Philosophy of Rhythm

The Philosophy of
Rhythm
The Philosophy of Rhythm
Aesthetics, Music, Poetics
Edited by
P E T E R C H EY N E , A N DY HA M I LT O N , A N D
M A X PA D D I S O N
1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cheyne, Peter. | Hamilton, Andy, 1957– | Paddison, Max.
Title: The philosophy of rhythm : aesthetics, music, poetics / edited by
Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019004326 | ISBN 9780199347773 (cloth) |
ISBN 9780199347780 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780199347896 (oxford scholarship online)
Subjects: LCSH: Musical meter and rhythm. | Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. |
Musical perception. | Music—Psychological aspects.
Classification: LCC ML3850 .P55 2019 | DDC 781.2/24117—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004326
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
“This remarkable collection of essays brings together philosophical and empirical
approaches to the significance of rhythm across the arts. The approach is refresh-
ingly interdisciplinary. Anyone concerned with the place of rhythm and metric
structure in the arts, and—more generally—within the wider domain of human
practices will find this an extraordinarily helpful volume.”
—Robert Kraut, Professor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University
“Fascinating and mysterious, rhythm is at the heart of music, dance, poetry, soci-
ology, and neuroscience. This inspired volume engages, enlightens, and is the first
to explore rhythm across a broad range of philosophical, aesthetic, and percep-
tual domains. This book is required reading for anyone concerned with time and
rhythm in contemporary life.”
—Peter Nelson, University of Edinburgh
“This wonderful collection considers questions about rhythm from a wide variety
of angles, perspectives, and disciplines—among them analytic and continental phi-
losophy, musicology, art history, poetics, and neuroscience. Like the dialogue that
opens the book, The Philosophy of Rhythm supports no particular line of thought or
argument but enormously deepens our understanding of a topic so palpable and yet
so mysterious.”
—Christoph Cox, Hampshire College
Preface
This project began in the mists of time, as a collaboration between Andy Hamilton
and Will Montgomery. Will had to pull out and Max Paddison took his place—but
Will remained as a contributor and his essay on rhythm in poetry is invaluable.
Max has worked on musical time since his contributions to the 2004 special edition
of Musicae Scientiae on spatialization and temporality in music, while Andy’s first
publication on rhythm was for Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society in 2011. Max’s
expertise in Continental philosophical traditions has been a necessary corrective
to Andy’s more analytic background, and they organized a workshop in Durham
in 2013, at which many contributions were presented. Besides his contributed
essay, Peter Cheyne has been involved in an editorial role from an early stage. He
reorganized the material, making it thematic rather than discipline-centered, and
closely edited each chapter.
Acknowledgments are gratefully given to Laura Dearlove for diligently checking
the style of several chapters; Anthony Parton for advice on artwork permissions;
Suzanne Ryan, Jamie Kim, and Dorian Mueller at OUP for their work in helping
to bring the volume to press; the anonymous reader for careful criticisms; Brian
Marley for invaluable assistance in helping compile the index; and Durham
University and the British Society of Aesthetics for their support for the workshop.
Later-stage work was supported by JSPS Kakenhi grant number 19K00143. Finally,
a sincere apology is due to the patient contributors. This volume has taken much
longer in preparation than was originally anticipated.
Contents
List of Illustrations xiii

List of Abbreviations xv
Notes on Contributors xvii
Introduction: Philosophy of Rhythm 1
Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison
PA RT I . M OV E M E N T A N D   STA SI S
1. Dialogue on Rhythm: Entrainment and the Dynamic Thesis 15
Andy Hamilton, David Macarthur, Roger Squires, Matthew Tugby,
and Rachael Wiseman (compiled and edited by Andy Hamilton)
2. Rhythm and Movement 43
Matthew Nudds
3. The Ontology of Rhythm 62
Peter Simons
4. “Feeling the Beat”: Multimodal Perception and the Experience of
Musical Movement 76
Jenny Judge
5. Dance Rhythm 91
Aili Bresnahan
PA RT I I . E M O T IO N A N D E X P R E S SIO N
6. The Life of Rhythm: Dewey, Relational Perception, and the
“Cumulative Effect” 101
Garry L. Hagberg
7. Rhythm, Preceding Its Abstraction 110
Deniz Peters
8. Mozart’s “Dissonance” and the Dialectic of Language and Thought in
Classical Theories of Rhythm 125
Michael Spitzer
9. Rhythm and Popular Music 141
Alison Stone
x Contents
10. Rhythms, Resemblance, and Musical Expressiveness 156

Ted Gracyk
PA RT I I I . E N T R A I N M E N T A N D T H E S O C IA L D I M E N SIO N
11. Metric Entrainment and the Problem(s) of Perception 171
Justin London
12. Entrainment and the Social Origin of Musical Rhythm 183
Martin Clayton
13. How Many Kinds of Rhythm Are There? 199
Michael Tenzer
14. Temporal Processing and the Experience of Rhythm: A Neuro-
Psychological Approach 216
Udo Will
PA RT I V. T I M E A N D E X P E R I E N C E : SU B J E C T I V E A N D
OBJECTIVE RHYTHM
15. Complexity and Passage: Experimenting with Poetic Rhythm 233
Christopher Hasty
16. Encoded and Embodied Rhythm: An Unprioritized Ontology 255
Peter Cheyne
17. Time, Rhythm, and Subjectivity: The Aesthetics of Duration 272
Max Paddison
18. Husserl’s Model of Time-Consciousness, and the Phenomenology
of Rhythm 291
Salomé Jacob
19. Pictorial Experience and the Perception of Rhythm 307
Jason Gaiger
20. Soundless Rhythm 331
Víctor Durà-Vilà
PA RT V. R E A D I N G   R H Y T H M
21. Rhythm, Meter, and the Poetics of Abstraction 349
Jason David Hall
22. The Not-So-Silent Reading: What Does It Mean to Say that We
Appreciate Rhythm in Literature? 362
Rebecca Wallbank
Contents xi
23. Leaving It Out: Rhythm and Short Form in the Modernist Poetic

Tradition 374
Will Montgomery
24. Hearing It Right: Rhythm and Reading 392
John Holliday
Index 409
Illustrations
8.1. Sulzer’s Schlagfolge 127

