rhythmic precision notably the
guiding role of drums, percussion, piano, and
harpsichord, whose sharp attacks present
unambiguous cues for collective rhythmic
synchrony. But in addition to these percussion
instruments, one must not underestimate the
role of proprioceptive and visual feedback
among the musicians and, in many cases,
from the dancers.
Embodiment and Metamusical Language
Thought has gestalt properties and other
overall structures that go beyond mere
handling of symbolic building blocks by
logical rules. The efficiency of cognitive
processing, as in learning and memory,
depends on this overall structure of the
conceptual system. (Lakoff 1987: xiv-xv)
With these realities in mind, Lakoff and
Johnson (1980) set forth the claim that
metaphorical structures underlie the way we
understand aspects of everyday life. For
example, common statements such as "You're
wasting my time!" and "How do you spend
your days?" suggest an underlying conceptual
equation of time with money, resources, and
commodity. (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 7-9)
Such elementary metaphorical structures are
often reflective of aspects of embodiment, be
they bodily or environmental. As an example,
note our tendency to treat conceptual
abstractions as visual entities. We say "I see"
29

to mean "I understand," as things become

"clear" or "transparent." This would appear to
stem from a primal sense of understanding
that is visual in nature a privileging of the
sense of vision among the modalities. This
seems ecologically valid, as vision remains
our most relied-upon and most continually
varying modality.
Linguistic theories have studied the role of
physical and spatial metaphors in language
(Lakoff 1987, Lakoff & Johnson 1980).
Lakoff (1987) developed the concept of
image schemas, which are rough conceptual
pictures that we use to organize our
understandings of abstract concepts. For
example, the "container" schema makes it
possible for people to be in love, out of
trouble, and so forth. Lakoff argued that many
of these schemas (such as the up-down,
center-periphery, container, and movement
schemas) are indeed kinesthetic, that is,
derived from somatic experiences that
"preconceptually structure our experience of
functioning in space." (Lakoff 1987: 372)
Such theories suggest both bodily and
environmental bases for cognition.
We can cast a similar glance at the
"metaphors we play by" the language and
schemas we use to conceptualize and talk
about music. Surveying some common tropes
of metamusical language ought to lead to
larger, underlying ur-metaphors, which may
shed light on music cognition. Some
commonly cited examples are aids for
visualization of abstraction: pitch as height,
timbre as color. (In my experience teaching
music to children, I have observed that they
tended to have no a priori sense that certain
pitches were "higher" than others, even when
they were well aware of gradations of pitch.
This seemed to suggest that such an
abstraction is merely arbitrary convention.)
Others may have ecological significance, as
the connection between loudness and size; a
"big" sound usually comes from a physically
large source. Here I point out a few other
common musical metaphors.
Time as space. It is unsurprising that one of
the most pervasive tropes in metamusical
30

language is a sense of spatial dimension and

extent. As with time in general human
experience, musical time can appear to have
forward momentum or to stand still; time is
spatialized in an overall horizontal sense that
seems to grow out of our experience walking
around in the world. However, rhythmic time
also carries a vertical implication, akin to a
sense of gravity. As mentioned above,
verticality is commonly understood in the
realms of pitch and harmony; we have high
notes and low notes, stacked voicings and
root movement. Less often acknowledged is
the way we verticalize time in the presence of
a pulse. We play upbeats and downbeats.
Rhythms can be grounded or floating; time
can be suspended; a bassist can walk a steady
pulse; a drummer can play four-on-the-floor.
This common underlying trope amounts to a
verticalization of rhythmic phase, i.e. of
"circular" time. This provides a compelling
connection between rhythmic pulse and the
act of walking, in which feet are raised and
lowered in a repetitive manner. These two
notions of time demonstrate a grounding in
physical embodiment; an extended, rhythmic
piece of music can carry a metaphorical
suggestion of a walking journey, characterized by regular rhythmic pacing coupled with
the gradual visual flow of one's surroundings.
Gibson (1975) has argued that this experience
of walking through a stationary environment
underlies our ecological (and, he argues,
illusory) understanding of time as a
continuously flowing quantity.
Music as speech. Often, music bears metaphorical attributes of speech and conversation. Monson (1996) has given an elaborate
treatment of this metaphor in the context of
jazz improvisation. One often hears instances
of this metaphor in African-American musical
pedagogy, where "'to say' or 'to talk' often
substitutes for 'to play.'" (Monson 1996: 84)
Such usage underscores what musical
performance does have in common with
speech as an activity or behavior, as well as
what music has in common with language as
a symbolic system. Among the traits that link
musical performance to speech, we see that:

Musical performance is a process, a

salient mental and physical activity that
takes place in time.
Musical performance is interactive,
characterized by dialogue, call-andresponse, and collective synchronization.
Music has semiotic dimensions, which
enable sonic symbols to refer actively to
other parts of the same piece, to other
music, or to extramusical and contextual
phenomena.
Aspects of performed musical activity can
be performative, existing only in the
context of performance and meaningful
only by virtue of their being performed.
(See below for more on performativity.)
Note that these aspects of speech and
performed music are not restricted to the
domain of semantics; that is, they are not
solely concerned with the "intrinsic"
meanings of words or notes. Rather, these
specific aspects depend upon the act of
performance.
Music as life. A final way of framing music
metaphorically is as life itself. Among many
jazz musicians, a most valued characterization
is that a certain musician has his or her own,
instantly recognizable sound, where "sound"
means not only timbre, but also articulation,
phrasing, rhythm, melodic vocabulary, and
even analytical skills. Generally it came to
mean a sort of "personality" or "character"
that distinguishes different improvisers.
Though it is a complement if someone told
you that you "sound like Coleman Hawkins,"
it is even higher praise to be described as
"having your own sound." Trombonist and
improviser George Lewis writes,
"Sound", sensibility, personality and intelligence cannot be separated from an
improvisers phenomenal (as distinct from
formal) definition of music. Notions of
personhood as transmitted via sounds, and
sounds become signs for deeper levels of
meaning beyond pitches and intervals.
(Lewis 1996: 117)
This view supports the widespread interpretation of improvisation as personal narrative

(Lewis 1996: 117), as that which gives voice

to the meaningful experiences of the
individual. Ground-breaking pianist Cecil
Taylor wrote of equally ground-breaking
saxophonist John Coltrane [CD-11],
In short, his tone is beautiful because it is
functional. In other words, it is always
involved in saying something. You can't
separate the means that a man uses to say
something from what he ultimately says.
Technique is not separated from its content
in a great artist. (Taylor 1959)
Often, then, an improvisers original playing
style is bound up with his or her (possibly
idiosyncratic or self-styled) technique.
Usually the autodidactic approach plays a
large role for improvisers, for whom the
creation of music is embodied in one's
relationship to one's instrument; hence the
inseparability of "sound," or pure musical
approach, from a "phenomenal definition of
music" a personal sense of what music is
and what it is for.
The notion of personal sound functions as an
analytical paradigm, a kind of down-home
biographical criticism. An individual's sound,
rhythmic feel, and overall musical approach
are seen as an indicator of who he or she "is"
as a person. Musicians' interactive strategies
in music might be seen as an indicator of their
interpersonal behavior; their rhythmic
placement with respect to the pulse may
reflect how "fiery" or "cool" their temperaments run; their melodic inventiveness and
harmonic sophistication might parallel their
offstage urbanity and wit. Admittedly, such
stereotypical characterizations beg to be
broken down; rarely does a musician's
offstage personality fit such conventional
wisdom. Indeed, one could also view
"musical personality" as a kind of mask that
the performer wears onstage, Signifying on
his or her offstage identity as well as on
performance itself. But in either case, the
notion of personal sound, relating musical
characteristics to personality traits, reveals
much about how music and life can be
conceptualized together. It is best seen as a

31

manifestation of a cultural model in which

music is a way of life, and vice-versa.
We can also examine this metaphor of music
as life in a different light as it appears in West
African music. Ladzekpo (1995) counts
among the most important aspects of his
musical education the understanding of
different musical elements in terms of their
worldly counterparts. A particular rhythm
might be seen as the "artistic animation" of a
real-life character. As a concrete example, he
has described a rhythmic ostinato that occurs
on the off-beats as the "party animal," because
of the way it seems to jump off the ground
repeatedly and draw attention to itself:

(In the audio example [CD-12], a click track

is heard alongside this drum pattern, with the
high click on the downbeat of the written
measure.) Also, steady rhythmic pulse is seen
as "purpose in life," and rhythmic obstacles
such as cross-rhythms as "challenges" to that
sense of purpose. Mastery of the music's
rhythmic complexity is seen as a kind of
strength, an ability to keep life balanced.
Ladzekpo describes the music in the AnloEwe culture as representative of the "complex
fundamental disposition of mankind"
(Ladzekpo 1995).
Metaphors in motion: the music of Cecil
Taylor. An extended example may provide
more illumination. The above metaphors of
music as life and as speech were made quite
concrete in my experience as a performer with
pianist Cecil Taylor's "creative orchestra" in
1995. This was his music for large ensemble,
which forty very fortunate Bay Area
musicians had the opportunity to study and
interpret under his guidance. Taylor's
approach spoke volumes about improvised
music as a collective activity. Early on, when
we were repeatedly questioning him about the
role of the written material, he said, "This
[written material] is the formal content of the
piece; what I want is for all the players to
32

bring their individual languages to the

interpretation and execution of the piece."
Taylor desired that we create a collective
embodiment of his material by filtering it
through our individual "languages," framing
the music as speech, individual sound as
personal narrative.
In such a context the emphasis is rarely on
being faithful to set compositions in terms of
pitch content, melody or harmony. Compositions in an improvising context mean
something else entirely perhaps a jumpingoff point, or music-generative methods that all
can agree upon to some extent. In our week of
daily sessions with Mr. Taylor, the earlier
sessions led us to believe that he was a
stickler for detail. I recall that we spent the
first 3-hour rehearsal on one postage-stampsized corner of one of his scores; he would
continually repeat and rework the material bit
by bit, singing or dancing a certain phrase for
us, or asking us to permute the written pitches
in a certain way. But towards the end of the
week, his requirements grew less stringent,
his guidance less direct; he would simply set
us in motion and leave the room for a while. I
realized that somehow he had taught us his
language his sense of phrasing and
repetition, his attention to detail, the way he
rigorously reworks and dissects a turn of
phrase. Once this had happened, we were free
to bring our own ideas to this context to
embody his language. When he returned to
the rehearsal room, he would find that we had
made something out of his "hieroglyphics."
Evidently, Taylor's aesthetic privileges the
sound of personalities interacting over
conventional concepts of form. Because of the
heightened role that group interactivity
played, it felt at times as though we had
formed a small musical civilization, rather
than an orchestra.
Indeed, our group experienced in microcosm
the conflict, strife, and tension that a society
experiences in macrocosm. Much of this was
enacted on a musical level in the performance
on October 26, 1995. For example, when
some musicians reached the stage, they
abandoned their allegiance to the unwritten,
brittle orchestral aesthetic that had been

developed over the course of rehearsals [CD13], choosing instead to yield to the
temptation to play nonstop with furious
intensity. This behavior raised the issue of the
distribution of (physical) power for clearly,
a tenor saxophonist can honk and shriek with
enough force to drown out a section of six
violinists, and a drummer can bury a pianist's
efforts with ease. It was found that the louder
instrumentalists possessed the privilege to
control the intensity level directly, while the
softer instrumentalists were forced to defer to
such control. Fellow musician Matthew
Goodheart (1996) has observed the added role
played by the self-serving musical choices
made by certain individuals who wanted to
"Play With Cecil" and get noticed by the
legendary pianist for possible career
advancement. Also, in the absence of a more
dictatorial leader figure or a hard and fast text
to which to adhere, we found ourselves in
frequent disagreement as to what was
"supposed" to be happening or what to do
next. Different factions formed to conduct
their own unified small-group activities,
allowing for the emergence of pockets of
apparent order in the sonic chaos. The
resultant performances featured truly sublime
flashes of fortuitous beauty and moments of
brilliantly focused small-group improvisation,
amidst often inscrutable orchestral noise. The
metaphor of music-as-life was borne out in
our experience of ensemble-as-social-group.
What do these underlying metaphors teach us
about music? It becomes clear from the above
discussion that especially in the realm of jazz,
an understanding of music grows out of one's
relationship to one's body, instrument, peers,
and broader culture. Such conclusions are also
drawn by Berliner (1994). His overall claim is
that one acquires the knowledge and skills
called for in jazz improvisation chiefly
through the combination of immersion in an
acculturated community of practitioners and
hours and hours of self-directed experimentation on one's instrument that is, through a
confluence of situated and embodied learning.
Perceptual invariants. We can view the
notion of sound as a carrier of identity from a
perceptual standpoint, in the same way that

one might describe the recognition of a

specific person's speaking voice, using the
notion of invariants. As Gibson (1979)
described it, the perception of an environment
that both changes and persists involves
extracting invariants of structure from a
continually varying bath of stimulation, and
noticing the variation relative to these
underlying invariants. In a similar vein, Shaw
and Pittenger (1978) suggested the possibility
of invariants that are functions of time, such
as a repetitive motor. They distinguished
between transformational and structural
invariants. Transformational invariants are
relational aspects of the information that
specifies the identity of a particular pattern of
change; hence one might hear speaking as a
certain kind of use of the human voice, as
opposed to singing, for example. By contrast,
structural invariants are relational properties
specific to the source object undergoing a
particular style of change. These properties
might include the invariant structural features
of this particular speaker's vocal tract and
other parts of her body that might give rise to
the production of vocal sound. It seems that
they might also include learned usage of those
organs in specific ways, such as regional
accent and vocabulary. For these structural
invariants are not only confined to body; they
also involve memory, history, personal choice
in short, the person's individuality. In
African-American musical contexts, especially in the case of musical improvisation, a
personal sound contains the musical trace of
the musician's body usage (as with saxophone
timbre, for example), as well as of his or her
conceptual approach (as it is conveyed in the
course of improvisation). A variety of musical
attributes, ranging from instrumental timbre
to improvised musical choices, may be seen
as manifestations of underlying invariants in
the musician's embodied worldview. Hence
we may align the personal sound construct
with these perceivable structural invariants.
Paralinguistics, Performativity, Signifying
Some recent results from psycholinguistics
illuminate the role of paralinguistic phenomena such as hand gestures in conversational
speech. McNeill (1998) examined footage of
33

individuals explaining cartoon scenarios, and

found that hand gestures served not just to
illustrate but to augment what was described
verbally. In this way, language and gesture
are seen to be coexpressive, meaning that the
sonic and visual dimensions sum to form a
larger meaning than either one independently
would convey. McNeill's aim is to challenge
the modular information-processing model of
cognition, which in its strictest sense does not
treat different processes as interacting. In the
modular view, complex cognition is broken
down into something resembling subroutines
or modules in a computer program. Rather,
claims McNeill, visuals and sound connect to
produce a whole; they need to be treated as
interacting, not modular, so that context can
be incorporated.
Similarly one might imagine that visual and
other contextual factors in a musical
performance co-articulate musical meaning
along with the sonic trace. In keeping with
some post-structuralist scholarly work, we
may call these elements performatives. The
term "performative" has grown to encompass
a wide range of phenomena, but it was first
coined by J. L. Austin (1962) in reference to a
certain class of speech act, namely a verbal
utterance that fulfills a function by virtue of
its being spoken. A commonly cited example
is a wedding officiant's statement, "I now
pronounce you husband and wife." In
speaking that declarative sentence, the
officiant also executes an action one that
can only be done by enunciating that
statement. Hence the utterance accomplishes
more than conveying a true or false statement;
it is also an act with non-linguistic, real-world
consequences. Later, Austin and others
(Forguson 1969; see also Parker & Sedgwick
1995) pointed out that "there really is no good
reason to distinguish between performative
and other sorts of utterances at all. All
utterances have their 'performative' role to
play in discourse..." (Forguson 1969: 419)
Hence it was acknowledged that a variety of
additional meaning arises via inflection,
stress, and most importantly, situational
circumstance. When the Pope says, "Bless
you," as an Englishman kneels at his feet, it
means something quite different from when a
34

Polish immigrant says, "Bless you," to a

sneezing American passerby, even if the
intonations, inflections, and intensities are
identical. The dimension along which these
two cases differ may be called the
performative dimension.
In a related essay, Barthes (1977) pointed out
that performance of composed music also
carries this "extra" dimension. In addition to
the meaningful intramusical dynamics,
supplemental meaning is generated by the
presence of a music-making body, and the
sonic traces it leaves behind. Hence the
"grain" of the voice, by announcing the
vocalist's physical presence, signifies a
rupturing of the disembodied, self-contained
world of the classical work. The personhood
of the performer insinuates its way into
(classical) music performance through its
roughness, its resistance, its departure from
the ideal. The physicality and resistance of the
voice point to its producer, the performer, and
to the act of it being produced. The grain of a
musical performance reminds the listener of
the physical sensation of using the voice, or
other parts of the body: "The 'grain' is the
body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it
writes, the limb as it performs." (Barthes
1977: 188)
These variable features of performance give
music no small part of its expressive powers.
Dunn and Jones (1994) provide a multiplicity
of perspectives on embodiment in Western
female vocal music. It is seen that the
meaning of a vocal utterance is constituted
not simply by its semantic content but also by
its sonorous content. By focusing on the
essential role played by the 'purely sonorous'
(i.e. musical, non-verbal) features of the
female voice in 'the construction of its nonverbal meanings,' by making explicit the fact
that sonorous features must be conceptually
linked to the production of vocal sound
through a person's body, and by studying the
various factors of acculturation that affect the
reception of vocal sound, the authors provide
a complex account of the status of sound as
"performed." Vocal meaning derives from 'an
intersubjective acoustic space,' and any
attempt to articulate that meaning must

necessarily 'reconstruct ... the contexts of ...