8.2. Koch’s Schlagreihe 128
8.3. Koch’s Schlagreihe with resting points (Ruhepuncten) 129
8.4. Model of the drift from rhythm to punctuation 129
8.5. Koch’s schema of a sonata-form exposition 133
8.6. Mozart, String Quartet in C major, K. 465, “Dissonance,” bars 23–6 135
8.7. Mozart, bars 67–97 136
8.8. Introduction, bars 1–4 137
9.1. Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean,” cabasa, drums, bass guitar, and synthesizer,
timing c.00:20–00:24 144
9.2. The double backbeat 146
11.1 Kanizsa triangle, organized array (left panel); disorganized array
(right panel) 172
11.2. Beat interpolation in the opening theme of Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 in
E-minor, Op. 98 177
11.3. A “metrically malleable” melody notated in (a) 4/4, and (b) 9/8, showing
alternate listening construals 178
11.4. The “Standard Pattern” (or “Bell Pattern”) timeline found in many styles and
genres of African music. Upper system: construed as a three-(or six-) beat
pattern. Bottom system: construed as a four-beat pattern 178
15.1. Keats, “Hymn to Pan,” first stanza (from Endymion, Book 1, lines 232–46),
annotated. 236
15.2. The two sides of “projection” 242
15.3. One version, among many, of the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” as an
illustration of the determinacy of tetrameter (and also as an example of the
pattern long-long-short-short-long) 244
15.4. The first line said as strict iambic pentameter (five isochronous beats each
of the form “weak-strong”) in obvious violation of the line’s complexity 245
15.5. The first line said as five more or less isochronous beats, but now allowing for
complexities of “weak” and “strong” 246
xiv List of Illustrations
15.6. The first line said as five “flexibly isochronous” beats whose flexibility or
variability is determined (or “controlled”) by higher levels of complexity 246
15.7. Beat-to-beat projections in which each new event is focally aware simply
of its immediate predecessor 249
15.8. A representation of projective complexity showing the resistance of a
five-beat line to the determinacies of four, or rather two, beats (Attridge’s
“doubling”). NB: this diagram is not meant to represent the complexity
of most “pentameter” lines where a reduction to two is not an issue. (Indeed,
in some “pentameter” nine-or ten-syllable lines there are four beats,
but these situations are hardly “square.”) 250
18.1. Husserl’s structure of time-consciousness 297
19.1. Sonia Delaunay, Rythme coleur n° 1076 (1939). Centre national des arts
plastiques. © Pracusa S.A./Cnap/Photograph: Yves Chenot 310
19.2. Dactyl illustration (Creative Commons) 313
19.3. Raphael, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1515–16), bodycolour over
charcoal underdrawing, mounted on canvas, 320 x 390cm, Victoria and
Albert Museum. © The Royal Collection, HM The Queen/Victoria and
Albert Museum, London 314
19.4. Nicholas Dorigny, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1719), etching and
engraving on paper, 51 x 65cm, Victoria and Albert Museum. © Victoria
and Albert Museum, London 316
19.5. Joseph-Marie Vien, St. Denis Preaching in Gaul (1767), oil on canvas,
660 x 393cm, Église Saint-Roche, Paris. © The Art Archive 322
19.6. Ten percent of all saccades of forty viewers (twenty art experts and twenty
non-experts) beholding Vien’s painting for two minutes each. Adapted version
© Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History, University of Vienna 323
19.7. Visualization of frequent saccadic transitions between fixation clusters for
Vien’s St. Denis Preaching in Gaul (average of forty viewers, twenty art experts
and twenty non-experts, whilst viewing for two minutes each). Adapted version
© Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History, University of Vienna 324
19.8. Visualization of frequent saccadic transitions between fixation clusters for
Doyen’s The Miracle of St. Anthony’s Fire (average of forty viewers, twenty art
experts and twenty non-experts, whilst viewing for two minutes each).
Adapted version © Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History,
University of Vienna 325
21.1. Opening lines of John Milton’s Paradise Lost displayed as prose in David
Charles Bell and Alexander Melville Bell’s Standard Elocutionist (London,
1878), 426 352
21.2. Graphic record of various rhythmical sounds, from Edward Wheeler Scripture,
Elements of Experimental Phonetics (New York, 1902), 509 356
Abbreviations
bpm beats-per-minute
EDM electronic dance music
fMRI functional magnetic resonance imaging
HKB Haken–Kelso–Bunz [equation]
OED Oxford English Dictionary
Notes on Contributors
Aili Bresnahan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dayton (USA). She
specializes in aesthetics, particularly in applied philosophy of dance, improvisation,
interpretation, and the philosophy of mind and motor cognition as it relates to the per-
forming arts. She is also the founder and moderator of Dance Philosophers, an inter-
disciplinary research and networking Google group. More information can be found
on her professional website: https://www.artistsmatter.com. Contact:abresnahan1@
udayton.edu.
Peter Cheyne is Associate Professor at Shimane University, and Visiting Fellow in Philosophy
at Durham University. He is leading two international projects, one on the Aesthetics
of Perfection and Imperfection, the other on the Seventeenth-to Nineteenth-Century
Philosophy of the Life Sciences. Published in journals including Intellectual History
Review and the Journal of Philosophy of Life, and editor and co-author of Coleridge
and Contemplation (OUP, 2017), he recently completed a monograph on Coleridge’s
Contemplative Philosophy (OUP, forthcoming 2020).
Martin Clayton is Professor in Ethnomusicology at Durham University. His publications
include Time in Indian Music (OUP, 2000) and Experience and Meaning in Music
Performance (OUP, 2013, co-edited with Laura Leante and Byron Dueck). He is cur-
rently pursuing research on entrainment in musical performance within Durham’s
Music and Science Lab (https://musicscience.net).
Víctor Durà-Vilà is Lecturer at the University of Leeds. In aesthetics, he works on Humean
aesthetics, aesthetic experience, ethics and aesthetics, aesthetic cognitivism, as well
as on interdisciplinary projects in music and dance. Other research interests include
applied ethics (parental obligations; autonomy and paternalism) and philosophy of
physics. His work has been published in journals such as Analysis, Journal of Value
Inquiry, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and British Journal of Aesthetics.
Jason Gaiger is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the Ruskin
School of Art and a Fellow of St. Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford. His prin-
cipal research interests are in aesthetics and art theory from the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury through to the present day; he also works on theories of depiction and visual
meaning, and on twentieth-century and contemporary art practice and theory.
Ted Gracyk teaches philosophy at Minnesota State University Moorhead, and is co-editor
of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He is the author of several philosoph-
ical books on music, including Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock Music (Duke
University Press, 1996), Listening to Popular Music (University of Michigan Press,
2007), and On Music (Routledge, 2013). With Andrew Kania, he co-edited The
xviii Notes on Contributors
Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music (Routledge, 2011). Most recently, he

co-authored Jazz and the Philosophy of Art (Routledge, 2018).
Garry L. Hagberg is James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard
College. Author of numerous papers at the intersection of aesthetics and the philosophy
of language, his books include Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic
Theory (Cornell University Press, 1995), and Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein
and Autobiographical Consciousness (OUP, 2008). He is editor of Art and Ethical
Criticism (Wiley Blackwell, 2008); Fictional Characters, Real Problems (OUP, 2016);
and Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Editor
of the journal Philosophy and Literature, Hagberg is currently writing Living in
Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood.
Jason David Hall is Associate Professor of English at the University of Exeter. He has written
the books Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic, Translator (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),
Seamus Heaney’s Rhythmic Contract (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and Nineteenth-
Century Verse and Technology: Machines of Meter (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and is
contributing author and editor of Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth
Century (Ohio University Press, 2011) and Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at
the British Fin de Siecle (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, with co-editor Alex Murray).
Andy Hamilton teaches Philosophy at Durham University, UK. He specializes in aesthetics,
philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and history of nineteenth-and twentieth-
century philosophy, especially Wittgenstein. His books are Aesthetics and Music
(Continuum, 2007), The Self in Question: Memory, the Body and Self-Consciousness
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Wittgenstein
and On Certainty (Routledge, 2014). He also teaches aesthetics and history of jazz at
Durham, and published Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art (University
of Michigan Press, 2007).
Christopher Hasty is Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University where
he teaches music theory. His research interests center on questions of time and rhythm
understood from perspectives of process and event formation. Recent publications
include essays in Thought and Play in Musical Rhythm: Multidimensional Perspectives
on African, Asian, and EuroAmerican Musics (co-edited with Richard Wolf and Steven
Blum, OUP, 2019) and an essay on “Time” in The Oxford Handbook of Western Music
and Philosophy (ed. McAuley, Nielsen, and Levinson, OUP, 2020).
John Holliday has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Maryland and is currently
Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at Stanford University, where he supports
Stanford’s initiative in Philosophy and Literature. His research centers on issues of
literary value and has appeared in the British Journal of Aesthetics and the Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
Salomé Jacob holds a PhD on philosophy from the University of Durham. Her research
lies at the intersection between philosophy of perception, aesthetics, and phenome-
nology. She focuses on the nature of musical movement.
Jenny Judge is PhD candidate in philosophy at NYU. She also holds a PhD in musicology
from the University of Cambridge, as well as degrees from University College Cork
Notes on Contributors xix
and the Cork School of Music. Her research explores the resonances between mu-
sical experience and the philosophy of mind. Her doctoral dissertation defends and
elaborates the thesis that music represents attitudes. Judge is also an active musician.
Justin London is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Music, Cognitive Science, and the
Humanities at Carleton College (USA). He received his PhD from the University of
Pennsylvania where he worked with Leonard Meyer. His research interests include
rhythm and timing in non-Western music, beat perception, sensorimotor synchro-
nization and joint action, and musical aesthetics. He has served as President of the
Society for Music Theory (2007–9) and President of the Society for Music Perception
and Cognition (2016–18).
David Macarthur is Associate Professor at the University of Sydney. He has published
articles on liberal naturalism, pragmatism, metaphysical quietism, skepticism,
common sense, Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, perception, and philosophy
of art—especially concerning architecture, photography, and film. He has co-edited
three collections of papers with Mario De Caro: Naturalism in Question (Harvard
University Press, 2004); Naturalism and Normativity (Columbia University Press,
2010); and Philosophy in an Age of Science (Harvard University Press, 2012); and re-
cently edited Hilary and Ruth-Anna Putnam, Pragmatism as a Way of Life (Harvard
University Press, 2017).
Will Montgomery teaches contemporary poetry at Royal Holloway, University of London.
He is the author of The Poetry of Susan Howe (Palgrave, 2010); co-edited (with Robert
Hampson) Frank O’Hara Now (Liverpool University Press, 2010); and co-edited (with
Stephen Benson) Writing the Field Recording (Edinburgh University Press, 2018); and
has published numerous articles on contemporary and twentieth-century poetry. His
monograph on short form in American poetry is forthcoming. He has a long-standing
involvement in experimental music and field recording and has released several CDs.
Matthew Nudds is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the
University of Warwick. His work is principally in the philosophy of perception and he
has a particular interest in the non-visual senses and auditory perception.
Max Paddison is Emeritus Professor of Music Aesthetics at the University of Durham. He
works in critical theory, philosophy, contemporary music, and popular music. His
publications include Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (CUP, 1993), Adorno, Modernism
and Mass Culture (Kahn & Averill, 1996), and Contemporary Music: Theoretical and
Philosophical Perspectives (co-edited with Irène Deliège, Ashgate, 2010). He has re-
cently contributed essays to The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2017), The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School (Routledge, 2018),
and The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (forthcoming 2019).
Deniz Peters is Professor for Artistic Research in Music at the University of Music and
Performing Arts Graz, Austria, where he also directs the Doctoral School for Artistic
Research. His research concerns philosophical questions, such as the concept of mu-
sical expression, listening modes, ensemble empathy, and the epistemic potential of
artistic research through music. His explorative pianistic practice is part of his re-
search method.
xx Notes on Contributors
Peter Simons is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. He is the au-
thor of the monograph Parts (OUP, 2000) and some 300 essays on pure and applied
ontology, philosophy of language, logic and mathematics, the history of early analytic
philosophy and of Central European philosophy (mainly Austrian and Polish) in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is a member of the British, European, Irish,
and Polish Academies.
Michael Spitzer is Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool and Editorial Chair of the
Society for Music Analysis. He inaugurated the International Conferences on Music
and Emotion (Durham, 2009), and co-organized the International Conference on the
Analysis of Popular Music (Liverpool, 2013). His publications explore interactions be-
tween music theory, philosophy, and psychology, and include Metaphor and Musical
Thought (Chicago University Press, 2004); Music as Philosophy (Indiana University
Press, 2006); A History of Emotion in Western Music (OUP, forthcoming 2020); and
The Musical Human (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2021).
Roger Squires works in areas opened up by the mid-twentieth-century revolution in
philosophy of mind brought about by Wittgenstein and Ryle. Publications in-
clude: “Depicting,” Philosophy, 44 (1969); “Memory Unchained,” Philosophical Review,
77.2 (1969); “On One’s Mind,” Philosophical Quarterly, 20 (1970); “Silent Soliloquy,”
Understanding Wittgenstein, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, 7 (1973); “The
Problem of Dreams,” Philosophy, 48 (1973); “Mental Arithmetic,” Ratio, 1 (1994).
Alison Stone is Professor of European Philosophy at Lancaster University. She is the au-
thor of Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy (University of Notre Dame
Press, 2004), Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference (CUP, 2006), An
Introduction to Feminist Philosophy (Polity, 2007), Feminism, Psychoanalysis and
Maternal Subjectivity (Routledge, 2011), and The Value of Popular Music (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016). She edited the Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century
Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) and co- edited the Routledge
Companion to Feminist Philosophy (Routledge, 2017).
Michael Tenzer is Professor of Music at the University of British Columbia. His books in-
clude Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of Twentieth Century Balinese Music (Chicago
University Press, 2000) and the edited volumes Analytical Studies in World Music (OUP,
2006) and Analytical and Cross Cultural Studies in World Music (OUP, 2011, with co-
editor John Roeder). His compositions are available on New World and Cantaloupe
Records. Recent articles include the cross-cultural study of world “Polyphony” in the
Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory (OUP, 2018).
Matthew Tugby is Associate Professor at Durham University. He has published on a
range of topics in contemporary metaphysics and co- edited Metaphysics and
Science (OUP, 2013).
Rebecca Wallbank is PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at Uppsala University,
specializing in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. In addition to research on rhythm
and the philosophy of literature she also has strong interest in the philosophy of trust
and its relation to aesthetic testimony. She is Editorial Assistant to the British Journal
of Aesthetics.
Notes on Contributors xxi
Udo Will is Professor of cognitive ethnomusicology at The Ohio State University. He has
studied music, sociology, and neuroscience, holds a PhD in both musicology and neu-
robiology, and his research focuses on cognitive aspects of music performances in oral
cultures. He leads projects on physiological entrainment to music, on cultural effects
on cognitive processing of prosodic components in music and language in Asian and
African tone language cultures, and on cross-cultural studies of rhythm perception,
movement and the concept of time.
Rachael Wiseman is Lecturer in Philosophy at University of Liverpool. She works on
Wittgenstein, early analytic philosophy, and philosophy of mind, action, and ethics,
and wrote the Routledge Guidebook to Anscombe’s Intention (Routledge, 2016).
Her articles have been published in the Journal of Philosophy, American Catholic
Philosophical Quarterly, and Philosophical Topics.
Introduction
Philosophy of Rhythm
Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison
This volume brings together philosophical and empirical approaches to offer critical
perspectives on the philosophy of rhythm. The editors have not imposed theoretical
or interpretational prescriptions, except that contributors should examine concrete
manifestations of rhythm in the various arts and in human activity. Our aim is to
locate fruitful questions and stimulate lively discussion of them. Contributors offer
definitions and theories of rhythm in music and prosody that are often opposed,
referring to meter, pulse, stress, and accent as constituent elements of rhythm, or
at least as key concepts in understanding it; lines of dispute are examined from dif-
ferent perspectives throughout the book. As well as examining the case of music,
essays explore possibilities or hypotheses of rhythm in non-musical and non-
prosodic (non-poetic) arts.
As the essays are generally contemporary in scope, Section 1 outlines some key
points in the history of rhythm in philosophy, not in the pretence of providing a
comprehensive survey in such a short space, but to offer some historical precedents
for the problems addressed. Section 2 discusses the extent of recent attention to
rhythm and the puzzling neglect of the field, especially in philosophy. Section 3
gives an outline of the chapters, describing the conceptual space of the book.
1. Historical Considerations
Recent neglect notwithstanding, philosophical traditions have long acknowledged