hearing'." We thereby "recognize the roles
played by 1) the person or people producing
the sound, 2) the person or people hearing the
produced sound, and 3) the acoustical and
social contexts in which production and
hearing occur. The 'meaning' of any vocal
sound, then, must be understood as coconstituted by performative as well as
semantic/structural features." (Dunn 1994:23) The performative dimension in music and
speech, as described above, overlaps many
other salient musical/linguistic dimensions
(the interactive, the processual, the semiotic)
to some degree. In fact it could be said that all
socially situated human acts music, speech,
writing, sport, political acts, worship, etc.
contain a performative element, for they all
involve non-verbal meanings generated by
situated bodies in intersubjective cultural
spaces.
How might performativity operate in music
that has no score? Indeed one might ask, how
might performativity not operate in music that
only exists when performed, when in motion?
To be sure, improvised music must project a
great amount of meaning along the
performative dimension, since so much of
how one listens to it depends on one's
understanding of its contextual factors. These
aspects might include the role of
improvisation as a trope for the present,
interactivity as the conveyor of a shared sense
of time, and the attention to the role of the
body and the specific surroundings in musicmaking activity. In my experience, I have
noticed one of the most common questions
asked by novice listeners after a jazz
performance to be, "What percentage of that
was improvised?" One requires some
understanding of the conditions and
assumptions that give rise to the sounds one
hears; the notes and tones do not explain
themselves to an outsider.
In African-American musics, it could be said
that a large part of this performative
dimension coincides with the dimension of
Signifying (Gates 1988). The stylized term is
given dozens of meanings that play off of
each other; Signifiying can refer to "a way of

encoding messages or meanings which

involves, in most cases, an element of
indirection... [i.e.] an alternative message
form [which] may occur in a variety of
discourse ... Signifying is troping." (Gates
1988:80-81) The governing idea behind
Signifying is verticality that is, the free play
of rhetorical associations to conjure up
multiplicities of meaning beyond the literal.
In theorizing about African-American literary
discourses, Gates identifies the importance of
Signifying i.e. of verticality, of intertextuality, of history, of multiplicity, of
reference to shared knowledge in the
production and communication of meaning.
It seems fair to align the concept of
Signifying with the notion of the performative, which also denotes the nonliteral
meanings conjured up through nonverbal
channels. Hence, just as the very performative
activity of Signifying accounts for a
significant portion of the generation of
meaning in spoken and written language, one
might expect a similarly large amount of
information to be conveyed via Signifying in
the performative aspects of music. For
example, much meaning in African-American
music is generated through continual referencing, be it explicit or implicit, of a background wealth of cultural information. In jazz,
this might happen on a surface level by
quoting a well-known melody in the course of
an improvised solo, or by paraphrasing a
melodic or rhythmic fragment that somebody
else just played. Or, it might happen at a
subtler, more deeply coded level, through a
construct such as timbre (e.g. does Eric
Dolphy's alto saxophone sound reference that
of Charlie Parker? [CD-14]), or in the way
that a piece is constructed (do Ornette
Coleman's compositions Signify on the
melodic gestures of bebop? [CD-15]), or most
abstractly, in a musician's "sound" or
"attitude" (does Miles Davis's sense of space,
timing, and melody convey a sense of the
blues? [CD-16]). In hip-hop it may occur in
the choice of musical material, as with the
widespread, often blatant use of samples of
classic funk and soul tunes [CD-17, 18], or in
lyrics, as when MC's (rappers) represent,
addressing their origins or their home turf
35

[CD-19]. Also, an MC is often characterized

by his or her flow, a flexible concept
(analogous to sound in jazz) that can refer in
different contexts to rhythmic acuity, lyrical
prowess, or general persona [CD-20]. The
heightened role of such performative
parameters in these various African-American
musics provides a case for the conceptual role
of sociocultural situatedness in their reception, perception, cognition, and production.
In light of this discussion of performativity, it
seems that the application of Meyer's (1953)
concepts of musical meaning to jazz leaves
something to be desired. Meyer theorized that
emotion and meaning in music boil down to
the deferral of expectations implied by
intramusical dynamics. In developing this
theory, Meyer adhered to a rather arbitrary
distinction between "designative meaning," in
which a stimulus may become meaningful by
referring to something that is different from
itself in kind, and "embodied meaning," in
which the reference is to something like the
stimulus itself. Roughly, this distinction
corresponds to the difference between the
ethnomusicological understanding of music as
a body of references to certain cultural
practices on the one hand, and the objectivist
understanding of the "intrinsic" dynamics of
the music itself, somehow disembodied from
its cultural context. Meyer chooses (and thus
believes it possible) to focus on the latter,
which, ironically, he labels "embodied
meaning." Whatever its applicability or
inapplicability to European concert music, I
believe that this distinction collapses in much
African American music, which is often
arguably as much a definition of the oral
culture that produces it as it is an outgrowth
of it. For a music that is so conscious of its
own origins, one cannot neglect the dimension of meaning made possible by Signifying
namely the possibilities of multiplicities of
meaning set forth by the metonymies of oral
culture itself. To deny the dimension of
history, of the Signifying possibilities
inherent in the play of one piece of music
against the memory of its predecessors, is to
rob the music of a greater part of its meaning.

36

Time and Temporal Situatedness

Yet another fundamental consequence of
physical embodiment and environmental
situatedness is the fact that things take time.
The concept of time must structure our
conception of physically embodied cognition
from the start. Smithers (1996) draws a useful
distinction between processes that occur "intime" and those that exist "over-time." The
distinction is similar to that between processoriented activity, such as speech or walking,
and product-oriented activity, such as writing
a novel or composing a symphony. In-time
processes are embedded in time; not only does
the time taken matter, but in fact it contributes
to the overall structure. The speed of a typical
walking gait relates to physical attributes like
leg mass and size, and shoulder-hip torsional
moment; this is why we cannot walk onetenth or ten times as fast as we do. Similarly,
the rate at which we speak exploits the natural
timescales of lingual and mandibular motion
as well as respiration. Accordingly, we learn
(or more likely we are hardwired) to process
speech at precisely such a rate. Recorded
speech played at slower or faster speeds
rapidly becomes unintelligible, even if the
pitch is held constant. The perceived flow of
conversation, while quite flexible, is sensitive
to the slowdown caused by an extra few
seconds taken to think of a word or recall a
name.
Over-time processes, by contrast, are merely
contained in time; the fact that they take time
is of no fundamental consequence to the
result. Most of what we call computation
occurs over time. The fact that all machines
are considered computationally equivalent
regardless of speed suggests that time was not
a concern in the theory of computation, and
that the temporality of a computational
process is theoretically immaterial. In socalled "real-time" systems, typically one
exploits the blinding speed of modern
microprocessors to allow computation so fast
that one doesn't notice how much time is
taken. However, this is not what the mind
does when immersed in a dynamic, real-time
environment; rather, it exploits both the
constraints and the allowances of the natural

timescales of the body and the brain as a total

physical system. In other words, Smithers
(1996) claims, cognition chiefly involves intime processes. Furthermore, this claim is not
limited simply to cognitive processes that
require interpersonal interaction; it pertains to
all thought, perception, and action.
In intersubjective activities, such as speech,
musical performance, or rehearsal, one
remains aware of a sense of mutual
embodiment. This sense brings about the
presupposition of "shared time" between the
listener and the performer. This sense is a
crucial aspect of temporality of performance,
especially from a communication point of
view. The experience of listening to music is
qualitatively different from that of reading a
book. The experience of music requires a "coperformance" that must occur within a shared
temporal domain (Schutz 1964). This sense of
co-performance is made literal in musical
contexts primarily meant for dance; the
participatory act of marking time with
rhythmic bodily activity physicalizes the
sense of shared time. The meaning derived
from such physical participation contrasts
with the "contemplative" mode of music
listening as practiced in the European concert
hall, in which any kind of body motion by an
audience member is typically met with
negative social feedback.
The Temporality of Musical Performance
We may consider how various cultural
models may affect cognition by framing,
though not entirely dictating, notions of time.
Shore (1996: 62) gives examples of temporal
models that can orchestrate culturally specific
time frames. These include incremental,
decremental,
cyclical,
rhythmic,
and
biographical models, as well as contextframing devices. A jazz performance might
contain many of these models simultaneously.
It might utilize a cyclic form (such as a song
form or "chorus"), in which time is broken
into rhythmic segments (beats, subdivisions,
meter), and of which chunks may form
complete episodes (such as an individual solo,
which might last a number of choruses). The
entire performance might be governed by a

sense of appropriate length, thereby involving

an overall incremental model.
Furthermore, the performance situation might
be understood as a context-framing device. In
his study of music of a certain community in
South Africa, ethnomusicologist J. Blacking
wrote, "...Venda music is distinguished from
nonmusic by the creation of a special world of
time. The chief function of music is to involve
people in shared experiences within the
framework of their cultural experience."
(Blacking 1973: 48) There is no doubt that
this is true to some degree in all musical
performance. We can take this concept further
in the case of improvised music. The process
of musical improvisation in a jazz context can
be seen as one specific way of framing the
shared time between performer and audience.
The experience of listening to music that is
understood to be improvised differs significantly from listening knowingly to composed
music. The main source of drama in
improvised music is the sheer fact of the
shared sense of time: the sense that the
improviser is working, creating, generating
musical material, in the same time in which
we are co-performing as listeners. Part of
what we seem to experience as listeners to
any music is an awareness of the physicality
of the "grain," and a kind of empathy for the
performer, an understanding of effort required
to create music. In improvised music empathy
extends beyond the concept of the physical
body to an awareness of the performers'
coincident physical and mental exertion, of
their "in-the-moment" (i.e. in-time) process of
creative activity and interactivity. Thus
improvisation heightens the role of
embodiment in musical performance.
Time framed by improvisation is a special
kind of time that is flexible in extent, and in
fact carries the inherent possibility of
endlessness, similar to that pointed out in
Shore (1996) in the case of baseball games.
Instances like Paul Gonsalves's 27 choruses
(over 6 minutes) of blues on Ellington's
"Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" [CD21] and Coltrane's sixteen-minute take on
"Chasin' the Trane" [CD-22] significantly,
both live recordings attest to the power that
37

the improviser wields as framer of time,

deciding both the extent and the content of the
shared epoch.
Temporal Situatedness & Musical Form
Accordingly,
music
that
privileges
improvisation requires a different concept of
musical form from music that is throughcomposed. In the former case, musical form
can be described in terms of temporal
situatedness. It is enlightening to consider the
concept of form in the classical improvised
music of India [CD-23]:
Syntactical forms are virtually unknown in
the music of India. Instead we hear long,
cyclical, chain structures and a general
progression of organic growth that reveals
the guidance of quite different formal
models and metaphor. The tactics of form
go hand-in-hand with the prevailing models
of structure: hierarchical and syntactical
forms are naturally implemented by such
tactics as contrast, parallelism, preparation,
rise, transition, and the like; serial forms [as
in Indian music], however, tend to be
modular,
decorative,
incremental,
progressive, and open-ended. The Indian
version of musical structure tends to
emphasize variation of the module: by
permutation of its elements, by inflation and
deflation
of
patterns,
by
pattern
superimpositions, and by progressive
organic development. (Rowell 1988)
Improvised African and African-American
music can share many of these traits,
particularly in the long-term organization of
material. The major role of improvisation in
many oral musical traditions, combined with
the important function of groove, make
possible alternative notions of musical form
that do not conform to the recursive
hierarchies of tonal-music grammars. A
teleological concept of form, in which the
meaning of music is taken to be its large-scale
structure, may be replaced with an alternative,
modular approach, in which the meaning of
music is located in the free play of smaller
constituent units. Such notions of musical
structure appear in many African and African38

American musics. Instead of long-range

hierarchical form, the focus is on fine-grained
rhythmic detail and superpositional rhythmic
hierarchy. Thus, large-scale musical form
emerges from an improvisatory treatment of
these short-range musical ingredients that is,
from the in-time manipulation of simple
components in a modular conceptual organization.
A prime example is James Brown's frequent
practice of "taking it to the bridge" [CD 24].
A given piece might consist of two different
musical spaces or grooves, the transitions
between which are cued musically by the
vocalist. Hence each section may be
arbitrarily long, since the only thing to
delineate it is an improvised cue to the next
section. Before the performance of the piece,
Brown and his band may not know exactly
what will happen when; rather, they know
what the raw materials are and how to
manipulate them during performed time. As
another example, jazz drummer E. W.
Wainwright (private communication, 1997)
described to me a practice of creating largescale temporal form out of an open-ended
though metrically distinct musical environment, as it was done by John Coltrane's
legendary quartet in the early 1960s (cf. the
title track to Transition [CD-25]). In such
pieces, the group would be improvising in 4/4
time, using a certain collection of pitches as a
loose framework, such as a mode over a D
pedal point. Eventually, formal small-section
boundaries would emerge by the systematic
doubling of the musical period. As was told to
Wainwright by Elvin Jones (the quartet's
drummer and Wainwright's teacher), the
group would initially accent the beginning of
every four bars, using intensity as well as
rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic parameters.
As the piece unfolded, they would expand the
period to eight bars, then sixteen, and so on.
The larger the period became, the greater
heights the intensity and dissonant tension
could reach, and the more effective the
unified release at the beginning of the next
period. As Jones told Wainwright, this
practice emerged organically over the course
of hundreds of improvised performances,
never having been discussed verbally by any

band members. These two examples suggest

that aspects of musical form can stem from
the sense of shared, lived time, and the way
variations are carried out while embedded in
time.
In addition, in jazz and other musics,
intramusical hierarchical organization may
very well be decentered in favor of
referential, associative, or functional relationships (Honing 1993). Formal emphasis might
be more on repetition, on reference to a
shared body of knowledge, or on maintaining
a relationship to a composite rhythmic
pattern, and less on the recursive derivation of
a background meaning by grouping sections
into chunks. In other words, the emphasis on
"the moment" as a consequence of embodiment allows for different kinds of formal
derivation.
As an example, consider again the
saxophonist John Coltrane. He was known
early in his career for playing long,
impressive, exploratory solos that projected
excitement and forward motion nonetheless,
full of blisteringly fast runs, filigrees, and
arpeggios, as on Monk's "Trinkle, Tinkle"
[CD-26]. Coltrane's improvisations were less
hierarchically unified than was typical for the
idiom, and more serial or sequential;
sometimes it was said that his solos lacked
direction or went on too long. Many have
tried to establish "motific development" in
Coltrane's individual improvisations as that
which creates structure (Dean 1992, Jost
1981), but it seems to me that this is merely a
consequence of a greater formation
Coltrane's "sound," his holistic approach to
music, which yields these elements. I do not
wish to imply that Coltrane had no mind for
"structuring" an individual solo; but these
sorts of analyses stem from the critical tools
of the listener rather than the improviser. As a
musician, I personally believe that the
improviser is concerned more with making
individual improvisations relate to each other,
and to his or her conception of personal
sound, than he or she might be with obeying
some standard of coherence on the scale of
the single improvisation.

In this way, the temporally situated view of

music cognition facilitates a nonlinear
approach to musical narrative. Musical
meaning is not conveyed only through formal
hierarchies, motific development, contour,
and temporal deferral of expectations; it is
also embodied in improvisatory techniques.
Musicians tell their stories, but not merely in
the traditional linear narrative sense. An
exploded narrative is conveyed through a
holistic musical personality or attitude. That
attitude is conveyed both musically through
the skillful, individualistic, improvisatory
manipulation of expressive parameters in
combination, as well as extramusically in the
sense that these sonic symbols "point" to a
certain physical comportment, a certain wayof-being-embodied. In improvised music
practices in general, the emphasis tends to be
not on the single isolated performance but on
the developing body of concepts or
expressions as it exists over long periods of
one's life. The only invariable guideline for a
solo or a group improvisation is to feel in the
end as though you have "said something"
(Monson 1996). The details of how this is
accomplished are as variable in music as they
are in speech.
Embodiment as a Complement to
Cognitivism
In concluding this lengthy chapter, it should
be pointed out that the claims of embodied
and situated cognition operate alongside the
symbolic cognitive methods that traditional
knowledge-based systems might exploit.
There is a clichd distinction between literate
and oral cultures that runs, "The literate man
stores information through writing; the oral
man stores information through physical
assimilation: he becomes the information."
(Sidran 1971: 9) Actually, both kinds of
"storage" occur in everyday life in the literate
world; information is distributed among
various embodied and situated dimensions,
including learned sensorimotor patterns,
written or memorized symbolic information,
and social customs. These delineations
correspond to three "vantage points" that we
can consider to be part and parcel of
cognition: "the development of the individual,
39

the local support conditions leading to the

mastery of the symbol system and materials
of the domain, and the cultural setting which
gives meaning and structure to the entire
expression." (Davidson & Torff 1992: 120121)
As an example, consider a concert violinist's
performance of a composed piece from the
standard repertoire. We have now discussed
many ways of studying the violinist's
performance. In working on the piece, she
develops a personal, non-transferable interpretation, which emerges as a highly
specialized behavior from her hours of
physical practice. A performance of this piece
would represent both the retrieval of
memorized, symbolic information and the
enaction of physically assimilated behavior.
The piece itself may possess a deeply
hierarchical intramusical logic full of formal
interplay, and the violinist may highlight
these formal elements via certain expressive
performance choices. Other performance
variations in timing, dynamics, and intonation
might stem from nervousness, fatigue,
caprice, or the soloist's attempts to be audible
over the polyphonic backdrop of a hundred
accompanying musicians. One may also study
how the performance may be framed socially
in a concert hall as elite high-culture
spectacle, rich in performative elements, from
the "alienating social ritual of the concert
itself," to the enhanced social distance
between the audience and "the 'artist' in
evening dress or tails," to the "listener's
poignant speechlessness as he/she faces an
onslaught of such refinement, articulation,
and technique as almost to constitute a
sadomasochistic experience." (Said 1991: 3)
All of these dynamics inform our reception of
the performed music.
Improvised music provides us with another
example. A jazz pianist improvising over a
standard tune would certainly require a
working understanding of functional harmony, meter, and form, both in general and
specifically applied to the song in question.
This knowledge would fall mostly in the
abstract, symbolic domain. However, a
variety of other requirements draw on the
40

situatedness of the pianist's body vis--vis the

piano. These elements include sensorimotor
functions like the placement and control of
hands on the keyboard and foot on the pedal,
the coordination of the digits, and the
harnessing of these activities to an internally
entrained pulse. In addition, cultural and
learned factors such as the musician's
relationship to the instrument, genre, and
associated lifestyle may find their way into
the improvising process in the form of
personal sound, choice of musical material, or
adherence to preestablished norms. The artist
might signify on established versions of the
piece (including his own, as when pianist
Ahmad Jamal performs "Poinciana" today,
knowingly quoting and modifying his
distinctive, extremely popular 1958 version
[CD-27]). Or, the pianist might highlight his
or her version by sheer contextualization (as
with the quintessentially modern Thelonious
Monk's old-fashioned, buoyant stride-piano
version of the then-40-year-old tune
popularized by Louis Armstrong, "I'm
Confessin'" in 1963 [CD-49]). The pianist
might deploy expressive timing and accent
manipulations that highlight the relationships
between the performed rhythm and the pulse,
the melody and the chord changes, the
melody and the (unheard) lyric, the right hand
and the left hand, the left-hand pattern and a
bassline from another piece, or any number of
other kinds of rhythmic interplay.
The often implied characterization of the
social and symbolic as high-level and the
embodied as low-level is misleading, for these
functions may interact with each other
bilaterally. In particular, one should not claim
that the high-level processes "direct" the lowlevel, for in some cases it is not clear that
there is any such hierarchical organization.
Indeed, the tendency to posit such a hierarchy
stems from our prejudice of mental processes
as more "elevated" than physical ones.
Further consideration of the example at hand
suggests that the cognitive organization
between "body" and "mind" can be
heterarchical, or non-hierarchically distributed. For instance, in the midst of an
improvisation, the temporally situated pianist
is always making choices. These choices are

informed not simply by which note, phrase, or

gesture is "correct," but rather by which
activities are executable at the time that a
given choice is made. (Similar observations
have been made by Sudnow 1978.) That is, a
skilled improviser is always attuned to the
constraints imposed by the musical moment.
This requires an awareness of the palette of
musical acts available in general, and
particularly of the dynamically evolving
subset of this palette that is physically
possible at any given moment. In this way, for
example, the improvising pianist is more
likely to choose piano keys that lie under her
current hand position than keys that do not.
Such weak constraints (which may be
overridden, with physical and melodic
repercussions) combine holistically with
formal directives such as melody and
harmony (which may also be overridden).
Indeed, improvisation musical and otherwise may be understood partially as a
dialectic between formal/symbolic and
situational/embodied constraints.
Hence the functions of situated or embodied
cognition neither replace wholesale, nor obey
blindly, but rather supplement and
complement the abstract, symbolic cognitive
processes that we usually associate with
"thinking." In this chapter, I have attempted to
show how the theoretical concepts of
embodied and situated cognition can similarly
enhance the study of music perception and
cognition.