the importance of rhythm across the arts and in everyday life. However defined,
it is readily agreed that rhythm is fundamental to those arts that directly involve
duration and temporality: dance, music, drama, and recited poetry. These arts
were closely associated in classical Greece. They all include rhythm, the animating,
flowing factor it is the purpose of this book to explore, along with the associated
phenomena of movement, measure, pattern, and repetition.
Before Parmenides and Plato, Heraclitus ascribed to rhythm a universal sig-
nificance in holding that “everything flows [panta rhei].” This stream of thought
2 The Philosophy of Rhythm
continues in contemporary process philosophy, influencing thinkers, including

some in this book, who employ the concept of rhythm as flow. Less cosmic, more
socio-cultural, Plato’s consideration of rhythm, in contrast, focuses primarily on
music and its effects on culture and mood. In the Republic, he has Socrates discuss
the various rhythms and regulations of meter as modeling different virtues (coura-
geous, self-controlled, active, graceful) and vices (lamenting, drunken, idle, grace-
less), reprising the theme in his later dialogue, the Laws. It is also in the Laws—in a
discussion of the ability to control and order one’s bodily movements and speech—
that Plato has “the Athenian” give the definition by which: “Order within move-
ment is called ‘rhythm.’ ”1
A core motivation for this collection of essays is to explore rhythm across the
arts. Connections between the different arts are addressed in Aristotle’s Poetics via
three related concepts: mimēsis, metaphora, and poiēsis. Aristotle saw mimesis as
a dynamic, performative impulse to “mimic” actions, processes, emotions, and
gestures through different media and art forms. Mimesis, he said, “is natural to us,”
and in the opening pages of the Poetics he specifically refers to rhythm as a medium
for mimesis:
the medium of imitation [mimēsis] is rhythm, language, and melody, but these
may be employed either separately or in combination. For example, music for
pipe and lyre . . . uses melody and rhythm only, while dance uses rhythm by itself
and without melody (since dancers too imitate character, emotion and action by
means of rhythm expressed in movement).2
Clearly, Aristotle describes our capacity for an embodied mimesis that enables us to
move rhythmically in space and move together in time with others. His discussion
links music, poetry, and dance and anticipates the theory of entrainment discussed
in several contributions to this volume.
Another theme in this book is the contemporary debate between proponents of
the dynamic thesis, who hold that music literally moves, and those on the other
side, who conform to the thesis that movement in music is metaphorical. We return
to this debate in Section 2, but should note here the three categories of rhythm dis-
tinguished by Aristides Quintilianus in his Peri musikês:
The term ‘rhythm’ is used in three ways. It is applied to bodies that do not move, as
when we speak of a statue having ‘good rhythm’; to anything that moves, as when
we speak of someone walking with ‘good rhythm’; and it has a specific application
to sound . . . . [viz.] a systēma of durations [chronoi] put together in some kind of
order.3
1 Plato, Republic, Bk 3, 397a–401a; Laws, Bk 7, 798d–802e; Laws, Bk 2, 665a.

2 Aristotle, Poetics,  3–4.
3 Aristides, On Music, Bk 1, Ch. 13.
Introduction 3
For Aristides, then, rhythm applies to proportionality in static objects, physical

movement, and music. Distinguishing rhythm in things that move from rhythm in
music, it seems he stands on the movement-as-metaphor rather than the dynamic
side of the debate.
Philosophical theories of rhythm in the modern era include Rousseau in
the eighteenth century, with his entry on rhythm in Diderot and d’Alembert’s
Encyclopedia (1751), and his later Dictionary of Music (1768).4 In the Encylopedia
he states that:
Rhythm can be defined generally as the proportion that the parts of a measure,
parts of a movement, or even parts of a whole have with each other: in music it is
the difference in movement which results from speed or slowness, from respective
length or brevity of the notes.5
In 1802 (though published posthumously, another half-century later), Schelling

proposed that art first “breaks through into the world of representation” via the
expression in music of “the primal rhythm of nature.”6 It is, he claimed, “through
rhythm” that humans “impose variety or diversity onto everything,” thereby finding
pleasure in “an entire unity within a particular multiplicity,” often transforming “an
essentially meaningless succession into a meaningful one.”7 Schelling thus argued
that with rhythm music transforms the atomic or disparate into the organic, its
basic units forming larger groups which in turn cohere in a variegated whole. In
its articulative capacity to transform experience, rhythm is, in Schelling’s view,
the dominant of the three powers in music—rhythm, melody, and modulation.
Because articulating or “informing . . . unity into multiplicity” is for him the essence
of music, and since rhythm effects “this informing within music itself,” he concludes
that “Rhythm is the music within music.”
Nietzsche’s early lecture “Rhythmic Researches” (1870–2) distinguished what
he saw as Greek mathematical rhythms from the fluid, living rhythms of the body,
anticipating his influential Apollonian– Dionysian distinction.8 Influenced by
Schopenhauer, who distinguished music as “entirely apart” from all other arts in
reaching further than mimetic representation and into a “serious and deeper sig-
nificance . . . referring to the innermost essence of the world and of our selves,”9
Nietzsche finds the primality of will in rhythm and dance. Thus this philosopher,
for whom “Without music life would be an error,”10 affirms the Dionysian necessity
of rhythm: one must dance to enter fully, bodily, into the life of the world. Thus too
he declared: “I would only believe in a god who knew how to dance.”11
4 Rousseau, Dictionnaire.
5 Rousseau, “Rhythme.”
6 Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 17.
7 Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 110–11.
8 Elaine P. Miller, “Harnessing Dionysus.”
9 Schopenhauer, Will and Presentation, 306.
10 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 10 (“Epigrams and Arrows” §33).
11 Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 29.

Drawing from such nineteenth-century sources, Bergson’s distinctly modernist

writings on time, duration, and continuity had a remarkable influence on music and
philosophy in France from the 1890s up to the 1930s. The phenomenologist Gaston
Bachelard’s The Dialectic Of Duration (1936; revised 1950), for example, arose from
a critique of Bergson’s concepts of duration and continuity. Against Bergson’s no-
tion of continuity, and indeed against the tradition that since the ancient Greek
philosophers has regarded musical rhythm and melody as “flow,” Bachelard argues
that “music’s action is discontinuous; it is our emotional resonance that gives it con-
tinuity.”12 Bachelard regards continuity and duration in music as an elaborate meta-
phor “reconstructed in reverse” by the experiencing subject.
2. Recent Times: Attention and Neglect
Given its importance in ancient and modern philosophy, the neglect of rhythm as
an area of inquiry in contemporary philosophical aesthetics is puzzling. This lack of
interest is not only from aesthetics, however. Poetics is also marked by a neglect of
rhythm; there is a corresponding lack of interest from prosody, the area of linguis-
tics concerned with patterns of stress and intonation. In the case of musicology, the
neglect has been relatively less evident but nevertheless noticeable, given that, in
contrast to popular music, rock music, and jazz, the dominant focus in the theory
and analysis of Western art music has tended to be on the parameter of pitch in rela-
tion to harmony, as opposed to rhythm as such.
Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard B. Meyer’s groundbreaking work on rhythmic
structure commented on the “moribund state” of its topic.13 Subsequently,
Christopher Hasty, in an ambitious work, analyzed the experience of music as an
irreducibly temporal phenomenon, as opposed to the spatialized representation
assumed by many theorists and by ordinary thinking.14 Philosophically influenced
by William James, phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl, and process
thinkers such as Henri Bergson and A. N. Whitehead, Hasty argued that music
should be regarded as a process of becoming rather than a record of what has be-
come, rejecting the image of meter as an artifact of a system of representation—that
is, of notation.
There has also been a neglect of the relationship of rhythm and larger-scale form
and structure. Aspects of this relationship occur in the work of Heinrich Koch in
the eighteenth century, as Michael Spitzer has observed.15 In non-Western music
theory and practice, however, notably that of North Indian classical music, rhythm
and its relation to extended improvisation has an ancient and long-standing,
12 Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration, 124.
13 Cooper and Meyer, Rhythmic Structure of Music.
14 Hasty, Meter as Rhythm.
15 Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought, 69, further discussed at 243–59.

Introduction 5
fundamental significance, as has been emphasized by Martin Clayton’s work on the

relation of meter, duration, and structure in this tradition.16
In English-language philosophy, John Dewey, Leonard B. Meyer, Roger Scruton,
Andy Hamilton, and Andrew Kania are among the small number of philosophers
to address rhythm to any great extent. This blind spot is particularly unfortunate
because rhythm is a phenomenon that is immediately evident to everyone, and is a
topic on which philosophical progress can be made without expert technical know-
ledge. The need for greater attention to rhythm provides a major motivation for this
volume, which sets out to rectify the oversight. We have sought to do this not only
through commissioning contributions from philosophical aesthetics, but also—
albeit with a philosophical perspective—from other disciplines like neuroscience,
psychology, musicology, ethnomusicology, poetics, literary studies, dance, and art
history. In taking an interdisciplinary approach, this volume facilitates lines of in-
quiry that investigate whether rhythm (and related concepts including meter and
duration) should be restricted to music, dance, and poetry, or, by contrast, should
be extended to non-poetic literature and theatre, as well as painting and the visual
arts, and also architecture.
The attempt to apply the concept of rhythm across the arts raises problematic
philosophical issues, and the term “metaphor” is often employed rather loosely. It is,
in any case, hard to define. Might there remain in all the arts something—perhaps
even some dimension, such as movement, the immediately spatial, or the immedi-
ately temporal—that can only be discussed in metaphorical terms? This suggestion
raises a number of interesting further questions in relation to rhythm and has led to
much recent debate. Music is a time-based art and has duration, but can we say that
music really moves, and if so, what does talk of “movement in musical space” mean?
The debate arises among those who hold movement in music to be metaphorical—
such writers include Roger Scruton, who draws from Victor Zuckerkandl. Scruton
concludes that the sense of movement is, though vastly important, only metaphor-
ical in terms of the physical space in which bodies move, that is, the sounds of music
“are ordered in space only apparently, and not in fact.”17 Zuckerkandl’s position
involves the further sophistication that while, as he concludes, music transcends
physical and geometrical space, it does not transcend spatiality completely, for it
testifies to a space that remains in the absence of physical objects and geometry.18
What can be said today of rhythm in arts besides music? In the case of poetry—
and indeed literature in general—one can say that duration is involved, in that it
takes time to read it, but, as with music, what might be meant by movement in po-
etic or literary space? The visual arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, which
literally occupy space, also endure through time, and take time to view and walk
around or within—but are they generically different in terms of temporality from
16 Clayton, Time in Indian Music.
17 Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 14.
18 Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 292.

artworks that take time to unfold in their entirety, such as performed music and
recited poetry? These questions are taken up in a number of essays in this volume.
Simply to say that we can discuss an “absent dimension” only metaphorically is
also to underestimate the importance of metaphor in its relation to mimesis and
poiesis (creative, artistic production), whether in our experience of the arts and of
nature (which has traditionally been the domain of aesthetics), in our attempts to
understand, explain, and interpret the arts (which is the domain of hermeneutics),
or in the making of art (which was traditionally the domain of poetics). As Aristotle
says: “A metaphor is the application of a [word] which properly applies to some-
thing else.”19 He refers to metaphor as a “transference” from one sphere to which it
belongs to another where it is not normally encountered.
Thus this collection aims to provide both an overview of an often neglected but
vital aspect of aesthetic experience, and an examination of formal affinities be-
tween historically interconnected fields of music, dance, poetry and literature,
and also the visual and spatial arts, addressing key concepts such as embodiment,
movement, entrainment, and performance. We have attempted to avoid an over-
emphasis on music, and have sought also to stress structural parallels between dif-
ferent art forms and their aesthetics. An essential aim has been intelligibility across
disciplines. While the volume draws on a wide range of disciplines, contributors
were encouraged to present their ideas non-technically as far as possible, and to
engage in cross-disciplinary dialogue, in part through the insights of philosophical
aesthetics.
3. Outline of Chapters
Enhancing its interdisciplinary ambition, this book is organized not territorially,