41

5. On the Perception of Meter

In this chapter I shall turn to the concept of
meter, and its role in shaping our musical
perceptions. The first question to ask is why
we have meter at all. I shall stress that meter
has some special status among the various
time spans of music, and in particular that its
function is both established and constrained
by our embodied perceptual and cognitive
abilities. Later I will discuss some subtleties
in the question of how we perceive meter in
situated musical contexts, by examining its
role in instances of West African music.
Rhythmic Timescales
The extremely influential techniques of
Schenkerian analysis (Schenker 1979) are
characterized by concepts of hierarchy,
progression, and recursion. Musical structure
is understood on three levels: foreground,
middle ground, and background. Analysis is
seen as a process of isolating, identifying,
connecting and integrating these three levels
of musical perception, aiming for reduction of
musical surface structures to a series of nested
levels. The perspective is hierarchical in its
layered organization and progressive in the
implications between events within levels.
The role of recursion is metaphoric, in that a
large piece can be seen as a giant cadence, or
composition as the large-scale embellishment
of an underlying harmonic progression. The
Ursatz, or underlying background structure, is
seen as the point of analysis and the mark of a
good composition. The theory presupposes
that music's purpose is its background and not
its foreground. This assumption seems to bias
the very concept of analysis in favor of longterm form; ultimately, the entire theory
legitimizes its own goals.
According to Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983),
who have a strong allegiance to the
Schenkerian point of view, grouping structure
in music is said to be recursive because it is
supposed that there is a uniformity from level
to level. That is, grouping structure can be
elaborated iteratively and indefinitely by the
same rules (ibid: 16). They suggest that "the
42

elements of metrical structure are essentially

the same whether at the level of the smallest
note value or at a hypermeasure level (a level
larger than the notated measure)." (ibid: 20)
There are many objections to such a
formulation. It must be granted that this is a
theory of perception and cognition, not of
composition; hence it does not presume that
such uniformity exists in the music, but rather
that in listening to music we tend to expect
such regularities. However, an immediate
problem with this kind of analysis is that it
presupposes a kind of classic large-scale order
or unity; notes hang together coherently as
melodies, phrases answer other phrases,
sections balance each other. The concept of
coherence (often phrased by contemporary
composers as "what works") is an old
problematic, ascribable to many structuralist
and pre-structuralist literary theories. It has
been deconstructed by the observation that
coherence or artistic unity is projected by
some theory of coherence, and not by any
intrinsic properties of the work itself (Street
1989). As another critique of the notion of
recursive hierarchy in music, Narmour (1990)
supposes instead that there can be
multidirectional networks and communication
between levels of the hierarchy.
In any case, if taken literally, the claim of
recursive grouping hierarchies in the temporal
domain must be rejected on simple cognitive
grounds, because of the qualitative differences among the three kinds of memory, namely
the echoic store, short-term or working
memory, and long-term memory. As Brower
(1993) has pointed out, echoic memory covers
the immediate timescale of rhythmic activity
("foreground rhythmic structure"), whereas
short-term memory covers meter and phrases
("middle-ground"), and long-term memory
covers the timescale of musical sections and
movements ("background"). The three
different types of memory involve different
kinds of processing. We entrain to a pulse
based on the echoic storage of the previous
pulse and some matched internal oscillator
periodicity, we feel the relationships among
strong and weak beats (accentual meter), we
count times between phrases or bars (metric
grouping), and we associate features of one

section with memories of a previous section

that is no longer represented in serial order.
So for example, we can experience
syncopation at the metric level, and so-called
expansion and contraction at a higher level,
but these are qualitatively not the same
cognitive phenomenon. Hence it appears that
the notion of recursion does not apply literally
as we switch among these different
timescales, because they operate in very
different ways from a cognitive perspective.

elementary theoretical considerations, it was

possible to rank the errors detected by each
method for three different experimental
conditions. Estimates of the relative
discrimination index for each of the methods
(i)-(iii) are shown for each kind of
perturbation. Each line represents one
experimental configuration, in which an
isochronous series of tones or clicks,
separated by an inter-onset interval , is modified by a perturbation . In the experiment,
the change occurred after a large number of
unchanged intervals, to establish regularity.
(Table adapted from Shulze 1978.)

The above arguments suggest that we tend to

organize music in terms of certain ranges of
musical times that are commensurate
discrimination index
with the timescales of human activity, in comparison patterns (successive IOI's)
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
keeping with the remarks of the previous ( =300ms; =10 or 15 ms)
hi
hi

+
+
+
+ lo
chapter on embodiment. Among the 1.
med
med lo

pieces of the rhythmic puzzle that we 2.

discussed were three qualitatively 3.
hi
lo
med

+
-

distinct embodied regimes of temporal

perception: the quick detail of speech and
digital motion, the steady tactus-level pulse,
It turns out that the second alternative (ii) is
and the phrasal breath. These distinctions,
correct. In other words, when we hear a
together with the arguments about grouping
regular rhythmic pulse, we don't match the
and memory discussed above, all enter into
intervals one by one, nor do we compare each
the following discussion of meter.
interval to an internal ideal interval, but rather
we co-perform this periodic pulse internally.
Pulse Perception
This kind of internal, synchronized pulse
generation is known as entrainment. A
One of the most crucial aspects of rhythm
relatively simple phenomenon, entrainment is
perception that has been established
the essence of pulse perception. It has turned
experimentally is the mind's role in entraining
out to be a rather prodigious computational
to a periodic input signal. This ability allows
problem (Desain & Honing 1991).
us to tap our foot to music. Given a periodic
auditory pulse as input, we have a low
Meter
tolerance for error in the signal; we easily
detect any sudden deviation from periodicity
The next step up from entrainment is a more
above a small threshold. One might suppose
complex phenomenon known as meter perthat the mind would detect such errors in any
ception. Much music of the world is orgaof three ways: (i) compare each inter-onset
nized metrically, that is, according to a
interval (IOI) to each previous IOI, (ii) match
periodic grouping of pulses; this grouping
the periodic signal to an internally generated
may or may not be explicit in the musical
periodic oscillator, or (iii) match each IOI to
surface. Most generally, meter is a periodic
an internal ideal period.
grouping of a musical time unit; it can
connote but does not strictly imply a hierarchy
Schulze (1978) carried out the following
of weak and strong beats. Meter denotes a
experiment to test each possibility. Subjects
subharmonic (or grouping) of a pulse, and
listened to a periodic series of tones with one
might also suggest a higher harmonic (or
of three possible kinds of small temporal
subdivision) of the same pulse. That is, it can
perturbations, as shown below. From
simultaneously group and subdivide pulses
43

into regular units. For example, the time

signature 6/8 denotes a cycle of two pulses,
each divided into three equal subunits. The
best understanding of meter is as a periodic
grouping of perceived pulses i.e. as a
cognitive/perceptual phenomenon, not as an
objective reality of the acoustic signal.
However, this distinction is often elided, so
we might speak of the meter of a piece of
music. In doing so we would make some
assumptions about the listener's and the
musician's musical presuppositions. Studies of
rhythm perception of both test patterns and
musical performances show that meter itself
is an ambiguous if not wholly imaginary
property of the audio signal (Parncutt 1994).
A given rhythm, whether intentionally
musical or not, can evoke a number of
contrasting pulse sensations and metric
orientations in different listening subjects or
in different trials with the same subject. In
this regard, as we shall see below, West
African and many African-American musics
are no exception.
To circumvent this problem, one could create
a distinction between the functions of meter in
music production (as a generative principle)
and in music perception (as an informationprocessing strategy). Or, more compellingly,
one could avoid this distinction by defining
meter as an internal periodic template that
frames and temporally grounds both
perceptions and actions. This latter definition
is in keeping with a model proposed by Povel
(1984). This model was proposed in response
to experimental data involving both perception and imitation of temporal sequences, in
which it was found that both musically trained
and untrained subjects map temporal
sequences onto an interval structure. In the
model, the first step in temporal processing of
music consists of a segmentation of the
sequence into equal intervals (i.e., beats)
bordered by events. In a second processing
step, intervals smaller than the beat interval
are expressed as a subdivision of the beat
interval in which they occur. These beats and
subdivisions serve to orient perception and
action in a musical environment; meter may
be seen thus as an attentive mechanism, as
discussed below.
44

One small shortcoming of the above model,

also admitted in a treatment by Lerdahl &
Jackendoff (1983: 97), is that this definition
of meter is challenged by asymmetric meters
containing odd numbers of beats or an
irregular pulse. In many cases (e.g. Eastern
European, Greek, and Middle Eastern folk
musics, South Indian classical music) one
entrains to a series of long and short beats at
the tactus level. These different kinds of
pulses almost always occur in the duration
ratios of 3:2 or 2:1, implying a common small
temporal unit at a lower metric level. From
these cases, it is apparent that a concept of
metrical structure should not enforce
regularity of pulse if it claims to apply
universally, but instead should allow for a
repeating group of irregular tactus-level
pulses of either 2 or 3 constituent units.
Similarly, the accentual view of meter in
which a metric template is seen as always
reinforced by accentual and microtiming
variations does not appear to carry over to
many non-Western musics. One should not
regard the global musical preponderance of
"syncopation" (off-beat accents) as a vast set
of exceptions to the "normal" accentual rules
of meter, but rather as convincing
counterexamples to such proposed accentual
rules. Various signal-processing techniques
have been developed to derive a pulse and a
meter from musical recordings, but typically
such attempts yield notoriously variable
results for many such "syncopated" kinds of
music such as jazz (e.g. Todd et al. 1998).
This is because meter is not necessarily
inherent in any audio signal. It is a perceptual
and cognitive construction, derived from
some perceived periodic patterning of
perceived accents (including, paradoxically,
accents imposed by the imagined meter itself)
but also from some set of assumptions about
meter.
Indeed, indicated meters appear in most
Western sheet-music scores because of the
composer's desire to exploit these assumptions, to allow the implications of a time
signature to shape the performers understanding and subsequent rendering of the
piece. Aspects of meter can be conveyed in

expressive musical performance. In Western

tonal music, a given meter can suggest a
certain template for phenomenal accent
patterns and sub-tactus expressive timing
variations. Meter provides a basic guideline
for manipulating loudness, timbre, and timing
in keeping with the composer's intention.
Additionally, there exists a large vocabulary
of diacritical marks to extend the connotations
of meter. Due to all of this, we tend to speak
of the meter of a piece objectively, because it
is simply the time signature written to the left
of the first bar of written music. This
tendency is carried over erroneously to many
ethnographic analyses of nonwritten musics,
where the "meter" is simply that perceived by
the transcriber. In a study of a foreign music,
one should be aware of the cultural baggage
attached to a musical concept like meter.
There may be an analagous concept of
orienting a periodic grouping of pulses, but it
need not imply all the other attributes of
meter that we recognize in Western music.
Later I examine this possibility in the study of
West African music.
Sometimes meter is also used to connote
larger periodicities (as in "hypermeter").
Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983) characterize
metrical structure as a hierarchical nesting of
beats to arbitrary degrees of recursive depth.
This formulation covers too broad a range of
timescales and presupposes temporal "unities"
where they need not exist. In attempting to
apply this theory to some rather simple
musical examples (Lerdahl & Jackendoff
1983: 250-253), they encounter unexpected
difficulties, and find that the supposition of
large-scale periodicities beyond the barline
level is much less robust and highly errorprone. It appears that meter functions most
effectively as relatively small periodic
groupings of the main beat, and quite variably
at higher levels.
London (1997) has claimed that polymeter
does not exist; that is, one cannot perceive
two meters at once. Since meter exists only in
the minds of the listeners and the performers,
two meters thus cannot "exist" at once in the
same mind. Instead one can hear ambiguous
rhythms in which different metric candidates

compete. The result, however, is not the

simultaneous perception of two contrary
meters but the canceling of the effects of one
meter by the other. One can be aware of the
possible presence of two different meters, and
one can switch actively between perceiving
them, as one can between the vase and the
two faces in the classic visually ambiguous
figure. One can also hear metrically vague
music, in which no periodic grouping of
pulses suggests itself. Certainly two people
may simultaneously hear different meters in
the same music. But one person cannot
entrain simultaneously to two separate pulse
groupings. In the classic figure-ground
relationship, only one meter can function as
the ground. This claim against polymeter
seems to apply only to groupings of pulses in
the vicinity of the tactus, however. One can
be aware of multiple subdivisions of the
tactus (as in some examples of Afro-Cuban
rumba, where we perceive both quadruplet
and triplet subdivisions in abundance [CD28]). Similarly, one can simultaneously hear
different-length groups of measures (as in
James Brown's "I Don't Want Nobody to Give
Me Nothing" [CD-29], in which we easily
apprehend that the vocals are in four-bar
phrases and the horns and drums cycle a
three-bar unit). Hence the claim against
polymeter refers more to the level of
entrainment than to perception in general that is, to the act of imagining the movement
associated with the rhythm, rather than the act
of "hearing" the rhythm passively.
Our attentional capacities are sharply
delineated by the timescale implied by meter,
namely, that of the tactus. It is suggested by
many (Gjerdingen 1989, Jones 1986, Jones &
Boltz 1989, Jones & Yee 1993) that meter
provides us with an attending mechanism a
temporal template against which to process
information in time. Meter is seen as an
invariant of the musical environment,
computed from recurrent temporal patterns.
As an invariant, it gives us a baseline from
which to discern musical variation (such as
musical rhythm and expressive timing) more
efficiently. This view is supported in
experiments in which subjects have more
difficulty reproducing rhythms that do not
45

have an obvious common time unit than those

that do (Jones 1986). Modelling metric
oscillations with neural networks is quite
straightforward. It seems plausible that a
small signal from a modest, neurally based
metric counter could be used to modulate the
performance of a much larger neural network
according to a given meter, yielding a form of
metrically modulated attention (Gjerdingen
1989: 78).
In differentiation among various timescales of
music, Jones (1993) and Jones & Boltz (1989)
has described different music-listening
strategies as different kinds of attention,
namely future-oriented (long-term, memorybased) vs. analytic (short-term, perceptionbased) attending. Actually, this distinction is
more relational than absolute; there are
intermediate regions between the two
extremes. In any case, we can associate
analytic attending with the timescale of
musical meter.
These distinctions lead one to believe that, in
its most useful form, meter measures a narrow
range of rhythmic phenomena, limited
roughly to what has been called the
psychological present. Meter functions as an
orienting principle among some small number
of (often regular) tactus-level beats between
two and eight, roughly. A metric grouping of
beats stretches over a duration between
approximately 800 ms and 5 s, which lasts
longer than the duration of the echoic store (<
1 s) but shorter than the span of working
memory (~ 30 s). Apparently, then, we must
scale back our definition of meter itself to
denote only groupings of the tactus. Hence
hypermeter is not a true species of meter, nor
is a smaller subdivision of the main beat
("micrometer"). One will find apparent
exceptions to this rule in some adagios from
the tonal-music literature, where a written
measure might stretch over ten seconds, or in
some allegros or prestos, where a written
measure might last a half-second or less.
Typically in such cases, however, the written
meter and the perceived metric grouping are
far from identical, the latter being both
somewhat variable from one individual to the

46

next, and somewhat constrained by our

attentional capacities.
In light of these arguments against both
polymeter and hypermeter, it becomes clear
that the perceptual groupings of the musical
tactus into twos, threes, fours, and so on
(perhaps up to eights) retain special status
among rhythmic perceptual phenomena. This
unconscious periodic grouping of pulses as
some kind of gestalt would saturate at "the
magical number seven plus or minus two"
(Miller 1956) at which point perception with
such ease becomes impossible. At metric
lengths beyond this, we require either a
conscious counting principle to hold our
place, or a grouping procedure for "chunking"
the beats into larger units. In addition,
familiarity is an issue with meter. The sound
and feeling of a given meter needs to be
experienced, or else it will not function in this
unconscious way. This is why, for example,
five-beat groupings seem alien to westerners
but are quite common in Indian popular
music. More remarks on cultural aspects of
meter appear in a later section.
Models of Meter Perception
As mentioned above, meter perception has
prompted a number of researchers in music
cognition to develop models with varying
degrees of success. Large (1994) has
developed a compelling model for beat
perception, which he has subsequently (1997)
applied to meter perception. He modeled the
phenomenon of beat perception as a pattern of
coordination that arises between an internally
generated periodic process (a self-sustaining
oscillator) and a periodicity within a complex
external rhythm (Large 1994, Large & Kolen
1994). The listener and musical input are
treated as a single dynamical system
consisting of the external (driving) rhythm
and the internal (driven) oscillator; the
attractor states of this dynamical system
correspond to instances of entrainment. The
internal oscillator's dynamics are assumed to
adapt to the external periodicity, thereby
modelling the robustness of ordinary beat
perception to the subtle, systematic timing
deviations that occur in human performance.