into academic disciplines, but thematically, into aspects and questions concerning
rhythm. With this arrangement, the editors not only encourage connections be-
tween the disciplines and a closer exchange of perspectives, but also see a concep-
tual map of the philosophy of rhythm taking shape. The five thematic parts that
make up the volume arose naturally, as the project progressed, revealing a spread
of concerns among current scholars regarding rhythm, suggesting also the shape of
the conceptual space itself.
Part One, “Movement and Stasis,” addresses conceptual questions that in-
clude: Does rhythm necessarily involve movement, or is this a matter of metaphor
only? Is rhythm as a literal phenomenon restricted to human activities and actions,
or does it extend to natural and mechanical phenomena such as ocean waves and
the sound of a train on a track? How is rhythm experienced through the senses—is
it recognized or projected?
19 Aristotle, Poetics, 34.
Introduction 7
The opening chapter, collated and edited by Andy Hamilton, is a dramatized dia-
logue in the long philosophical tradition of that form. The debate poses the dynamic
conception—that rhythm involves movement—against the view that nothing rele-
vant in the music moves literally, that is, spatially. Hamilton’s dynamic conception
characterizes rhythm as “[a primitive] order within human bodily movement or
movement-in-sound,” and opposes static accounts in terms of order-in-time and
Scruton’s metaphorical conception. Most dialogue participants support a dynamic
conception of some kind, but Macarthur denies that rhythm “moves in a literal but
non-spatial sense.” Squires and Wiseman develop Hamilton’s account, arguing that
the movement criterion should be expressed as a capacity and not a disposition.
Matthew Nudds’ “Rhythm and Movement” continues this theme, arguing that
we can experience literal movement in rhythm. The argument depends on the claim
that our experience of musical grouping involves experiencing sounds as produced
by extra-musical events that include movement, and that musical grouping is cen-
tral to our experience of rhythm in music, hence our experience of rhythm involves
the experience of movement. The view defended rejects the suggestion that move-
ment can only be heard in music in a metaphorical sense.
In “The Ontology of Rhythm,” Peter Simons defends, in contrast, a static concep-
tion of rhythm. Investigating its complex ontology, he sets out the types of entity on
which rhythm is founded and their relationships with rhythm itself. No single char-
acterization will work, Simons argues; rather, a series of types branches off from
simple paradigms. Rhythm in music is characterized in its simplest form by a re-
petitive temporal pattern, which forms the basis for variations generating the whole
range of musical rhythms. In music, but not rhythm in general, this range is limited
(though not constituted) by anthropological constraints concerning pitch, tempo,
volume, and complexity.
Jenny Judge’s chapter on “ ‘Feeling the Beat’ ” argues that the experience of mu-
sical meter is multimodal: it involves the binding to a common sensory individual
of auditory and proprioceptive content. One hears the beat, and feels it, too. She
further claims that a consideration of this multimodal content undermines the
seeming necessity of the appeal to “metaphorical perception” as a way of accounting
for the experience of movement in the case of musical meter.
Next, in “Dance Rhythm,” Aili Bresnahan proposes a theory of dance rhythm as
distinct from rhythm in dance. Distinguishing natural from intentional rhythm,
she defends this account by exploring musical and non-musical connections be-
tween rhythm and dance. She argues that dance rhythm can arise in conjunction
with music; follow music; set the musical rhythm; or be completely independent of
music, though natural or internal bodily rhythms can underpin both. Finally, she
asserts the existence of dance that might be naturally rhythmic, but not in a way es-
sential to dance qua dance.
Part Two, “Emotion and Expression,” considers the relation of rhythm to human
feeling and covers topics including: the deep significance of rhythm deriving
from its being “a universal scheme of existence”; the use of rhythm in empathetic
communication and composition; rhythm at the base of cognitive and linguistic

meaning; the creativity involved in bodily responding to musical rhythms such as
those found in popular music; and entrainment and the recognition of expression
in music.
In “Theories of Rhythm,” Garry Hagberg poses the question: Why does rhythm
speak to us so deeply? Patterns of percussive sound that move us are meaningful,
yet we find it hard to say what associations or connotations create that meaning.
What is required is something more elemental and universal than personal or id-
iosyncratic associations. Hagberg argues that John Dewey’s Art as Experience has
important insights on this question. Focusing on examples from jazz improvisa-
tion, Hagberg suggests that both player and listener are very like Dewey’s broader
conception of the live organism interacting within its environment.
Deniz Peters’ “Rhythm, Preceding its Abstraction” takes a non-reductive ap-
proach to the understanding of musical rhythm based on reflections on his musical
practice, arguing that, preceding its abstraction, rhythm centrally resides in “doings”
and “happenings” in our bodies and interactions between each other. Further, it
resides in our somatic and cognitive awareness of these “doings” and “happenings”
by way of experience and attention. The line of thought Peters develops stems
from a number of related observations concerning how “lived rhythm,” unlike
“represented rhythm,” comes into being via interpersonal-and self-attention.
In “Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’ and the Dialectic of Language and Thought in Classical
Theories of Rhythm,” Michael Spitzer discusses Mozart and eighteenth-century
theories of rhythm. Challenging the abstract conception of musical rhythm, Spitzer
argues for its intrinsic expressiveness, supporting his claim with reference to a rich
eighteenth-century tradition. He argues that eighteenth-century rhythmic theory
was cognitive, in tune with the cognitive qualities of classical music. Another ex-
pressive aspect of classical rhythm was its linguistic character. It imitated the nature
of primitive grammar as imagined by contemporary linguists. Spitzer concludes by
showing how these ideas can enhance our understanding—and hearing—of a piece
by Mozart.
Next, in “Rhythm and Popular Music,” Alison Stone explores how rhythm
functions and affects us in popular music. She considers explicit rhythm as a con-
stant layer of percussion that has no precise pitch. Relative to this layer, the rhythmic
qualities the other layers of sound are heightened, emphasizing beats that fit in or
pull against those emphasized by the percussion. Referring to Michael Jackson’s
“Billie Jean,” Stone discusses how this pronounced rhythmic character of popular
music appeals to our bodies to move in time with the emphases sounded in dif-
ferent layers.
In “Rhythms, Resemblance, and Musical Expressiveness,” Ted Gracyk argues
for the plausibility of entrainment accounts of musical expression in holding that
the ability to hear expressiveness in rhythmic sounds is logically prior to hearing
some musical patterns as expressive gestures. Although Gracyk does not endorse
arousalism as a general account of musical expression, understanding the role of
Introduction 9
rhythm in expressiveness supports a combination of the “resemblance” and “conta-

gion” accounts of musical expressiveness, blending what are often treated as mutu-
ally opposed accounts.
Part Three, “Entrainment and the Social Dimension,” expands on the concept of
entrainment raised in Gracyk’s chapter and discusses rhythm in psychology, neuro-
science, and biology. They aim less to make a particular scientific contribution, than
to assess the nature and viability of scientific approaches to rhythm. Justin London
begins Part Three with “Metric Entrainment and the Problem(s) of Perception,”
discussing the limits and mechanisms of our perceptual faculties for auditory
rhythm. His consideration reveals that the perceptual process is not a linear chain
of information from the external world, but an active interplay between mind and
world. Yet while considering our senses as cross-modal perceptual systems solves
some problems of perception, it creates other, perhaps deeper ones, he argues. In
music, our rhythmic percepts are often non-veridical, as we add accents, beats, and
grouping structure to otherwise undifferentiated stimuli.
Martin Clayton’s “Entrainment and the Social Origin of Musical Rhythm”
discusses the social nature and origin of musical rhythm. The argument draws
on Halbwachs’ idea of rhythm as a social rather than a natural phenomenon, and
Schütz’s critique of Halbwachs in his famous essay “Making Music Together.”
Clayton argues that rhythm in fact emerges spontaneously both in individuals and
(crucially) in interactions between them, and that it is therefore both natural, in the
sense of physiological, and social in origin.
Michael Tenzer’s “How Many Kinds of Rhythm Are There?” offers an ethnomusi-
cological perspective on the indefinite varieties of rhythm, examining the contrasts
between musical and linguistic rhythm, anthropological categories, perception,
and technology. Partitioning the universe of rhythm typologically, Tenzer views the
potential of rhythm along various continua: via comparison with language; in the
development of human culture; in the life of an individual’s experience, perception,
and cognitive prowess; and in the non-human natural world.
Udo will considers the physiological, psychological, and social origins of rhythm
in “Temporal Processing and the Experience of Rhythm: A Neuro-Psychological
Approach.” Reviewing data from Australian Aboriginal music, he argues for dy-
namic neural models that challenge abstract conceptions of rhythm. Will holds that
instrumental rhythms and vocal rhythms in speech and music derive from different
ways of interacting with our environment and are controlled by different temporal
mechanisms. Thus, he argues, instrumental music should be considered in parallel
to vocal music, not as derived from it.
Part Four, “Time and Experience: Subjective and Objective Rhythm,” considers
subjective and objective conceptions of time; phenomenological, process philos-
ophy, and empiricist perspectives; rhythmic duration; and—reprising the main
theme of Part One for this experiential point of view—whether movement is a
necessary criterion for rhythm. In “Complexity and Passage: Experimenting with
Poetic Rhythm,” Christopher Hasty begins by treating rhythm as the shaping of
events and their succession, rather than as a pre-existent order of isochronous divi-
sion. He argues for rhythm as flow, as the fluid, active, and characterful creation of
things or events, rather than of a homogeneous substance (“time”). He relates this
concept to poetry by reading the opening of Keats’s “Hymn to Pan,” analyzing the
continuing “life” of the vocal impulse along the lines and through the word-sounds
taken as “mouth events”—a reading after the manner of M. H. Abrams (2012).
Peter Cheyne defends an unprioritized ontology regarding the subjectivity and
objectivity of rhythm in “Encoded and Embodied Rhythm: An Unprioritized
Ontology,” and thus argues against writers such as Christopher Hasty and Nicholas
Cook, who prioritize the subjectivity of rhythm as flow. Cheyne argues that because
rhythm is perceived through the senses as patterned temporality evoking emo-
tional response, it has both objective and subjective qualities according to Lockean
criteria. He further argues that the intricacy of actual rhythm neither excludes its
description in objective form, nor its subsequent performance by other skilled
performers who are present and listening attentively.
In “Time, Rhythm, Subjectivity: The Aesthetics of Duration,” Max Paddison
argues that rhythm must be considered in relation to time and subjectivity, un-
derstood within a larger concept of “rhythmicized duration” as form. Drawing on
Bachelard’s phenomenology of duration, he argues that aesthetic concepts of tem-
porality, movement, and rhythm in music and the performing arts are subject to
change, development, and displacement, and have functioned normatively and
metaphorically in different historical periods. He concludes that our experience of
rhythm as structured duration is both subjectively experimental and historically
contingent.
Salomé Jacob examines the implications of Husserl’s model of temporal con-
sciousness on the experience of musical rhythm in “Husserl’s Model of Time-
Consciousness, and the Phenomenology of Rhythm.” Husserl’s framework, when
applied to rhythm, suggests that listeners retain the just-past sounds and anticipate
the sounds-to-come in the light of what has been heard. Besides, Husserl’s model
helps to frame a rich embodied phenomenology of rhythm. One’s experience
encompasses the perception of musical rhythm but also a bodily awareness of one’s
own movements, where both aspects share the same temporal structure.
In “Pictorial Experience and the Perception of Rhythm,” Jason Gaiger considers
whether a painting can have a rhythm. Rhythmic structure unfolds in time, but if
rhythm is essentially durational, he asks, how can a static configuration of marks
and lines be rhythmic? Gaiger argues that although viewing a picture takes place in
time, and thus is successive, it cannot be temporally structured in a sufficiently de-
terminate manner to sustain the attentional focus required for the communication
of even simple rhythmic patterns. Graphic art is non-sequential and this has impor-
tant consequences for picture perception.
Víctor Durà-Vilà then engages Gaiger’s essay in “Soundless Rhythm,” to de-
velop a notion of rhythm that is independent of sound and can include all
senses. Durà-Vilà argues against the theoretical proposal that music is required
Introduction 11
to conceptualize rhythm. Moreover, he contends that rhythm in painting can