Large (1997) has also developed the notion

that networks of these oscillators can combine
hierarchically to respond to multiple
periodicities in the driving signal. The model
allows hierarchies of entrainment, whereby a
fundamental pulse frequency (the beat) and its
subharmonics
(slower
periodicities)
coordinate with distinct phase relationships.
This is presented as a model for meter
perception. While it provides some
compelling results that are robust under
expressive tempo variation, it appears that this
model neglects crucial aspects of our
perceptual apparatus that cause us to
distinguish between pulse and meter. As
discussed above, the notion of a tactus
provides a primary pulse range that sits
squarely in the echoic-memory regime,
whereas the larger timescales associated with
meter invoke a different variety of cognition
(Brower 1993). In his model, by treating all
periodicities as equivalent regardless of
length, Large fails to ground his model in the
embodied temporal processing abilities of
human beings. Hence, while the model works
very well with the expressive tempo
variations of tonal music, it is not clear to
what degree it represents the ways that we
perceive and interpret such structures.
Another recent effort to construct a model for
rhythm perception (Todd et al. 1998) stems
instead
from
a
strongly
embodied
sensorimotor theory. The authors have
developed a model that takes into account the
natural biomechanical frequencies of the body
and the temporal characteristics of the
auditory system, and treats beat induction as
an active rather than a passive process. The
computational implementation takes audio
input and synchronizes a simulated
locomotive action. When applied to
something as culturally contingent as music,
however, the implementation encounters
problems getting the phase relationship right
for the pulse of the audio signal, not to
mention the meter. The model seems to err on
the side of overemphasis on the sensorymotor (embodied) component, failing to
account for the possibilities of supplementing
or even overriding this component with
learned input. The only learning discussed is

that which tunes the sensory systems to their

embodied dynamics and the motor control
systems to the temporal-motional properties
of the physical environment. However, as
musical beings, we know that musical
perception involves more than physical and
raw sensory input. We cannot forget the role
of culture in shaping our perception, and this
includes rhythm perception, as I shall argue
below.
Rhythm and Meter in West African Music
Studying what others have said about meter in
the music of other cultures helps us
understand the most basic, possibly crosscultural functions of meter. In doing so,
however, we have to unravel the cultural
biases that all too often mark such crosscultural studies. As a case study in the
remainder of this chapter, I shall present my
reactions to a wide variety of viewpoints from
various ethnomusicologists, psychologists,
and theorists about meter, pulse, and rhythmic
grouping in West African music. In my
opinion, many of these studies are
characterized by two striking trends: a
misapplication of music-theoretic and musiccognition models of rhythm and meter
stemming from studies of Western tonal
music on the one hand, and a well-meaning
application of misunderstood African cultural
and musical principles on the other. Although
the models suggested by Lerdahl and
Jackendoff (1983) and others go to great pains
to keep meter and rhythmic grouping
separate, the precedents set in African
musicology by Western scholars tend to
confuse the two. Furthermore, they tend either
to ignore or to oversimplify descriptions
provided by musicians and musicologists who
come from West African cultures. Many
highly influential treatments are fraught with
misleading statements about such things as
polymeter in African music. For example,
Jones (1959) transcribed musical rhythms
such that each phrase begins at the downbeat
of a new meter, resulting in a jumble of
meters of varying lengths and negligible
perceptual salience. Below I attempt to
address the contradictory viewpoints that
works such as Jones's have engendered.
47

The Ghanaian percussionist C. K. Ladzekpo,

a prominent performer and teacher of AnloEwe dance-drumming in northern California,
has written an extensive web document on the
technique, practice, and cultural functions of
this art form. He begins his section on
rhythmic techniques thus:
In a complex interaction of beat schemes of
varying rhythmic motions, the human mind
normally seeks a focal point. Among the
Anlo-Ewe, one of the integral beat schemes
is dominant and the rest are perceived in
cross rhythmic relationship to it. This
dominant beat scheme is considered the
main beat because of its strong accents in
regular recurrence that pervade and regulate
the entire fabric...
In practice, the beat scheme of four units is
the most commonly used. At any given
tempo, the rhythmic motion of this beat
scheme is the most moderate (not too slow
or fast) and the most convenient as a focal
point...
To better comprehend a main beat, it is
structured so that it measures off equal
increment of pulsations, the first of which
normally bears an accent. These integral
fractions or background pulsations are the
major ornamental forces that give a main
beat its distinct texture, flavor and
character...
The recurrent grouping of the main beats
normally creates a fixed musical period or
measure. While it is possible to create
several measure schemes by varied
groupings of the main beats, two types of
such groupings are the most frequent in the
development
of
Anlo-Ewe
dancedrumming. The first most useful measure
scheme consists of four main beats with
each main beat measuring off three equal
pulsations as its distinctive feature. The next
most useful measure scheme consists of
four main beats with each main beat
flavored by measuring off four equal
pulsations. These beat schemes are roughly
equivalent to 12/8 time and 4/4 time in
Western music.
48

In contrast to the Western measure concept

of accenting the first beat of each measure,
the Anlo-Ewe concept maintains regular
accents on all the main beats. However,
there is a tendency to end phrases as well as
the entire composition on the accented
pulsation of the first main beat implying
further movement or flow. (Ladzekpo 1995)
Ladzekpo clearly states that the chief
rhythmic organizing principle is an isochronous pulse in an appropriate tactus range,
typically grouped into metric units of four
pulses, and also subdivided into smaller
isochronous subdivisions of three or four. The
first of each such group of subdivisions is
usually accented, but the first of each group of
four pulses is no more accented than the other
three. However, the first pulse of a group of
four is understood as the end (as opposed to
the beginning) of many musical phrases. The
first pulse thus has privileged status among
the four pulses and corresponds somewhat to
the Western notion of a downbeat, although it
functions slightly differently. In the original
document, all of Ladzekpo's statements are
supplementally depicted in Western musical
notation to minimize cross-cultural ambiguity.
The strong accents to which he refers should
not be taken to mean sonic accents. As noted
in Pantaleoni (1972) in reference to the music
of this same ethnic group, the gradations in
volume accent in West African drumming do
not necessarily correspond to those implied
by a European time signature such as 12/8 or
4/4. In fact, the volume accents alone may
rarely reinforce any unified meter at all, by
Western standards. To the "experienced"
listener in the dance-drumming environment,
however, accents can also be of a phenomenal
(sonic, visual, tactile) or purely cognitive
(metric) nature. Not only do we have some
metric sense that frames the rhythmic activity
with conceptual accents; also, we see the
dancers' grounded footwork and the
musicians' subtle body language, and we feel
the sticks beating the drums and the ground
shaking. Such paramusical input is operative
in any performed music, much as
paralinguistic phenomena are in most
linguistic communication (McNeil 1998);

these aspects are consequences of situated

cognition.
Much West African music is characterized by
variable and repetitive rhythms played in
conjunction with a basic timeline, such as a
fixed pattern played on a bell. The bell part
functions as a point of reference, a constantly
repeating pattern that the other musicians use
to orient themselves metrically. But one
should be careful with the connotations of this
last statement. Whatever parallel concept of
meter exists in these cultures, it does not
necessarily imply the same template of
accents and stresses that a Western meter
does. I am using meter in the sense offered in
the previous section namely, as a perceived
periodic grouping of tactus-level pulses. The
extra connotations associated with Western
meter, such as an accentual template and a
basis for expressive tempo modulation, are
not included in this general understanding of
meter.
(To complicate the issue, the presence of
African diasporic musics in the West, and
their more and more frequent rendering in
Western notation, has smoothed out the
difference. For example, a piece of
commercially available sheet music can bear
next to the tempo marking a suggestion such
as "swing," or "slow funk groove," or even
"African 6/8 feel," thereby implying a
rhythmic treatment that is decidedly nonEuropean, that is indeed derived from African
rhythms (Wilson 1974), and that is not
implied by the time signature alone. Hence
there has been a gradual expansion of the
possibilities of written music to include nonWestern elements, to the point that one cannot
draw a sharp boundary between Western
notational concepts and non-Western musical
practices.)
A guiding aesthetic principle in West African
musics privileges rhythmic groupings that
would challenge or "Signify on" the integrity
of the pulse. It must be noted that an
important function of the performance of
drum music is the psychological balance
achieved
by
internalizing
seemingly
conflicting rhythmic unities at the physical

level (Ladzekpo 1995). Part of the crux of the

activity of dance-drumming involves maintaining one's balance (i.e. one's sense of the
steady isochronous pulse, metaphorically
viewed as "purpose in life") in the midst of a
torrent of interlocking cross-rhythms (metaphorically viewed as "obstacles") (Ladzekpo
1995). This does not necessarily imply that
the intention of the composer/performer is to
induce polymeter, nor does it imply the
opposite. Rather, the musical construction is
not framed in terms of meter, but in terms of
crossed rhythmic groupings; these groupings
can be serial or periodic or both, to use
Parncutt's (1994) terminology. When two
meters appear to the listener, it is because
there are periodic groupings of short, serially
organized rhythmic fragments or phrases, and
their periodicity seems to imply a different
meter from the primary one. In the sense
described above, the music becomes metrically ambiguous. Most commonly it is some
variety of triple meter that seems to appear
over some variety of duple meter. But in
context it is seen as a challenge, not an
alternative, to the prevailing meter; frequently
the latter is so obvious subjectively to the
practitioner that it is not reinforced sonically
very much at all. Waterman (1952) also
emphasizes the importance of the subjective
beat in African music, the underlying pulse
that is not necessarily beaten out literally. He
stresses that the appreciation of African music
necessitates a "metronome sense." European
music emphasizes the main beats, the upbeat
and the downbeat. By contrast, African
musicians assume implicitly that their
audience is imagining these fundamental
beats without difficulty; the audible musical
material will fashion its rhythms around this
mental beat, often using polyrhythms, crosspulses, offbeat melodic accents, and much
indirection and subtlety. Hence perceived
groupings in the audio signal need not
delineate the meter, and in fact frequently run
counter to it.
So, where is meter in West African and
related musics? If the Anlo-Ewe music
described by Ladzekpo is any indication,
meter is there, solidly, unproblematically, in
the mind of the practitioner, and equally
49

solidly in the mind of the acculturated

listener, even if it is not obviously apparent in
some objective rendering of the acoustic
signal. One learns the main beat, its
subdivisions, and its metric grouping; and
then one learns the rhythm of the bell pattern,
which simultaneously groups the main beats
into larger units of four and subdivides them
into smaller units of four or three. This
simultaneous grouping and subdivision
denoted by this referent rhythm suggests a
way of orienting one's attention and physical
entrainment to the musical signal; i.e., it
connotes a set of assumptions in much the
same way that a European time signature
connotes a related but distinct set of
assumptions. When learning to perform other
rhythms in this music, one's attention is
continually directed towards the concurrent
bell pattern. This is done not because the
asymmetric bell supplants the regular pulse,
but because the bell gives the most consistent
depiction of the pulse and its organization.
Sonic accentual reinforcement is unnecessary
and (uncoincidentally) is not a guiding
aesthetic.
Thus the main beat and its metric grouping
are articulated in a rather indirect fashion
not with a continual parade of accentual
reinforcement, but with suggestion and
complexity. The meter is encoded in the
rhythm itself. The way in which this is done is
unambiguous but highly culturally specific.
(In the audio examples that follow, a click
track is heard alongside the written patterns,
with the high click on the first beat of the
written measure.) For example, the standard
12/8 bell pattern of the Anlo-Ewe people is
heard phrased as [CD-30]

whereas the same bell pattern would be heard

with a different starting point by the Yoruba
people, as [CD-31]

50

and by yet another ethnic group as [CD-32]

Furthermore, the patterns are not necessarily

grouped according to the barlines; for
example, the Yoruba pattern is said to be
grouped such that the final note is the socalled downbeat (Anku 1992), i.e. [CD-33]

where the parentheses delineate the grouping

over the barline. (In the audio example, the
grouping is delineated by a slight accent in
intensity on the first note of each group.) Note
that respective boundaries implied by
grouping and meter do not reinforce each
other in this case; this possibility is allowed
for in the respective definitions of grouping
and meter. This example shows that both the
placement of the tactus and the grouping of
elements varies from one community to the
next with respect to a single rhythmic pattern.
Typically the constituent beats and
subdivisions are not literally "counted" by the
African practitioners. Hence literally there is
no "1." Rhythms are frequently represented
instead as linguistically derived mnemonics,
an obviously favored technique in an oral
culture. An example is the simple rhythm
known in the West as "three over four" and
represented by Ladzekpo as [CD-34]

This example is onomatopoeic, but there are

many documented examples of rhythmic
mnemonics with semantic meaning as well
(Anku 1992).
(There has been a chicken-or-egg debate
about the status of these linguistic
phrases: are the rhythms derived from
language, or are the phrases arbitrary
mnemonic devices to represent the
rhythms? Ladzekpo (1995) stresses the
ubiquity of symbolic and metaphoric
encodings in African music, which
seems to support the former view. In any
case, the fact that linguistic proverbs
have been long associated with many
rhythms in many African drum musics
suggests that the music carries these
meanings, whatever their etiology.)
The bell patterns mentioned above may be
seen as musically encoded time signatures in
a self-consistent musical language, implying a
different set of basic assumptions than are
used in the West. In many West African
musical contexts, one learns the proper
placement of rhythms not merely in relation
to an underlying abstract meter but to the bell
pattern itself; no explicit reference need be
made to an underlying metric abstraction. An
outcome of this approach is the organization
of phrases relative to the so-called downbeat,
referred to by Ghanaian musicologist W.
Anku as the Regulative Time Point (RTP)
(Anku 1992). Instead of referring to a specific
subdivision of a specific beat in the metric
hierarchy, a rhythmic phrase is said to have a
specific
relationship
to
the
RTP.
Improvisations based on this phrase will
maintain this relationship, yielding the
repeated use of what in Western terms might
be called an anacrusis or "pick-up." In the
figure below are some examples of rhythmic
themes with different RTP relationships, i.e.
different phase relationships to the underlying
meter. The groupings are specified by the
parentheses around each theme. A phrase with
RTP n corresponds to the RTP placement on
the nth relevant subdivision from the
beginning of the phrase. For example, the bell
pattern is designated as RTP 9 because the
ninth eighth note of the phrase (beginning

after the grouping parenthesis) is the RTP or

downbeat, as indicated by the central hash
mark.

The examples are taken from Anku (1992),

who describes these rhythmic phrases as
structural sets because of the way they
organize subsequent rhythmic material. The
RTP corresponds to the downbeat in the
indicated time signature. I have mixed
representations here to ease understanding;
Western meter is used to explain the West
African RTP notion. (In the audio example
[CD-35], again you hear a metric click track
to guide the ear, and again the groupings are
delineated by a slight accent in intensity on
the first note of each group. Once established,
the bell pattern is sustained throughout, while
themes 1, 2, and 3 are presented in
succession.) Again, these phrases are often
linguistically based, and thereby carry the
encoded meaning of a proverb. The placement
of the RTP in such a phrase may suggest the
added element of linguistic emphasis (which
in music we might call metrical accent), as in
the difference between "I walked to the store"
and "I walked to the store."
Hence, not only does the RTP relationship
thoroughly specify when to begin a phrase in
the metric cycle implied by the bell; more
importantly, this relationship delineates the
distribution of emphasis. This is similar but
not identical to the accentual template implied
in European music by a time signature, and in
particular by the downbeat. However, the
RTP relationship carries a stronger
51

implication of repetition and cyclicality than

is connoted by anacrusis and downbeat. A
certain section of drum-ensemble music might
be characterized by a certain RTP relationship, maintained each time the metric cycle
comes around; the change to a new RTP
relationship characterizes the transition to a
new section. This treatment amounts to a
different way of conceptualizing meter, in
which no reference need be made to any
mathematical abstraction or its accompanying
accent pattern.
The crucial orienting role of the bell pattern
and the complex interplay among the
interlocking cyclic patterns on like-sounding
instruments demands a high degree of skill in
both auditory scene analysis (Bregman 1990)
and selective attending (Jones 1993). These
cognitive facilities are rarely highlighted in
speaking of Western tonal music, which tends
to be less stratified and less rhythmically
dense at the tactus level. However, the
centrality of streaming and attending in music
perception and cognition should be apparent
both generally and in the specific case of
drum music. I return to the notion of
streaming in the next chapter, where I point
out how certain expressive rhythmic
manipulation can enhance segregation of
similar streams.
Meter Perception and Culture
Much has been written about African cultural
concepts of time and how they might
influence the approach to musical time.
Ethnotheoretic discussions of how time is
represented in the minds of African musicians
(Merriam 1982, Stone 1985) have failed to
appeal very extensively to African musicians
themselves for information. Extramusical
cultural investigations, usually in the form of
literature searches, have given rise to rather
extreme speculation about the "nature" of
African time in the mind of "the African."
While ostensibly aiming for cultural
sensitivity, such studies have often applied
oversimplified versions of selected cultural
models rather abusively. A so-called "cyclic"
mythology of life and death was seen to
correspond to a beat cycle (Stone 1985) even
52

though Western music also has beat cycles in

the supposed absence of such a conception.
Similarly, a cultural lack of ideal incremental
measurement of time was seen as an argument
against the existence of a steady underlying
pulse (Merriam 1982) in a music that is quite
unarguably pulse-based. These ethnomusicologists seemed determined to find essential
differences between Western and nonWestern ways of thinking, and to be able to
display such differences in a pat description.
In doing so they commit an epistemological
error of presuming that such essential
differences in worldview can be contained in
one language but not in another. In other
words, by assuming the role of impartial
observer, they implicitly construct their own
vantage point as a superior one for discerning
such difference (Agawu 1992).
In this way they seemed to recapitulate the
controversial stance of Whorf (1956), who
asserted (despite a poverty of evidence) that
the Hopi language contained such a radically
incommensurate conceptualization of time
from English that the Hopi themselves must
experience a severely different reality from
ours. (Whorf's well-meaning but flawed
claims were later refuted in Malotki (1983)).
The West African musicologist K. Agawu
wrote, in direct response to such misinformed
efforts in the study of African music, "[W]e
have to be careful not to fall prey to simple
dichotomies, especially those propped up by a
vulgar essentialism." (Agawu 1992: 266)
Elsewhere, he cautions:
What must finally be resisted is the impulse
to construct an Africa that is always
different from the West. No doubt some
differences cannot be suppressed, but one
may be surprised by the extent to which the
need for, and circumstances of, musicmaking in Africa resemble conditions in
other parts of the world, and bespeak a basic
human need for artistic expression. (Agawu
1995: 4-5)
And again, on the "project of 'exoticizing'"
African music: "[S]uch relentless pursuit of
difference must be resisted ... because it is
likely to blind us to those areas in which

difference actually occurs. For difference is

perceivable only against a horizon of nondifference, and until we have constructed such
a horizon, our efforts to understand African
rhythm will continue to founder." (Agawu
1995: 193)
I do not mean to dispute concepts of mosaic
time, nor to downplay the role of cyclical
structures, nor to ignore the importance of
learning the whole simultaneously with the
parts, nor to dispel any other valid insights
about African cultural models. Rather, in
keeping with Agawu's admonitions, I only
mean to be careful about how these ideas are
described and employed, especially in regards
to musical "time-reckoning." Just as we
would not tolerate an assertion that all
Western music is linear all the time from start
to finish because all Western thought is linear
and rational (nor could we really explain what
such a claim is supposed to mean), so we
cannot make such crude generalizations about
the entirety of African music based on a
vague and poorly explained cultural tendency.
While many rhetorical assertions are made
that African musicians do not measure time or
do not have a linear concept of time, nowhere
are these claims proven in connection with
music (nor is it very forcefully proven that all
Western musicians do). A recent attempt to
prove such a claim (Magill & Pressing 1997)
is by its own admission (Magill & Pressing
1997: 189; Pressing, private communication,
1998) scientifically inconclusive, although
rhetorically quite assertive in its conclusion.
The study is predicated upon a rather
misleading
dichotomy
between
"an
asymmetric timeline-ground model, which
represents a computational elaboration of
traditional African understanding, and a
pulse-ground model, which is based on
Western ideas of regular meter" (Magill &
Pressing 1997: 189). In other words, it is
supposed that the "Western" concept of steady
pulse does not exist in "traditional African
understanding," and that African music's
irregular "timeline" rhythm takes the place of
pulse. The quote from Ladzekpo (1995) in the
previous section suggests that no such
dichotomy exists for him. Curiously,

Ladzekpo and his brothers are cited as a

reference in Magill & Pressing, as is a
humorously long list of other Western and
African "experts" (Magill & Pressing 1997:
190, 197), provided as if to demonstrate
enough agreement as to render any challenge
moot. When I pointed out Ladzekpo's
description of the pulse as the cultural
equivalent to a sense of "purpose in life,"
Pressing (private communication, 1998)
claimed that Africans have a different way of
explaining it to westerners that really does not
correspond to their inner thoughts. To this I
must respond, why the conspiracy?
In their rigorous statistical analysis of the
bimanual tapping of authentic West African
rhythms by an authentic Ghanaian
percussionist N. K. Owusu, Magill & Pressing
(1997) seem to have thrown the experiment
off by asking their subject to refrain from
playing in his usual way:
Mr. Owusu would often implement various
flams in the course of a trial without
conscious awareness. This apparently
common stylistic device at first played
havoc with the selection criteria, and as a
result, it was necessary to remind him
repeatedly at the beginning of each trial to
avoid flamming... Mr. Owusu also showed a
marked tendency toward acceleration over
the course of a trial. This is not surprising as
it is a common stylistic trait used in Asante
drumming music; however, because it risks
creating uninterpretable nonstationarity for
long runs, he was also regularly reminded to
maintain a steady tempo. (Magill &
Pressing 1997: 204)
Pressing (private communication, 1998)
reported that in fact Owusu would accelerate
and decelerate over the course of a measure. I
suspect that both the flams and the supposed
tempo variation were actually a form of
expressive timing against an isochronous
pulse, as discussed in chapter 7. Furthermore I
can imagine that such rhythmic expression
was deeply intertwined in his performing
practice, inseparable from the rhythms
themselves, to the extent that forbidding him
from playing this way created a highly
53

irregular playing situation for him irregular

enough that the results are necessarily
inconclusive.
When learning West African music, one is
instructed constantly to focus on one's
relationship to the bell. But this should not be
taken so literally as to ignore the pulse; for
one is also continually reminded to remain
grounded, which in my estimation is closer to
staying with the (most often duple) pulse.
This sense of pulse is highly contextual. It is
undeniable that a given rhythm can be
"pulsed" in a variety of ways; West African
musicians are trained in the abilities to shift
their metric perspective on a rhythm and to
hear and generate cross-rhythms. But it is not
necessarily the case that advanced West
African musicians hear all possible metric
groupings simultaneously to such a degree
that any semblance of meter dissolves. There
is nearly always one prevailing meter, against
which all other metric possibilities provide a
sense of contrast. In any case, despite frequent
efforts to portray African music as
"participatory" (Keil and Feld 1994), there is
no question that West African musicians are
highly specialized, possessing knowledge and
understanding that goes far beyond that of the
average West African person (Agawu 1995:
116). Hence it is not clear that the extreme
competence of one highly trained individual
may generalize to an entire subcontinent.
Surely, "inner" musical time remains a
mysterious and unexplained dimension of
music cognition in general. But that does not
imply, as some would have it in African
music (Magill et al. 1997; Pressing, private
communication, 1998), that there is no
commonly agreed upon pulse or time unit
among members of a musical ensemble or its
listening audience, nor even that there is a
deemphasized reliance upon such units.
Occasionally, attempts at understanding of
cultural differences can turn out instead quite
pejorative. When the same Ghanaian
musicologist offered his voice to the fray
(Agawu 1986) and suggested a balanced view
in which we look at the music itself for partial
answers it may contain, he was all but berated
for confusing the theoretical discussion with
54

his "indigenous" perspective (Stone 1986).

The implication was not simply that every
musicologist is contaminated by his or her
cultural perspective, but rather that certain
contaminants are more suspect than others.
What this reveals, and what my present work
attempts to address, is the prevalent tendency
to treat non-European perspectives on music
as extraneous, foreign, or "Other."
Unquestionably, one should resist the
assumption that because musicians are of a
different culture, their cognitive processes are
mysterious. It is possible to allow for
difference without fetishizing it. Rather, the
definitions and governing concepts of musicology and music perception must either
expand to apply to the music of the world, or
at least have their limitations and problematics acknowledged.
With Western tonal music, usually we defer
to the authority of the composer by heeding
the time signature indicated in the score rather
than imagining our own. We ought to do the
equivalent for the music in question here, for
which typically no composer is credited. The
equivalent authority would be the practitioner,
the carrier of knowledge, as we would deem
any musician in the ensemble, from the
master drummer to the bell player. We could
simply ask such a person where the beat is,
when the cycle begins, and so forth; or we
could ask more indirectly how one would
dance or clap to the rhythm. The meter as
imagined by the practitioner is apprehended
by the listener from the music chiefly due to
his or her familiarity with the material and
specifically with its production, with its
activity as dance-drumming. This does not
necessarily imply training so much as it does
acculturation.
When participating in the dance-drumming
environment (which I have been fortunate to
do in workshop contexts organized by
Ladzekpo from 1994 to 1997), I usually
cannot help but perceive the pulse, for it is
quite readily reinforced by the sum total of
the aural, visual, and physical/somatic input.
And if my rhythmic footing is lost momentarily, I can always use the timeline, the bell
pattern, to tell me which way is "up" or

"where's 1," as it might be worded in

conventional Western terms. But this is only
possible because I have learned how to parse
the bell pattern and accompanying rhythms
and body language from a carrier of this
tradition; I have been (however minimally)
acculturated or attuned to the details of this
musical activity.
I have also found myself in similar contexts to
which I was not at all acculturated, as in a
recent trip to Senegal in collaboration with
some North American and British jazz and
funk musicians, four Afro-Cuban percussionists, and five Senegalese drummers. We
Westerners had great difficulties guessing
which way the African musicians' rhythms
were intended to be heard, as did they with
ours. (As one might expect, this musical
language barrier was clearly less extreme
between the Senegalese and the AfroCubans.) At one point some of us were taken
to the Senegalese group's local performance at
a crossroads in Dakar. Though some of us had
been exposed to other forms of West African
music, we had extreme difficulty understanding how to perceive their particular music
and dance, which to us was highly
ambiguous, metrically and otherwise. We
found ourselves watching for the incidental
dancing and jumping of small children, our
only
perceptually
"salient"
orienting
guideline.
What the above anecdote suggests is that in
these cultures (and in all cultures, I would
argue), meter perception is a practice an
open-ended, intentional activity that is
accomplished actively by the musical
participants, while profoundly influenced by
the perceivers' social context. (See Berger
1997 and Bourdieu 1977 for elaborations of
this concept.) Meter perception is not simply
a raw perceptual inevitability for which
mathematical models of pulse salience and
gestalt concepts of grouping will easily
substitute. On the contrary, one requires
crucial background knowledge to perceive the
"correct" meter. Indeed, quite frequently an
untrained listener from the West will perceive
an "incorrect" meter in a piece of West
African music by employing a standard

minimum-syncopation principle. In the audio

example [CD-36], one might be tempted to
hear a triple meter, but the high-pitched bell
supplies the correct duple pulse.
Hence any model of rhythm perception and
cognition must include stages at which
incoming rhythms are compared to known
rhythms, matched against known meters, and
situated among broader expectations about
musical events. It also must involve some
degree of what may be called active
perception, by which is meant the assessment
of various alternative readings of the musical
signal, and the switching among them, all
carried out in time and continually revised and
updated. In short, it must treat perception to
some degree as a practice. Finally, it must
replace the communicative model of musical
discourse, i.e.
musician -> musical object -> listener
in which the musical signal simply carries
information from the sound's creator to its
perceiver, with a mutually constructive
paradigm (Nattiez 1990),
musician -> musical object <- listener
in which both musician and listener are
constructive, situated participants in a larger
musical fact for example, in an intercultural
encounter in which different musical
presuppositions hold on either side. And in
fact we might consider expanding this
paradigm to account for the musician's and
listener's respective cultures, and to allow for
the ways in which the so-called musical
object might also "construct" the musician
and listener.
Summary
The point remains that a great many
conflicting ideas have been bandied about
regarding African rhythms, from Westerners
in both ethnomusicology and cognitive
psychology, and also from African musicologists. I would summarize my arguments as
follows:

55

56

We need to keep our definitions consistent

in order to avoid the confusion that occur
so readily with terms such as grouping,
rhythm, pulse, and meter, and in particular
to avoid confusion between denotative and
connotative meanings. As a general
construct, meter most often denotes the
smallest perceivable periodically repeating
groupings of the perceived tactus-level
temporal units. Allowance must be made
for irregular pulse constructs as they occur
in Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and
South Asian musics.
Meter need not denote a hierarchy of
strong and weak beats; such a hierarchy is
considered a secondary construct. However, the perceived meter is an abstract
template that lies upon the musical
material in a certain place; its particular
relationship to the material is crucial. In
other words, meter does include a phase
relationship - that is, a concept of a
regulative time point, which in the West
we call the downbeat or the "one," but is
conceived slightly differently elsewhere.
So when we perceive meter, we mark one
of the beats as the regulative point, where
the metric cycle begins; this placement
affects our perception of the rhythms that
follow.
Meter perception also includes among its
ingredients the perception of the pulse and
its operational subdivisions.
We need to be aware of the nature-nurture
questions entangled in terms like
perception and cognition. Is meter
perception a "natural" process, or does it
involve some acculturation? Does meter
just happen, or do we make it happen? If
we make it happen, why do we know how
to do so? Perception of meter is
considered to be at least partially
voluntary, in that a skilled musician or
listener can hear a given rhythm in any
number of meters. Meter perception is
also strongly directed by learned schemas,
and hence contains a culturally contingent
component.
We need to be clear about distinctions
between music theory and music practice,
and about how well this distinction
transfers across cultures. Does a theory

equal a cognitive representation? Can

volumes of prose make one understand
what it's like to play African music as an
African person in an African community?
It should be noted that some meter-like
concept of small or large groupings of a pulse
exists in a large number of musics of the
world, including many European, African,
South Asian, Southeast Asian, and East Asian
musics. Sometimes this meter is reinforced
visually, as in the conducted orchestral music
of Europe, in the dancing that is inseparable
from much West African drumming, and in
the hand signals produced by the musicians
and audience in South Indian classical music.
Other times it is encoded musically, as in
timeline-based and clave-based musics of the
West African peoples and their diaspora, in
the two-and-four hi-hat or backbeat of
African-American jazz and popular musics,
and in the accentual reinforcement of tonal
music. Generally, the cultural elaboration of
meter involves multisensory signals that must
be decoded according to a body of culturally
determined guidelines. Such guidelines may
conflict with perceptual input, especially if we
accept the reality of the intercultural
encounter, and even more so if we grant that
perception itself is in part a culturally
determined practice. The "experienced
listener" constructed in Lerdahl and
Jackendoff (1983, p. 3) is indeed adept at
such idiomatic decoding. Given the variety of
types of musical organization, it is unlikely
that a single, perceptually based model for
beat and meter cognition would apply
universally. However, given the cross-cultural
existence of some concept of meter (as
opposed to none), the tendency to organize
tactus-level pulses into periodically recurring
groups should considered as an important,
possibly universal component of pulse-based
music.
These points are mere tips of vast conceptual
icebergs in musicology, anthropology, and
psychology. Above all, this chapter is
intended simply to caution against the
dangerous cultural slippage that occurs when
hypothesizing about both the cognitive universals and the cultural particulars of music.

Like Agawu, I am calling for a restraint of the

urge to revel in facile notions of difference.
Agawu's unique vantage point, that of a native
West African raised on Northern Ewe music
and culture and trained professionally in
European music and musicology, allows him
to make invaluable criticisms of the typical
Western representations of Africa. His stance
carries over quite effectively to the study of
African-American cultures and musics. As a
professional musician working in a number of
African-American genres as well as a student
of the cognitive science of music, I find
myself in a similarly unique position, situated
both to debunk some of the widespread
problematics in the study of rhythm cognition
and to suggest new alternatives. In my work I
do not wish to represent African America as a
frozen entity that allows easy description and
that is free from interaction with mainstream
European-American culture. Rather, I endeavor to show how the study of African and
African-American musics can highlight
previously unexamined aspects of rhythm
cognition that are nonetheless globally relevant.

57

6. Microtiming Studies
I have experienced one of the most interesting
musical revelations of my life, gradually over
the last several years, in studying West
African dance-drumming and in playing jazz,
hip-hop and funk. The revelation was that the
simplest repetitive musical patterns could be
imbued with a universe of expression. I have
often witnessed the Ghanaian percussionist
and teacher C. K. Ladzekpo stopping the
music to chide his students for playing their
parts with no emotion. One might wonder
how much emotion one can convey on a
single drum whose pitch range, timbral range,
and discrete rhythmic delineations are so
narrow, when the only two elements at one's
disposal are intensity and timing. Yet I have
become convinced that a great deal can be
conveyed with just those two elements. Some
investigations into how this can happen are
set forth in this chapter.
Rhythmic Expression in African and
African-American Musics
Some of the arguments in this chapter draw
upon cultural aspects of music listening.
Working from the documented historical
lineage between West African and AfricanAmerican cultures, Wilson (1974) has identified a constellation of conceptual tendencies
that exist in the musics of that vast diversity
of cultures. Among the musical preferences
and principles he enumerated were the
following:

58

rhythmic contrast
stratification
antiphony (i.e. "call and response")
connection between music and physical
body movement
percussivity
continuity between speech and sound
heterogeneous sound ideal
tendency to fill up musical space
concept of music as meaningful "in
motion" as part of everyday life

These and other concepts can serve as the

beginnings of a pan-African musical
aesthetic, since so many of these notions
appear so often in so many different kinds of
West African and African-American music. A
great majority of this music falls in the
category of groove-based music that I have
mentioned, meaning that it features a steady,
virtually isochronous pulse that is established
collectively by an interlocking composite of
rhythmic entities and is intended for or
derived from dance. This somewhat
inadequate description should not be viewed
as a definition of the concept of groove;
indeed, to some degree, that definition is what
we are searching for with this work. One
could say that, among other functions, groove
gives rise to the perception of a human,
steady pulse in a musical performance.
In groove-based music, this steady pulse is
the chief structural element, and it may be
articulated in a complex, indirect fashion. In
groove contexts, musicians display a
heightened, seemingly microscopic sensitivity
to musical timing (on the order of a few
milliseconds). They are able to evoke
different kinds of rhythmic qualities, such as
apparent accents or emotional mood, by
playing notes slightly late or early relative to
their theoretical metric location. While
numerous studies have dissected the nuances
of expressive ritardandi and other tempomodulating rhythmic phenomena (Repp 1990,
Todd 1989, Desain & Honing 1996), to our
knowledge there have been few careful
quantitative studies that focus on expressive
timing with respect to an isochronous pulse.
In groove-based contexts, even as the tempo
remains constant, fine-scale rhythmic delivery
becomes just as important a parameter as, say,
tone, pitch, or loudness. All these musical
quantities combine dynamically and holistically to form what some would call a
musician's "feel." Individual players have
their own feel, i.e. their own ways of relating
to an isochronous pulse. Musical messages
can be passed at this level. A musician can
pop out of a polyphonic texture by a
"deviation" from strict metricality, or a set of
such deviations. As I shall attempt to
demonstrate below, these kinds of

performance variations create an attentional

give-and-take
to
emphasize
different
moments interactively. This and similar
techniques are manipulated with great skill by
experienced musicians playing together, as a
kind of communication at the "feel" level. We
claim that this variety of expressive timing
against an isochronous pulse contains
important information about the inner
structure of groove.
Often when the topic of musical
communication is breached, one is tempted to
wonder what is being said amidst all this
communication. This raises the question of
what actually constitutes a musical message,
or, for that matter, musical meaning in
general. Here, I feel, one should draw upon
the processual notion of communication, as a
collective activity that harmonizes individuals, rather than on the telegraphic model of
communication as mere conveyance of literal,
verbal meanings. For example, the musical
notion of antiphony, or call and response, can
function as a kind of communication, and
nothing need be "said" at the literal level to
make it so (although we need not rule out the
possibility of musically encoded symbolic
meaning). What definitely is happening is that
the interactive format, process, and feeling of
conversational engagement are enacted by the
musicians. In a context like jazz, the presence
of this kind of dialogic process can be
constant throughout a performance, as
sustained antiphony. I am arguing that a
significant component of such a process
occurs along a musical dimension that is nonnotatable in Western terms namely, what I
have been calling microtiming.
Previous Microtiming Studies
Miniscule timing deviations from metronomicity are frequently miscast as "discrepancies"
(Keil 1995), "motor noise," or "inaccuracies"
(Rasch 1988). But there has been a small
thread of research dedicated to the uncovering
of structure in these so-called inaccuracies. It
turns out that these deviations both convey
information about musical structure and
provide a window onto internal cognitive
representations of music. One of the most

compelling examples of this direction in

research is provided by Drake & Palmer
(1993). They proposed three types of accent
structure:

rhythmic grouping accents, in which a

longer note tends to end a rhythmic group
and is perceived as accented (a.k.a. the
"gap" principle), as indicated by the accent
mark:

melodic contour accents (turns or leaps in

pitch contour), as in:

metric accents (so-called strong beats),

such as:

In studies of timing of numerous skilled

classical pianists, they found systematic
deviations from strict regularity that
correlated with these accent structures. Their
qualitative findings are summarized below
(table adapted from Drake & Palmer 1993).
In these results, it is clear that small
performance variations in timing, intensity,
and duration enhance aspects of musical
structure. Drake and Palmer concluded that
these performance variations facilitate listeners' segmentation of musical sequences, since
the accent structures serve to break up a
musical sequence into smaller, more tractable
chunks. Furthermore, Drake and Palmer
found that the expressive effects that stemmed
from rhythmic grouping tend to dominate
melodic-accent or metric-accent effects; the
59

Type of
accent
structure
Rhythmic
grouping
accent

Intensity
variation

Inter-onset
interval

Last event is
louder

Penultimate
event is
elongated
(i.e., last event is
delayed)

Notes crescendo
throughout
group
Melodic
accent

Metric
accent

Event on a turn
is louder

Event before or
on a melodic
turn or leap is
elongated
(i.e., melodically
accented event
is delayed)

Stronger beats
are louder

Last beat of
metric cycle is
elongated
(i.e., downbeat
is delayed)

Overlap/
Articulation
Penultimate
event is more
staccato
Articulations are
proportional to
note durations

Event before or
on melodic leap
is more staccato

Stronger beats
are less staccato

former tended to override the latter two when

the music yielded conflicting accent
interpretations. That the metric accents would
tend to be overridden is unsurprising, since
one would expect expressive timing to break
up the regularity of repetitive metric accents.
But the fact that rhythmic grouping effects
dominate melodic-accent effects suggests a
more general primacy of rhythm over melody,
in both production and perception. Also worth
noting is that these expressive variations
allow graduated change flexible, continuous variability. A moderate amount of
expression is the norm, and performances that
are low or high in expressivity will stand out
as extreme.
In his studies of microtiming variation in
small chamber groups, Rasch (1988)
conducted statistical analyses of intermusician differences in note onsets from
recorded ensemble performances. Although
he averaged out all musical structure,
including metric accents and tempo variation,
he found that generally, in a string trio, the
violin's lead voice tends to lead by 5 to 10
milliseconds, the cello tends to follow, and
the viola's middle voice tends to lag by
another 5 to 10 milliseconds. It is unclear how
60

accurate these findings are, however, because

the standard deviation for each of the
instruments was around 35 milliseconds. But
at any rate, Rasch's hypothesis that there
might be systematic variation in ensemble
performance is a valuable one.
The above studies focused on European
classical-music performance, which would
not fall into the realm of groove-based music
because of its reliance on tempo variation for
expressive purposes. Indeed, the above
results indicate that beats are frequently
lengthened or shortened by the performer.
Also, as discussed in the previous chapter,
the treatment of metric organization as
implying a series of weak and strong beats
does not apply particularly well to West
African or African-American musics; in these
contexts there is no such thing as a metric
accent, in terms of performance variation.
Although the above studies are valuable, their
stylistic scope does not coincide with ours.
It would be instructive to conduct a similar
microtiming analysis for a percussion
ensemble, particularly in instances of groovebased music which is much less forgiving in
the realm of tempo variation and rubati than a
string trio might be. Bilmes (1993) conducted
a timing analysis of a recorded performance
of Los Muequitos de Matanzas, an AfroCuban rumba group [CD-37]. In a
performance averaging 110 beats per minute
(such that what would be a notated sixteenth
note lasts around 135 milliseconds), both the
quinto and the segundo (lead and middle
conga drum, respectively) tend to play about
30 milliseconds ahead, or "on top." On the
other hand, the tumbao (low conga drum) had
a much broader distribution, nearly as often
late as early. It should be noted that here the
precise moment of the beat was not
determined by the norm set by these three
instruments themselves, as it was in the case
of the string trio. Rather, the beat was
established by a reference instrument, in this
case a clave or a guagua. Hence it was
possible for all three instruments to be ahead
of the nominal beat, which was not the case
for the string trio. In Bilmes's work, the
average inter-drum asynchrony was not

calculated; indeed, such a measure would

ignore any relationship between timing and
musical structure. But a frequency analysis of
the
microtiming
variations
revealed
systematic structure. For example, the
repetitive segundo part displayed a strong
peak corresponding to its frequency of
repetition, showing that the microtiming
variations were not at all random.
Given this apparent systematicity of fine-scale
rhythmic expression in groove contexts, we
can take cues from the results of Drake &
Palmer (1993) and Rasch (1988) discussed
above, as well as from our expanded view of
cognition
involving
the
theory
of
embodiment, to make guesses about the
function of such rhythmic expression. Thus
we hypothesize that microtiming variations in
groove music play any of the following roles:

highlight structural aspects of the musical

material,
reflect specific temporal constraints
imposed by physical embodiment, and/or
fulfill some aesthetic or communicative
function.
I shall now address all of these possibilities
via a few examples.

Examples of Expressive Microtiming

Asynchrony
The asynchronous unison attacks described
above support a scientifically meaningful
explanation. Rasch (1988) reports an earlier
study of asynchrony: a 1977 experiment in
which he investigated the effect of onset
difference times on the perception of quasisimultaneous tones. The threshold for
perceiving the upper of two quasi-synchronous tones could be decreased drastically
[from between zero and -20 dB to about -60
dB] by introducing an onset difference time
of, say, 30 ms. In the latter case, the threshold
was largely independent of factors other than
temporal ones... In supra-threshold conditions

asynchronization contributes to the apparent

transparency of the compound sound multitone stimuli. (Rasch 1988: 80)
So a function of these quasi-synchronous
attacks, or flams, could be to aid in the
perception of the timbral constituents of the
unison attack.
The accompanying audio example demonstrates this tactic [CD-38, 39].

In the first version, the double stroke on the

first beat is essentially synchronous; in the
second version, a delay of 30 milliseconds is
introduced between the two notes, resulting in
a small flam. This serves to enhance the
perception of the two timbral constituents.
In some musical situations in which blending
is preferred, this kind of multitimbral
asynchrony may be undesirable, but it is often
a valued musical trait in groove-based music.
On Wilson's list of African and AfricanAmerican aesthetic concepts is the notion of a
heterogeneous sound ideal, a tendency to
value the presence of a variety of contrasting
timbres.
Another
important
cultural
characteristic (not mentioned earlier) is a
collectivist ideal, in which music is construed
as a communal activity among groups of
people. The rhythmic asynchronies described
above aid in the perception of a multiplicity
of timbres, as well as, in the ecological view
of music perception (Gibson 1979, Shove &
Repp 1995), the multiplicity of human bodies
behind those timbres. That is, rhythmic
asynchrony contributes both to the
heterogeneous sound ideal and to the sense of
collective participation. To be sure, exact
synchrony is impossible with groups of
people anyway; but this principle applies even
when different sounds are played by one
individual, as on the modern drumset. So here
is an instance in which a kind of subtle

61

rhythmic expression fulfills both a perceptual

and an aesthetic function.
Streaming
It is well established that auditory stream
segregation is a function of both pitch and
timbre (Bregman 1990). From our work, it
appears that microtiming can also contribute
to streaming. This claim builds on the role of
asynchrony in facilitating the perception of
multiple tones. The audio examples [CD-40,
41] consist of a steady stream of triplets on
tom-toms, together with a series of sparse
tom-tom strokes at a lower volume. The
musical material is shown below.

In the first audio example, the unison strokes

are as simultaneous as is allowed by the MIDI
protocol (i.e., within a couple of milliseconds
of each other). In the second example, the
second stream is delayed by 30 milliseconds
with respect to the first, as indicated by the
arrows in the figure, but kept at its same low
volume. In the former case, the different
timbres fuse into one stream, whereas in the
latter case, the second stream is clearly
audible as a separate entity. This example
shows clearly how such miniscule timing
variations can contribute to streaming. This
technique is especially important in a context
where the aesthetic tendency is to "fill up the
musical space" (Wilson 1974). Timing
variations can allow an instrument that is
sonically buried to draw attention to itself in
the auditory scene. Thus the presence of
multiple instruments of similar timbres, as in
a West African drum ensemble or a large jazz
ensemble, need not be viewed as enforcing
the subordination of individual identity.
Individual musicians can improvise at this
microrhythmic level to create an attentional
give-and-take. This streaming effect also
62

serves an aesthetic function, in that it

enhances the perception of different rhythmic
groups as separate animate entities with
distinct "personalities" as Ladzekpo stresses
(1995).
Spreading
It was not until the advent of automated
machinery that human ears were ever treated
to inhuman rhythmic precision. The fact is
that sonic trace of temporal constraints
imposed by the body are often perceived as
aesthetically pleasing, while inhuman
rhythmic regularity often is not. These audio
examples [CD-42, 43] consist of two versions
of the "same" rhythm, shown below.

The first rendition is executed as close to the

theoretical ideals the computer allows - that
is, rigidly, mathematically accurate. The
second features timing inflections designed to
imitate an aspect of human performance. The
difference is not simply the injection of
random temporal slop. Rather, it involves the
spreading apart of consecutive attacks played
by the same hypothetical limb or digit. An
individual effector such as a limb, hand, or
digit has a time constant associated with its
motion; the nerves and muscles have a brief
The rhythmic expression added in the above
example is systematic; the first of each group
of three taps is about 30 milliseconds early,
and the last is about 30 milliseconds late, as
indicated by the arrows in the figure. In
addition to enhancing perceived separation,
this example depicts the encoding of bodily
movement in musical material. Nearly all
listeners are familiar with the kind of motion
suggested by these synthetic tapped rhythms,
but that motion is strongly implied only by
the second, "imperfect" version. Again, this
description recalls the embodied, ecological

view of musical perception, in which the

listener perceives the source of the sounds,
rather than the sounds themselves. In a music
that embraces physical body motion (Wilson
1974) and that is contiguous with everyday
experience, this sonic trace of the body is a
valued aesthetic.
Coding for Invariance
The above three examples demonstrate the
notion of invariance. At the most basic level,
expressive microtiming represents a departure
from regularity, so it is likely to be noticed in
relief against the more regular background.
Gibson (1975) claimed that our perceptual
systems are attuned to variants and invariants
in the environment; they code for change. As
an example, consider the way that vibrato or a
trill can facilitate auditory scene analysis by
drawing our attention to a particular
instrument in an otherwise blended orchestral
texture [CD-44]. The microvariation of a
single pitch is enough to make that voice pop
out in the auditory scene.
We can make a similar generalization with
rhythm. That which is regular, or invariant, in
an isochronous-pulse context is the norm set
by the regularity of pulsation, along with its
salient multiples and subdivisions; that which
is irregular comprises the variable rhythmic
material along with its continuous expressive
variation. Microrhythmic expression signals a
departure from the implied norm, hence
marking a particular sound or group of sounds
as worthy of attention or analysis by our
perceptual systems. This argument contributes
to an ecological view of rhythm perception, in
which we are attuned to variations in an
otherwise regular environment.
Swing
A kind of rhythmic expression that seems to
be indigenous to African-American culture is
that found in jazz of the first half of this
century. Known as swing, this kind of
structure can be thought of as modified duple
subdivisions of the main pulse, or as modified
triplet subdivisions, or both concurrently. As
duple subdivisions, they divide the interval of

a pulse into two unequal portions, of which

the first is slightly longer. They are
occasionally rendered in triplet notation as a
quarter note followed by an eighth note, but
this exaggerates the typical swing ratio, which
is usually in the gray area between duple and
triple and is strongly tempo-dependent
(typically lower for fast tempi and higher for
slow ones). An individual musician has a
particular range of preferred ratios and
particular ways of manipulating them, which
together form crucial dimensions of that
individual's sound, rhythmic feel, and musical
personality.
In a related experiment on rhythm, Fraisse
(1982) has studied the ability of musically
trained and untrained subjects to reproduce
rhythmic patterns of varying degrees of
complexity. "Arrhythmic" sequences with
arbitrary relationships between time intervals
caused the most difficulty. In more regular
rhythmic cases, subjects tended to simplify
the ratios between intervals, almost always
settling on exactly two classes of time
interval: long (400-800 milliseconds) and
short (200-400 ms). People tend to understand
rhythms to feature two and only two interval
lengths, roughly in the ratio of 2:1. This drive
towards rhythmic simplicity recalls some of
the classical perceptual laws, namely the
principle of economy in organization (Fraisse
1982). Usually as performed or as "preferred,"
the ratio is lower in fact closer to swing,
about 1.75:1, about 57%
However, it is not apparent why the interval
would be divided unequally in the first place.
It would seem even simpler and more
economical if there were no such difference in
duration between the first and second of two
consecutive swung notes. But the point is that
this difference facilitates the perception of
higher-level
rhythmic
structure.
An
immediate consequence of the swing feel is
that it suggests the next level of hierarchical
organization. In conventional terms, the
swung eighth-note pairs are perceptually
grouped into the larger regular interval, that
is, the quarter note. If all subdivisions were
performed with exactly the same duration, it
would be more difficult to perceive the main
63

beat. The lengthening of the first of two

swung notes in a pair amounts to a durational
accentuation of the beat. (Often in practice,
the second note of the swung pair is given a
slight accent in intensity, as if to compensate
for its shorter duration.) Hence swing
enhances the perception of the main pulse, as
the examples [CD-45, 46] demonstrate:

The first version plays all eighth notes exactly

equivalently and is therefore metrically
indistinct, whereas the second version
introduces a slight swing, which immediately
marks the pulse.
In the Pocket: Backbeat Delay
The notion of a backbeat is indigenous to the
modern drum kit, an instrument pioneered by
African-Americans in this century. It consists
of a strongly accented snare drum stroke or
handclap on beats two and four of a four-beat
metric cycle, where the beat is typically a
moderate tactus rate [CD-47].

The backbeat appears to have arisen in the

middle of this century, as the popular swing
rhythm yielded to the even more popular,
more bombastic rock and roll rhythms of
artists such as Little Richard and Chuck
Berry.
In his musical interpretation of Stuckey's
(1987) study of the culture of enslaved
Africans and its influence on modern AfricanAmerican culture, Floyd (1995) discusses the
the important African diasporic cultural ritual
known as the ring shout as a distinctive space
in which, among other things, music and
dance were fused. This activity "helped
64

preserve ... what we have come to know as

the characterizing and foundational elements
of African-American music," including
"constant repetition of rhythmic and melodic
figures and phrases," "hand clapping, foot
patting, and approximations thereof," and "the
metronomic pulse that underlies all music."
(Floyd 1995: 6) As a cultural model, the ring
shout serves for Stuckey as a hermeneutical
point of departure in the study of AfricanAmerican art forms. It provides an alternative
lens through which to view these later
practices, a lens that is grounded on African,
rather than European, concepts and aesthetics.
(See Rosenbaum 1998 for more documenttation of the ring shout.)
The backbeat that is so prevalent in postwar
African-American popular music seems to
reference the role of the body in the ring shout
the bass drum (struck with a foot pedal in
the modern drumset) and snare drum (struck
manually with a stick) replacing the stomp
and clap, respectively. In fact, a real or
synthetic
handclap
sound
is
often
superimposed on the backbeat's snare drum
sound in popular urban dance music. The
hard-edged repetitiveness of the backbeat
embodies the cyclic, earthy atmosphere of the
ring-shout ritual. Though sometimes dismissed as dull and monotonous, the backbeat
taps into the hypnotic, functional role of
repetition in such rituals, in which steady,
moderate tempo, rhythmic ostinati, and
physical body motion (stomping and
clapping) were combined in a collective
setting to create a shared multisensory experience. It seems plausible that the earliest
musical activities of humankind possessed
many of these qualities. The backbeat is best
understood as a contemporary, popular
remnant of what is probably some very
ancient human musical behavior, filtered
through a sophisticated, stylized African ritual
and through centuries of African-American
musical development.
The curious point about the backbeat in
practice is that when performed, it displays a
microscopic lopsidedness. If we consider the
downbeat to be exactly when the bass drum is
struck, then the snare drum is very often

played ever so slightly later than the midpoint

between two consecutive pulses [CD-48].
Often musicians are aware of this to some
degree, and they have a term for it: the
drummer is said to play "in the pocket."
While perhaps unaware of the exact temporal
details of this effect, a skilled musician or
listener in this genre hears this kind of
expressive microdelay as "relaxed" or "laid
back" as opposed to "stiff" or "on top." This
effect is much subtler than the salient
rhythmic categorization of the long and short
durations of swing. It is a miniscule
adjustment at the level of the tactus, rather
than the substantial fractional shift of
rhythmic subdivisions in swing.
What function does this delay structure have?
Perhaps the delay functions as a kind of
accent, since it involves the postponement of
an expected consequent (Meyer 1956). It
seems plausible that the optimum snare-drum
offset that we call the "pocket" is that precise
rhythmic position that maximizes the
accentual effect of a delay without upsetting
the ongoing sense of pulse. This involves the
balance of two opposing forces: the force of
regularity that resists delay, and the backbeat
accentuation that demands delay.
Note that the concept of a backbeat, and the
slight delay associated with it, does not
pertain if a single voice is used for both the
downbeat and the backbeat. (As an example,
the urban dance-music genre known as
"house" features an isochronous bass drum on
all four beats, with the snare-drum backbeat
occasionally dropping out.) The effect seems
tied to the difference between the two sounds,
and perhaps also to the actual sounds
themselves and the imagined bodily activity
that gives rise to it. In a related study, Fraisse
(1982) reports,
In speaking of synchronization, it is
necessary to specify what is synchronized
with what. In effect, if one measures the
temporal separation between a tap of the
forefinger and the sound, one finds that the
tap slightly anticipates the sound by about
30 msec. The subject does not perceive this
error systematically... Moreover, this error

is greater if the sound is synchronized with

the foot. The difference between hand and
foot permits us to think that the subject's
criterion for synchronization is the
coincidence of the auditory and of the
tactile-kinesthetic information at the cortical
level. For this coincidence to be as precise
as possible, the movement of tapping should
slightly precede the sound in order to make
allowance for the length of the transmission
of peripheral information. This length is all
the greater when the distance is longer.
(Fraisse 1982)
This delay architecture amounts to the
subject's hand coming after the foot for
perceived synchronization, since the anticipatory "error" is greater for the foot. This seems
to predict that a regularly alternating stompclap pattern would contain a microscopic
asymmetry similar to that found in the
modern backbeat. Given that the bass drum
both references and is played by the foot, and
similarly the snare drum both points to and
involves the hand, it is possible that this
resultant delay structure was transferred to the
drumset. Though these arguments are quite
speculative, it is plausible that there is an
important relationship between the backbeat
and the body, informed by the AfricanAmerican cultural model of the ring shout.

Rhythmic Expression: Two Musical

Examples
Thelonious Monk plays "I'm Confessin'."
[CD-49] One of the most fascinating skills
displayed by Monk and many other pianists of
the genre is a high degree of independence
between the two hands, to the degree that one
hand can appear to perform rhythms that are
ambiguously if at all related to those
performed by the other. Often, as in stride
piano, this takes the form of a steady pulse or
repetitive bass rhythm in the left hand (the
"ground"), and upper-register, rhythmically
free melodies in the right hand (the "figure").
A classic example is Monk's 1963 solo
recording of "I'm Confessin' (That I Love
You)" (Monk 1998). In this piece, after
65

carrying on in this expressive stride fashion

for some time, the last two bars of the first
chorus give rise to an improvised melodic
fragment that rhythmically seems to stretch
and tumble into the next bar [CD-50].

In this excerpt, the melodic structure in the

right hand temporarily overrides and upsets
the underlying rhythmic structure, only to be
righted again. We can interpret Monk's
unquestionably gripping display here as the
rhythmic equivalent of a struggle, one that
threatens the norm of established pulse
regularity set by what has come before. It
seems to offer an example of a case in which
such regularity is sacrificed briefly to allow
for a case of extreme rhythmic expression.
But note that the sense of pulse is never lost;
Monk leaves out a couple of quarter-note
chords in the left hand, but otherwise provides
strong and accurate pulse reinforcement in the
stride style. The rhythmic underpinning of the
left hand compensates for the apparent
deviation from regularity.
When I played the recording of this piece for
a roomful of cognitive science undergraduates, most of whom presumably had no
familiarity with jazz, this excerpt elicited a
burst of spontaneous laughter. Something
about Monk's delivery is communicative
enough to transcend what one might expect of
the traditional confines of genre. Nearly
upsetting the regular pulse, Monk takes a
chance and chooses to follow through on a
melodic idea that momentarily takes him
rhythmically far afield.

66

The question of whether Monk "intended" to

play this in exactly this way is a pejorative
one, akin to rectifying the role of "mistakes"
in jazz (as in Walser 1995). From the
perspective of an improviser, the notion of a
mistake is supplanted by the concept of
displaying one's interaction with the
structure suggested by the sonic environment. It is never clear what is "supposed"
to happen in improvised music, so it
makes no sense to talk about mistakes.
This improvisation-friendly framework
allows for the possibility of musical
exploration and experimentation, including impromptu rhythmic variation of the
sort described here, without invoking a
notion of mistakes.
Ahmad Jamal plays "But Not for Me."
[CD-51] A wonderfully extemporaneous,
playful spirit is captured masterfully in pianist
Ahmad Jamal's 1952 trio version of the
standard tune "But Not for Me." In this piece,
Jamal manipulates his relationship to the
pulse actively and voluntarily through the
skillful use of microtiming variation. Nearly
every single phrase in Jamal's rendition
contains some interesting microrhythmic
manipulations, but here I will focus on one
fragment, namely the end of the first chorus
into the beginning of the second chorus. In
measure 31, Jamal initiates a repeating threebeat figure in the four-beat metric context.
This additive rhythmic technique is a
common one in African-American music, and
Jamal carries it out to a humorous extreme,
letting the blues-inflected figure cycle twelve
full times (nine measures). The first four
measures of this passage are displayed below.
I have adhered to the convention of
representing swung rhythms with regular
eighth notes, but it should be understood that
there is much more to this passage than meets
the eye. In particular, Jamal plays this figure
extremely behind the beat, so much so as to
enhance the humorous effect of the repeating
melodic figure by casting it in starker relief
against the more ordinary rhythmic
background [CD-52].

In these four measures, the quarter note

averages 469 milliseconds (128 beats per
minute). The note events in the piano that are
displayed as occurring on the beat tend to
begin actually around 40% of a beat later than
the drummer's rimshots, which are indicated
with x's above. This places him more than a
triplet behind the beat. Furthermore, Jamal's
second eighth note in each swung pair tends
to occur about 85% of the way through the
beat. This means that the swing ratio here is
effectively inverted; the first eighth note in a
delayed pair lasts about 45% of a beat (less
than half), and the second lasts about 55%
(more than half). It would appear that the
perception of swing arises due to complex
variations in timing, intensity, or articulation;
in this case, it is not merely a matter of
achieving the "correct" microrhythmic ratio.
How does Jamal pull off this apparent
rhythmic violation of an inverted swing? The
answer seems to lie in his 40% phase shift
relative to the beat established by the
accompanying instruments. If, while maintaining this phase relationship, he were to
adhere to the usual swing ratio of around
57%, then the second note in a swung pair
would be close enough to the onset of the next
beat (only a few percent early) that it would
be heard as on-the-beat. By employing a
relative anticipation of the second eighth note
in each pair, Jamal avoids this problem,
instead sounding squarely "between" the
beats. The 40% delay also affords him enough
rhythmic ambiguity so that the inverted swing
does not sound jarring. Also, Jamal enhances
the sense of swing by accenting the second of
each pair (a common technique, as mentioned
earlier). So here is a case in which one kind of
rhythmic expression interacts with another;
the usual long-short relationship of swing is
altered in order to accommodate the "laidback" quality of the melodic figure.

expect the same simple perceptual effects

(such as enhancing stream segregation) if
he instead played ahead of the beat, for
example. Playing behind the beat is
definitely a cultural aesthetic in AfricanAmerican music, especially jazz. In an
unpublished study, Bilmes (1996) found that a
West African drummer played equally as
often ahead of as behind the beat, whereas
one might observe casually that skilled jazz
improvisers tend to play much more often
behind than ahead. From the ecological point
of view, playing behind the beat might be
normally associated with a physical or mental
state of relaxation, or might suggest a causal
relationship in which the musical material is a
reaction to the pulse. Such hypotheses would
demand further investigation.
In this chapter I have discussed some aspects
of rhythmic expression that are quite distinct
from the common body of European classical
musical performance techniques typically
discussed. Instead of (or in addition to)
expressive concepts like rubato, ritardando,
and accelerando, we have seen deliberately
asynchronous unisons, subtle separation of
rapid consecutive notes, asymmetric subdivisions of a pulse, and microscopic delays.
As further illustration, we have seen
extremely deft manipulation of fine-scale
rhythmic material in examples from the jazz
idiom. I have chosen to focus on African and
African-American musics because they often
feature these concepts in isolation from the
possible interference of tempo variation, and
because they tend to involve percussive
timbres which facilitate precise microrhythmic analysis. I have argued that African
and African-American musics incorporate
aesthetics that value these kinds of microrhythmic expression. However, I believe that
these techniques are found to varying degrees
in all music, including the European classical
genres. In the next chapter, I present a
representation for rhythmic structure that
allows for the explicit manipulation of
expressive microtiming of the variety
discussed above.

What is accomplished by playing in this laidback, behind-the-beat fashion? One might

67

7. Describing Rhythmic
Behavior, Representing
Rhythmic Structure
In this chapter I discuss a class of models for
rhythmic tapping that have developed in the
literature over the last few decades. I discuss
what I see as a shortcoming of these models,
from which I suggest a supplementary view
that allows for different mental processes at
different timescales. In this light, I then
describe work initiated by Bilmes (1993) and
continued by a group consisting of Jeff
Bilmes, Matt Wright, David Wessel, and
myself (Iyer et al. 1997). This work culminated in the design and implementation of a
novel representation for rhythmic structure,
incorporating considerations specific to
groove-based music such as those discussed
in the previous chapter.
Rhythmic Tapping
The well-known studies of Wing &
Kristofferson (1973), Verborg & Hambuch
(1984), Jagacinski et al. (1988), and Verborg
& Wing (1996) are concerned with the
unraveling of cognitive command structure in
the timing of motor activity. Wing &
Kristofferson (1973) conducted experiments
in which subjects tapped a finger periodically
at a moderate, steady rate. Subjects tapping
was initially matched with periodic tones, and
then the tones ceased and the tapping was
unpaced. The experimenters studied how
accurately the original period was upheld in
unpaced tapping. From their data they
developed a model in which it was assumed
that there were two independent sources of
variability in this unpaced phase: 1) variation
in timing of centrally-generated, feedforward, periodic commands, and 2) variation
in implementation (mechanical noise in
effector, nerve response delays, and so forth).
The variability in tapping was taken to be the
sum of these two random variables. By doing
elementary statistics on the interval values,
one could determine which of these two
variables gave rise to a given change in the
overall variability. For example, it was found
68

that the typical negative correlation between

successive intervals ("negative covariance at
lag-1") is associated entirely with variance in
implementation. In other words, the natural
"swing" inherent in a person's tapped steady
pulse is due to variability not in the centrallygenerated command originating from the
brain, but in the motor processes associated
with the body.
Pressing et al. (1996) worked with experienced musicians to find that systematic
variations in so-called polyrhythmic tapping,
measurable through variance-covariance
analysis of tapped intervals, imply a hierarchical cognitive structure in rhythm production.
Specifically, there is a difference in the
microtiming inflections of a musician tapping
4:3 (four equally spaced taps over the length
of three tapped beats) from one tapping 3:4,
even though theoretically they are the "same"
rhythm. This systematic variation fits with a
hierarchical model involving a central clock, a
separate process of referential timing, and
motor delays.
The general cognitive model proposed by the
above authors for the production of
polyrhythms is as follows:
1. A central clock-like command process
directly triggers the motor delay process
of the "ground" rhythmic stream, played
by one hand.
2. Via an intervening subpulse (subdivision)
process, the immediately preceding
ground-stream clock element cues the
motor delay in the "figure" stream.
It is possible that the results showing the
difference between 3:4 and 4:3 are a recasting
of the work of Drake and Palmer (1993,
discussed in the previous chapter) at a lower
cognitive level. If there is indeed some
amount of microtiming that is related to
meter, then it could show up in the difference
between the so-called figure and ground
stream. Pressing et al. make no reference to
meter, but it is clear that the ground stream
functions metrically in this context. The
central command clock functions as a pulse;
the inter-pulse intervals are subdivided for

accurate timing of the figure stream.

However, Magill and Pressing (1997) have
attempted to posit an asymmetric central
clock, based on a view of West African music
as treating its so-called timeline patterns as
the "ground" rather than a figure. This work
was discussed and critiqued earlier, in the
chapter on meter.
A Subtactus Clock
A problem I see with all of the references
cited above is that nobody has ever proposed
a model for polyrhythmic tapping in which
the central clock pulse is the common
subdivision of the generated rhythms. Instead,
they propose internal timekeepers that are
equal to the length of one of the tactus-level
pulses. In the above model, subdivision of the
ground pulse only occurs when necessary; it
does not continue in the absence of
subdividing material. This is odd, considering
that the oft-cited Povel (1981) has shown that
people tend to perceive rhythms in terms of a
common underlying unit, and have the least
difficulty perceiving rhythms that conform to
such a structure.
To be sure, the notion of a second, faster
cognitive clock seems to go against some
theories of rhythm perception. According to
Brower, we process their structure of rapid
(sub-tactus) rhythms in a more qualitative
fashion. Instead of measuring individual
durations against the background of an
internally generated metric grid, the listener
recognizes sub-pulse rhythms by their
qualities of "evenness or unevenness, twoness
or threeness, accentedness or unaccentedness,
and so on." (Brower 1993: 25) She cites
Preusser (1972), who found experimental
evidence for a difference between integrated,
immediate, passive processing of rapid
rhythmic gestalts, and intellectualized,
cognitive, active processing of slower
rhythms. She says that performance variations
(e.g., 2:1 becomes 1.75:1, as described in
Fraisse 1982) are evidence that the fast clock
is not the most accurate for music. Brower's
claims about the unreliability of fast clocks
appear to stem from generalizations about
unskilled rhythmic behavior.

However, my own experience as a performer

has suggested that what we call a groove is
easier to reach if the members of the
ensemble collectively focus on the ongoing
small subdivisions of the beat, whether or not
they are filled by musical events. Similarly,
C.K. Ladzekpo teaches us to feel the abstract,
ongoing rhythmic subdivisions as a constant
reservoir of rhythmic intensity, a rapid,
energetic, incessant movement, which he calls
the "yell." (Ladzekpo 1995) The awareness of
this continual activity helps the performer
animate a simple rhythmic pattern. It seems
quite similar to the "imagined movement" that
we have discussed in the case of pulse
perception, but now at the faster rate of the
pulse subdivision. By maintaining a sense of
these abstract subpulses, and indeed by
imagining them not silent but loud, the
performer not only enhances rhythmic
precision but also derives cues for appropriate
durations and intensities for individual notes.
Contrary to Brower's claims, Ladzekpo's
teachings suggest that one can learn to
internalize this fast subpulse such that one
need not rely on its physical reinforcement.
This relates to a model proposed by Ivry
(1998) which proposes a bank of timers in our
neural apparatus, each related to the time
constants of our various limbs, digits, and
other effectors as they perform various tasks.
If we are able to generalize from locomotortype activities to an abstract concept of
musical pulse, it is equally possible that, with
practice, we can learn to internalize a faster
clock. The latter would be related to the
temporal structure of digital, manual, and
lingual motion, which, as I mentioned in
chapter 3, occur at a timescale that is
substantially faster than the tactus/locomotor
rate.
If all this is granted, it seems as though one
could posit two simultaneous central clocks,
one of whose frequencies is a multiple of the
other. Again, with practice, an individual
would learn to yoke together the faster clock
associated with the physical activity of musicmaking, such as rapid finger motion, with a
slower tactus-level pulse. I emphasize the
notion of practicing this behavior because, as
69

demonstrated in the previous chapter, groovebased musical activity involves highly skilled
and precise temporal acuity, far from the
simplicity of a typical tapping experiment.
Also, significantly, groove-based musical
activity is quite corporeal in nature; it is not
just an abstract form of knowledge, but also a
concrete skill requiring physical dexterity.
A Tripartite Model
Bilmes (1993) has developed a tripartite
model for expressive timing in performance
of groove-based music. In addition to the
salient moderate-tempo pulse or tactus,
another important pulse cycle is defined at the
finest temporal resolution relevant to a given
piece of music. It is called the temporal atom
or tatum (in homage to the great AfricanAmerican improvising pianist, Art Tatum),
the smallest cognitively meaningful subdivision of the main beat. Multiple tatum rates
may be active simultaneously, particularly in
ensemble performance. In Western notation,
tatums may correspond typically to sixteenthnotes or triplets, though they may vary over
the course of a performance. As noted above,
groove-based music is characterized in part
by focused attentiveness to events at this fine
level. The tactus and the tatum provide at
least two distinct clocks for rhythmic
synchronization and communication among
musicians.
In Bilmes's scheme, a performance displays
musical phenomena that may be represented
on three timescales. First, the musical referent
or "score" corresponds to the most basic
representation of the performed music as it
would be notated in Western terms, using
quantized rhythmic values (tatums) that
subdivide the main pulse. All note-events are
represented at this level. Secondly, at
relatively large timescale, inter-onset intervals
are stretched and compressed through tempo
variation. This variation may be represented
as a tempo curve a function of musical time
vs. score time. However, particularly in
percussive music, there is no real musical
continuum separate from the note-events;
score time is quantized in units of tatums. In
fact, the tempo curve operates on tatums,
70

modifying their durations such that their

sequential sum corresponds to the integral of
the tempo curve. In this way, the tatum may
be regarded as a sampling rate.
Thirdly,
the
tatum-relative
temporal
deviations capture many of the expressive
microtiming variations discussed in the
previous chapter. Deviations quantify the
microscopic delays or anticipations of noteevents relative to the theoretical tatum onsets.
In other words, they represent the microscopic
values by which note onsets differ from rigid
quantization, over a metronomic background.
Deviations take on continuous values from 0.5 to +0.5 tatums, so that all possible
rhythmic placements are allowed. In the case
of multiple simultaneous tatum rates, this may
allow for a redundant representation, in that a
given note-event may be described in a
number of different ways. For example,
swung notes may be rendered as deviated
sextuplets or as differently deviated sixteenth
notes. We include this ambiguity purposefully, because such ambiguities occur frequently and naturally in the types of music
under study.
In his 1993 work, Bilmes used signalprocessing techniques to extract each of these
three quantities from a musical performance.
The work demonstrated that analysis of
deviations can shed some light on musicians'
internal representations of the rhythmic
content of their performances, particularly in
ensemble contexts that feature fixed and
variable rhythmic groups.
Representation & Implementation
More recently, we have elaborated upon the
above model to develop a powerful
representation
for
musical
rhythm.
Implemented in MAX, a graphical, objectoriented music-programming environment
(Puckette 1991), the representation includes
features such as pitch, accent, rhythmic
deviations, tempo variation, note durations
(which are found to carry important rhythmic
information and are therefore treated
independently), and probabilistic processes. It
may be used in conjunction with MIDI

instruments or other synthesizers or sound

modules.
To facilitate the use of the representation, we
have developed various Editors and Players,
for creating and musically enacting the data
structures, respectively. One of our main
goals has been interactive music performance,
so our Players have been designed with realtime control in mind. A Player agent steps
through the data structures, scheduling and
playing the note-events. Multiple data
structures are handled with ease thanks to
MAX's parallel architecture. Players may also
improvise by selecting from banks of
rhythmic data or by creating new structures in
real time. The Editors consist of graphical
user interfaces for creating and modifying
data structures in the representation.
The basic unit of our representation is the
Cell, a data structure containing a Duration
and any number of Note_layers. A given
Note_layer contains either a discrete, regular
Tatum_grid whose elements contain Notes, or
a linked list of Notes occurring at fractional
points of the cell duration. The presence of
multiple Note_layers allows a rich variety of
rhythmic possibilities at the most fundamental
level, including multiple tatum rates, "atatum" rhythms, hierarchy, and stratification.
A Note is a vector containing data about the
note type, loudness/velocity, note duration,
and microrhythmic deviation (in the discrete
case). Thus, expressive microtiming against a
metronomic background stands on equal
footing with other continually modulating
musical parameters.
Among the various tools for manipulating the
data structures, we provide a way to
exaggerate or de-emphasize rhythmic features
by the use of non-linear (power-law)
compression and expansion. This technique
applies most effectively to deviation and
accent data, where subtle expressive features
may be either softened or enhanced via a
continuous controller.

Modularity
Note that the overall design privileges
hierarchy at the intra-cellular level, and
emphasizes "heterarchy" or modularity at the
multi-cellular level. This prioritization favors
a modular approach to musical organization.
As was pointed out in the chapter on music
and embodiment, the modular concept of
musical form has special relevance to African
and African-American musics. For example,
rhythmic textures often arise from the
superposition of various cyclic musical
patterns. A prime instance of this trait occurs
in Afro-Cuban rumba, which features fixed
cyclic clave and wood-block ostinati,
relatively stable repetitive low- and mid-range
conga drum patterns, and a variable, heavily
improvised quinto (high conga drum) part, all
combining to form an extremely rich
emergent texture. This modular approach may
also occur at a higher hierarchical level.
Musical pieces may have a number of
different repeated sections or "spaces" that
cycle for arbitrary lengths of time; the
transitions among these spaces are often cued
in an improvisatory fashion, quite possibly
without a preordained large-scale temporal
structure or a strictly linear notion of overall
musical time. As mentioned earlier, the music
of James Brown provides many examples of
this type. The linguistics-derived structural
notion of large-scale recursive depth may be
replaced or supplemented, for the musician or
the listener, by a concept of large-scale
organizational breadth. We characterize these
methods of musical organization as modular;
large musical structures are assembled from
small, fully formed constituent units. This
mosaic concept functions as an important
aesthetic guideline in African and AfricanAmerican musics, appearing in many
different manifestations in the cultures of the
continent and their diaspora.
In our implementation, Cells may be
combined either in series or in parallel into
larger Cells, or they may be cycled
indefinitely. The system employs a novel
method for handling large numbers of
complex rhythmic structures, using features
of the MAX collection object, a versatile and
71

open-ended data structure. This method

facilitates many of the modular combination
techniques mentioned above, such as the
stratification of different-length rhythmic
cycles, creation of composite beat schemes,
repetition, rhythmic progression, and most
importantly, improvisatory manipulation of
these structures. Thus, a user may create a
number of different Cells and select rapidly
from among them in real time, superimposing, serializing, or otherwise manipulating
the constituent units.
Applications
The richness of control over many meaningful
musical quantities distinguishes our representation from those in more common usage,
such as music notation programs, drum
machines, while the focus on musical
modularity gives the program a different
emphasis from traditional sequencers. In
addition, as mentioned above, the representation supports creative applications in improvised performance with electronic instruments. We use our implementation to collect
rhythmic data from musicians for analysis,
and to develop hypotheses and models of
rhythm cognition. We have also begun to
employ probabilistic processes to construct a
useful preliminary representation of rhythmic
improvisation, which has been exploited in
performance.

72

8. Implications for Music

Cognition, Musicology, and
Computer Music
My overall thesis has been that music
perception and cognition are embodied
activities, depending crucially on the tangible
features of our sensorimotor apparatus, and
also on the sociocultural environment in
which music perception, cognition, and
production are situated. I have presented some
specific evidence in its support, by showing
how certain rhythms of African-American
music may relate to such embodied processes.
I have claimed that musical perception and
cognition are active constructions, rather than
passive experiences, of the listener. In
particular, the perception of pulse and meter
are not perceptual inevitabilities, but are
strongly dependent on the person's culturally
contingent listening strategies. I have also
argued that much of what we experience
listening to performed music relates to a
ecological recognition of, and even an
empathy for, the bodily motion of which the
musical sounds are a result. These sonic
traces of bodily motion can be appreciated as
such, and even aesthetically privileged in
certain cultures, while neglected or
suppressed in others.
The music-cognition community has been
somewhat slow to acknowledge fully the role
of culture in shaping our ways of perceiving
music. Consider the search for the universals
of human music cognition. In a recent, rather
controversial and quite flawed lecture on
possible evolutionary explanations for the
existence of music (prefaced by the
disclaimer, "I don't know anything about
music, but..."), evolutionary biologist Steven
Pinker made one compelling claim: if we
wish to study the basics of music cognition,
we should appeal to the musical experiences
of the masses (such as hip-hop, the
Eurovision song contest, disco, etc.) rather
than the art music of high culture. (Pinker
1997) I concur with this claim, but challenge
him in his later assumptions that the
perception and cognition of music is foremost

a solitary, pensive act. His model listener was

an idealized, radically de-situated one, with
headphones on and eyes closed c in fact an
invocation of the classic Western autonomous
listener described in many European musictheoretic texts and dating back to Plato, as
McClary (1991) has pointed out (see below).
When Pinker was asked whether he had any
ideas about how group psychology might
have affected the evolution of music, he
responded that if any such effects did exist,
they were profoundly secondary. While it is
clear that music listening involves an
individual's cognitive systems, one could
argue that language comprehension does as
well; but nobody would claim that language
particularly spoken language exists for
solitary, pensive activity. Language serves as
a means of interpersonal communication, not
just of factual information but also of
emotions, interrelationships, and imaginings.
One could say the same of music. In fact, the
connections between music and language are
quite far-reaching, as I discuss further below.
In the same lecture, Pinker argued that music
could be seen as a "pleasure technology" a
concentrated dose of auditory patterns that
happen to give pleasure for other evolutionary
reasons. For example, sensory systems grant a
sense of pleasure when they receive optimal
input clear, analyzable signals probably
because such signals were favored
evolutionarily. Hence one might hypothesize
that simply organized musical material would
be more popular than pieces with much
surface complexity. But this is not the case for
many popular musics; salsa and Afro-Cuban
rumba [CD-37] would be judged as quite
complex by cultural outsiders. It seems as
though a simplicity criterion might be one of
many competing criteria in the perception of
music as pleasurable or not. One can also
think of other functions of music that are not
clearly derived from pleasure. For example,
consider a musical mnemonic such as the
"Alphabet Song," which nearly all young,
English-speaking children learn. It aids in the
memorization of a large number of symbols
by associating it with a familiar melody (that
of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star") and parsing
it into six chunks of decreasing size. Dance
73

music provides another example; not all

dance is merely pleasure-related (as in many
religious, ritual, and narrative dance forms),
but many social situations involving dance
seems to reinforce collective unity, which
itself could enhance pleasure.
Only someone who knew nothing about
music could miss the ugly implications of
Pinker's suggestions to study instances of
"quasi-music," among which in condescending fashion he included rap music alongside
train whistles and wood chopping. Blacking
cautions against this "evolutionary" treatment
of the development of musical styles
(Blacking 1973: 55-56). There is such an
absence of description or understanding of the
music of so many cultures that it is impossible
to judge any music to be primitive. Often a
musical style appears simplistic by one
culture because it is judged by false criteria.
We see this in our own culture: by other
musical standards, hip-hop music is musically
derivative and dull, because (for example) it
doesn't have enough chord changes or
melodies. I need not point out that hip-hop
culture has its own highly developed,
distinctive and elaborate esthetics and standards, nor that it requires highly developed
improvisational skills in a variety of domains:
vocal, instrumental (turntables), and dance.
What should be stressed is that Pinker's
ethnocentric comment and his arguments in
general betray his ignorance of these dimensions. This instance is emblematic of some of
the larger problems in this field, namely the
tendency to generalize from a poverty of data,
to fetishize certain varieties of musical
complexity, and to remain blind to nonEuropean parameters of musical expression.
In any case, questions of complexity defer, in
hip-hop as well as in almost all other cases of
music and language, to questions of function
and utility. Indeed, in Pinker's own book, The
Language Instinct (1994), he points out that
all human languages have pretty much the
same degree of complexity; they seem to arise
fully formed, regardless of a culture's
technological level. Pinker roundly rejects the
notorious Sapir-Whorf "relativism" hypothesis (Whorf 1956), which claimed that
74

language and culture shape one another to the

degree that certain cognitive abilities, like
color classification, are enhanced or stunted
by cultural and environmental factors.
Instead, Pinker argues, humans are born with
a baseline of hardwired cognitive capacities,
among which ranks language. In this way,
Pinker derives his ideas from Chomsky (see,
for instance, Chomsky 1975), and in
particular Chomsky's findings of universals or
"super-rules" of human language. As an
example, he cites data that show that children
are able to create the requisite complexity of a
full-fledged language, like a creole or American Sign Language, even if their parents
speak a pidgin or a shabby version of ASL.
Perhaps we could hypothesize that music
contains a similar baseline of complexity and
a similar set of super-rules, which is
distributed among rhythmic, melodic, and
other components. But in his talk, Pinker
claimed that music showed extreme variation
in complexity across cultures, with tonal
music representing some sort of pinnacle
(Pinker 1997). Blacking cautions against
attaching too much significance to musical
complexity:
The issue of musical complexity is
irrelevant in any consideration of universal
musical competence. First, within a single
musical system greater surface complexity
may be like an extension of vocabulary,
which does not alter the basic principles of a
grammar and is meaningless apart from
them. Second, in comparing different
systems we cannot assume that surface
complexity is either musically or cognitively more complex. In any case, the mind
of man is infinitely more complex than
anything produced by particular men or
cultures. (Blacking 1973: 34-35)
Furthermore, the research reviewed by
Dowling (1988) shows that very young
children produce spontaneous songs that
incorporate but by no means mimic elements
of adult productions. Just as in language
development, song development seems to go
through a set of ordered, rule-governed
stages, somewhat independently of external
input. However, as with language, the raw

materials for these cognitive processes do not

appear in a vacuum; the child requires some
basic stimulation to exercise these capacities.
It appears as though there does exist some
hardwired baseline of musical understanding;
however, this basic cognitive ability may
atrophy if not nurtured sufficiently in early
years, as is the case with language.
Would variations in surface complexity signal
variations in fundamental structure? Or might
there be other factors? For example, extreme
surface complexity may serve as a kind of
exclusivity, in the same way that extremely
jargonistic language might delineate a certain
small professional community. Might
increased complexity amount to a kind of
augmented vocabulary, rather than a complexified grammar? Perhaps a general musical
grammar would include interpersonal factors
as well as individual ones; most probably it
would include the conceptual scaffolding for
embodiment, dance, and collective rhythmic
synchronization as well as rules governing
melodic and rhythmic structure. If we are to
follow this evidence, we may consider the
possibility that universal musical competence
exist, and consider how it might manifest.
Ultimately, however, we must question the
utility of a concept of musical universals.
While it has been documented by Brown
(1991) (via thorough and painstaking analysis
of as many documented ethnographies as
possible) that every culture known to man has
music and dance that they themselves are
human universals we should be careful with
the limits of the assertion that the same
principles underlie all musics of the world.
Whatever the role of musical universals, the
particulars seem to matter just as much. For
example, cross-cultural studies suggest that
listeners experience great difficulty in
intuiting the emotional content of unfamiliar
music from another culture (Gregory &
Varney 1996). Furthermore, even people of
"the same" culture may fail to decode a given
piece's emotional content in the same way.
Often musical portrayals of exuberance and
rage can have similar surface characteristics;
for example, these similarities have led to
much-contested interpretations of saxophonist

John Coltrane's music as alternatively angry

or joyous [CD-53]. Similarly, musical
depictions of sexuality and of violence can be
mistaken for one another. (Wessel 1998)
Hence, one of music's most unarguable
strengths, namely its capacity for emotional
expression, appears to be the result of cultural
associations rather than purely intramusical
dynamics. Just as different cultures have
different words for joy or sorrow, they may
just as well use different sonic gestures to
connote these emotions. The cultural factors
that give rise to musical activity provide the
richness that distinguishes one music from
another, and they do so in a manner that is
productive, not limiting.
I will now turn briefly to the implications of
this thesis in the realm of computer music.
The early days of computer music saw pieces
that focused on manipulation of timbral
parameters in direct reference to work in
music perception and cognition. One might
suppose that this work suggests perceptual
issues that can be addressed through music
itself. The most relevant issues along these
lines relate to the body, and to its status in
contemporary music.
McClary writes, "The advent of recording has
been a Platonic dream come true, for with a
disk one can have the pleasure of the sound
without the troubling reminder of the bodies
producing it. And electronic composition
makes it possible to eliminate the last trace of
the nonidealist element." (McClary 1991:
136) The implicit prejudices about computer
music that it sounds inhuman, digitized,
random, and so forth are addressed
explicitly by the present work. As is the case
with programs that improvise "convincing"
musical output, programs that generate
human-sounding rhythms focus our attention
on the role of the same human performer that
they might seem to replace. From the few
psychological and cultural considerations
discussed herein, we could construct a
handful of heuristics about rhythmic
expression in a groove context; these
heuristics can be applied to relevant musical
material in an intelligent way. To summarize
what was set forth in chapter 7:
75

Bear in mind the important aesthetic of

microrhythmic asynchrony, as well as its
functional role in contributing to rhythmic
auditory streaming,
Watch out for physical impossibilities.
Our aesthetics of musical gesture derive
from our experiences with bodily gesture.
Extremely rapid rhythmic figurations,
while not impossible in human
performance, nearly always bear the
microrhythmic stamp of embodiment. For
example, fast figures played in one limb or
finger are slightly spread apart in time. We
are used to hearing the sound of physical
work involved in making music, and this
sound includes a specific temporal
microstructure.
We can give a kind of inner life to
seemingly monotonous rhythms such as a
backbeat or swing, through subtle yet
consistent deviations from metronomicity,
especially if those deviations somehow
contain the sonic trace of physical
embodiment.
A simple understanding of such minor
adjustments could help musicians working
with computers to create music that is
rhythmically vital and rich in texture.
Popular music of recent decades has grown
quite aware of these possibilities, as its use of
technology has catered to its fickle and everchanging audience. You only need to tune in
to any urban radio station to hear that rather
convincing electronic tracks have replaced the
drummer. Observe the trajectory from the
quantized, otherworldly sounds of the Roland
TR-808, an analog-synthesis drum machine
popular in the early 1980s, to the plasticity of
sampled recordings of real drumming
manipulated by contemporary software tools.
This path suggests the narrative of a popular
aesthetic, born of widely available technology, whose participants attempt to make
inexpensive rhythmic accompaniment that
sound as funky and fresh as their human
counterparts, and the counter-narrative of the
role of technology in shaping those aesthetics.
The uncanny, inhuman sounds of the TR-808
are now enjoying a resurgence thanks to a
retro craze, and thanks to the influence of
76

history and memory on popular taste. A

contemporary song using the sound of the
TR-808 [CD-54] implicitly signifies on the
past. Every pop tune or "ghetto classic" exists
in a universe of signifying associations with
other such songs.
Performance variation, musical expression,
microtiming they all suggest the presence of
a human body making music. Humans
necessarily exhibit some deviation from rigid
quantization. Hence, the absence of these
deviations implies the absence of a musical
body. But this absence can be as musically
meaningful as its presence; the strategic use
of "robotic" rhythms can suggest a
disembodied, techno-fetishistic, futuristic
ideal (as in contemporary electronica), or it
can embody a Signifying riff on technology,
history, and memory (as in contemporary hiphop referencing the sounds of its beginnings
[CD-54]).
Often, popular computer music plays in the
gray area between bodily presence and
electronic impossibility. Again, an example
from electronica displays this playful ambiguity [CD-55]. A sampled "beat" i.e., a brief
recording of a human drummer is sliced into
small temporal units. These units are played
back in rearranged orders, sped up or slowed
down, multiply triggered, and otherwise
manipulated electronically. Because the
original sampled recording bears the microrhythmic traces of embodiment, the result
sounds something like a human drummer
improvising with often amusing flourishes
and ample metric ambiguity. Momentarily
regular, almost human-sounding pseudodrumming devolves into inhumanly rapid
sequences of rhythmic attacks, fast enough to
resemble digital noise. Such electronic
manipulation of familiar musical sounds
serves to problematize the listener's ecologically sound image of a human drummer.
Another prime example of the play of
embodiment in contemporary popular music
is the hip-hop DJ, who treats the turntables as
a kind of percussion meta-instrument [CD56]. Using strategically chosen segments of a
vinyl record, the DJ moves the record back

and forth with one hand, while creating

amplitude envelopes with a fader on a mixer
in the other hand. The sound generated is of
two general types: one is a percussive scratch
derived from rapid motion of the record, and
the other is a recognizable, meaningful
fragment of recorded music or sound. The
latter stroke type often hides the sophisticated,
impeccably timed physical gestures involved
in their creation, as these gestures are
unrelated to the sonic material. The scratch
sound, however, bears a direct sonic
resemblance to the physical motion involved.
There is an interesting continuum between
these two general types. A fragment of
recorded sound can be manipulated percussively in a manner that temporarily overrides
its referential content, causing it to refer
instead to the physical materiality of the
vinyl-record medium, and more importantly
to the embodiment, dexterity and skill of its
manipulator.
This play with the ambiguity of embodiment
also appears in some more experimental
realms of computer music. Improvising
kotoist Miya Masaoka [CD-57] augments the
physical capacities of her wooden, stringed
classical instrument with electronic sensors
that drive a bank of synthesizers and
samplers. The sensors track her physical
gestures as well as the pitch material from
each string. Her creative mapping of this data
to the electronic sound sources results in a
sort of electronic-acoustic hybrid instrument,
which she calls the "Koto-Monster." As an
improviser, she makes use of this expanded
palette with an organic seamlessness that
blurs the boundary between the acoustic
(physical, embodied) and the electronic
(artificial, disembodied) realms. In a similar
vein, Laetitia Sonami has developed a sleek
lady's glove into a sensitive gestural controller
that tracks dozens of dimensions of manual
movement. In her performances, she
transforms primal gestures of the hand into
sonic elements that seem to bear the trace of
these gestures. Her sound material often
consists of non-melodic, sampled sounds that
also reference their own physical sources
(speaking voices, animal sounds, wind, etc.).
The result is as fascinating to watch as to

hear, as one discerns an emergent connection

between the hand motions and the
disembodied sound material, and one
becomes aware that a versatile instrument is
being played with great skill.
Also in the realm of sensitive, expressive
controllers, David Wessel [CD-58] has
developed a productive framework for improvising with the Buchla Thunder, a novel
electronic instrument with two dimensions of
continuous control (position and pressure) for
each fingertip. In his setup, each pressure
controller acts as a volume fader that brings
up a computer-driven rhythmic process,
which is always in motion. The position
control of each finger is set to manipulate
various rhythmic parameters of the associated
process, such as density, timing, or timbre.
The ten fingers can create richly variable
musical gestures that act as larger constructs
on top of an implied rhythmic undercurrent.
The musical material thus generated has the
quality of hand gestures, but the musical
totality is not the simple result of these
gestures. Rather, it is the novel interaction
between the hand motions and the computer
rhythm engine that gives rise to the hybrid
musical texture.
Working in a slightly different paradigm,
improvising trombonist George Lewis [CD59] has built a computer program that
improvises polyphonically, with other musicians or without them. Quite expansive in
timbral scope, it gives the sense of an
improvising orchestra that produces focused,
flowing music. Its output relates to its human
colleague's sonic input just enough to convince us that it is listening, without sounding
imitative. When unstimulated by musical
input, it "takes a solo," seemingly unfazed.
Aesthetically it fits quite squarely into the
world of improvised music of the last three or
four decades. It draws its inspiration from the
collective improvisations of artists like the
Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton,
and Muhal Richard Abrams, all of whom
(along with Lewis himself) are associated
with the Chicago-based African-American
musical collective known as the Association
for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
77

Indeed, the program makes musical choices

with enough depth and wisdom that one easily
forgets that it is a purely disembodied
computer program. In listening to this piece
of artificial intelligence, we begin to perceive
what we call a sound c the sonic traces of a
creative personality. Lewis's work addresses
these issues of embodiment, by creating a
distinct sense of embodied artistry out of a
laptop computer and some synthesizer
modules.
We can imagine a multitude of further
possibilities of exploration of a meaningful
continuum between these two poles of
absence and presence. For her recent
electronica album, pop diva Madonna says
that she wanted to explore the possibility of
giving that music's characteristically inhuman
sound "a soul." (Rule 1998) Her solution was
heartfelt (if exceedingly banal) lyrics
delivered by an instantly recognizable, celebrity voice [CD-60]. But now that we have
begun to analyze the actual sonic trace of the
human body in the microrhythmic content of
instrumental music, perhaps we can further
problematize the longstanding clich that
electronic music fails to provide a sense of
soul. For what is soul in music, if not a
powerfully embodied human presence? [CD61]

78

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Records

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