be experienced in a non-metaphorical way. Finally, he examines some potential
implications of his thesis for incipient art practices involving senses other than
sight and hearing.
Part Five, “Reading Rhythm,” addresses the role of rhythm in reading and thus
focuses on poetry and prose. The stressed–unstressed model of metrical analysis,
and its variants, now seems obsolete as a means of describing the patterns of em-
phasis in poetry. However, although in the twentieth century verse loosened its re-
lationship to meter, these essays show how rhythm remains an essential, though less
easily described, feature of literary language.
Jason Hall presents a genealogy of metrical abstraction in nineteenth-and
twentieth-century literature in “Rhythm, Meter, and the Poetics of Abstraction,”
surveying approaches to metrical abstraction that have shaped the modern met-
rical imagination, taking abstract meter as their starting point. Hall examines the
early twentieth-century return to theories that tried to avoid the complications
introduced by emphasizing voiced particularities of rhythm; these theories resisted
earlier syntheses of meter with music. For the New Critics, at least, the reader is
in “a better position” to offer a rhythmically “meaningful” reading if he or she
“recognizes the meter.”
In “The Not-So-Silent Reading . . . ,” Rebecca Wallbank asks: What does it mean
to say that we appreciate rhythm in literature? By raising this question, she aims,
first, to illuminate the modes of attention to rhythm in literature, and second, to
call for a re-evaluation of certain common assumptions concerning literary aes-
thetic experience and appreciation. She analyzes the impact of different forms of
attention within aesthetic experiences, and through this aims to expose and illumi-
nate the overlooked roles of rhythmic auditory-imagining within our experiences
of literary works.
Will Montgomery shows in “Leaving it Out: Rhythm and Short Form in the
Modernist Poetic Tradition,” how in the modernist era rhythm was no longer a
stable background pattern, but became part of the overall acoustic texture of the
poem—with short-form poetry the most powerful vehicle for rhythmic innova-
tion. Montgomery focuses on the Poundian line of influence, with particular em-
phasis on the writing of the American poet Robert Creeley. Montgomery argues
that brevity and ellipsis are integral to a modernism best approached through the
modernist dictum Dichten = condensare (to poetize is to condense).
Finally, in “Hearing it Right: Rhythm and Reading,” John Holliday addresses
the neglect of sound and rhythm within prose literature, arguing that poetry is not
more rhythmic than prose. He argues that works of prose have rhythm, to which
the pauses, inflections, stresses, and pronunciation of its language all contribute.
As such, prose literature, like poetry, should be considered musical. While poetry is
lineated and prose is not, Holliday argues that this distinction does not result in po-
etry being more rhythmic. He concludes that rhythm in prose literature generally
deserves attention for the different roles it plays.
Works Cited
Abrams, M. H., The Fourth Dimension of a Poem, and Other Essays (New York, 2012).
Aristides Quintilianus, On Music (c.350?), tr. R. P. Winnington-Ingram, in Greek Musical Writings
II: Harmonic and Acoustic Theory, ed. Andrew Barker (Cambridge, 1989).
Aristotle, Poetics (c.335 bc), tr. Malcolm Heath (London, 1996).
Bachelard, Gaston, The Dialectic of Duration, tr. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester, 2000).
Clayton, Martin, Time in Indian Music: Rhythm, Metre and Form in North Indian Rag Performance
(Oxford, 2000).
Cooper, Grosvenor and Leonard B. Meyer, The Rhythmic Structure of Music (Chicago, 1960).
Hasty, Christopher, Meter as Rhythm (Oxford, 1997).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols (1889), tr. Richard Polt (Indianapolis, 1997).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883–92), tr. and ed.
Adrian del Caro, co-ed. Robert B. Pippin (Cambridge, 2006).
Miller, Elaine P., “Harnessing Dionysus: Nietzsche on Rhythm, Time, and Restraint,” Journal of
Nietzsche Studies, 17 (1999), 1–32.
Plato, The Republic (c.380 bc), tr. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve, in Complete Works, ed. John
M. Cooper (Indianapolis, 1997).
Plato, The Laws (c.360 bc), tr. Trevor J. Saunders, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper
(Indianapolis, 1997).
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, “Rhythm” (1765), The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative
Translation Project, tr. Valerie Porcello (Ann Arbor, 2005): http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.
did2222.0000.491.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Dictionnaire de la musique (Paris, 1768).
Schelling, F. J. W., Philosophy of Art (1802–3; published 1859), tr. and ed. Douglas W. Stott
(Minneapolis, 1989).
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Presentation, tr. and ed. Richard E. Aquila (London, 2008).
Scruton, Roger, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford, 1997).
Spitzer, Michael, Metaphor and Musical Thought (Chicago, 2004).
Zuckerkandl, Victor, Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, tr. Willard R. Trask
(Princeton, 1956).
PART I
MOV E ME N T A ND  STASI S
1
Dialogue on Rhythm
Entrainment and the Dynamic Thesis
Andy Hamilton, David Macarthur, Roger Squires, Matthew Tugby,

and Rachael Wiseman (compiled and edited by Andy Hamilton)
The advantages of the dialogue form—in particular, the advantage of openness—

have been neglected in post-eighteenth-century philosophy. Unlike the currently
dominant journal article form, the present dialogue neither arrives at, nor seeks
to impose, a definite conclusion. Debate is left open. Knowledge in philosophy is
dialogical. As love of wisdom, philosophy pursues truth via challenging dialogue,
knowing that it needs opposing views to approach its aim. That aim is to arrive at
truth, and the most fruitful debate can help one get there.
In Plato’s Socratic dialogues, Socrates is regarded as the bearer (or at least a
“midwife”) of truth. We can infer that Plato endorses—though perhaps does not
defend—the viewpoint voiced by Socrates. In these earlier dialogues his main pos-
itive contribution is the Socratic elenchus, a method of eliminating incoherent
beliefs from the set that his interlocutor holds. It is this method, rather than partic-
ular philosophical claims, that Plato endorses through Socrates. By the time of the
Republic, however, Socrates is more like Plato’s mouthpiece, and his view seems to
prevail.
With Hume, the dialogue form is more open. He used it to evade religious cen-
sorship, leaving it unclear whose view the author was advocating—though in the
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion it is clear that one character, Demea the deist,
does not represent Hume. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the dialogue
form is more rare—Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues and Beckett’s more imaginative
Dialogues with Georges Duthuit are two very different philosophical dialogues on
artistic questions.
This “Dialogue on Rhythm” is based on contributions from Andy Hamilton,
David Macarthur, Roger Squires, Matthew Tugby, and Rachael Wiseman. The
“Dialogue” is neither a creation by a single author—as the classic dialogues by Plato,
Berkeley, and Hume were—nor verbatim transcription of actual conversation. Text
was passed back and forth, and the final result agreed. Here, no one view prevails,
though characters modify their views in the light of criticism. Debate is left open,
even to the extent that the alternative positions are not entirely clear—but progress
in clarifying them has been made.
Andy Hamilton
Dramatis Personae
skepticus = David Macarthur
dynamicus = Andy Hamilton
metaphysicus = Matthew Tugby
analyticus = Roger Squires
vitalia = Rachael Wiseman
Summary
This dialogue debates the common philosophical assumption that nothing relevant
in the music moves literally, that is, spatially—physical movements of performers,
or air molecules, are not relevant. It addresses Andy Hamilton’s critique of this
assumption, and his dynamic conception of rhythm as order-in-movement or
order-in-movement-in-sound, defended in his article “Rhythm and Stasis.” On
that account, rhythm is characterized as “[a primitive] order within human bodily
movement or movement-in-sound,” and it is suggested that this order “involves a
non-spatial yet literal sense of movement.”1 This dynamic account opposes both
Budd’s and Simons’ static accounts in terms of order-in-time, and also Scruton’s
metaphorical conception of sonic rhythm as movement in space.2
While Macarthur (Skepticus) and perhaps Tugby (Metaphysicus) oppose or re-
sist it, the other participants support some kind of dynamic conception. Macarthur
rejects the dynamic–static distinction as Hamilton (Dynamicus) presents it, while
Tugby offers a metaphysical account of non-spatial movement in terms of quality-
space—a view of which both Macarthur and Hamilton are skeptical. Macarthur
criticizes Hamilton’s original claim that music moves in a literal but non-spatial
sense; Hamilton concedes the point, but responds that something relevant does
move literally: musicians and audience share a rhythmic, dance-like response.
Drawing on aspects of Macarthur’s account, and discussion by Squires (Analyticus),
he argues that this dance-like response is a participatory manifestation of musical
understanding; there is an internal relation between music and movement, such
that rhythm constitutes an order of movement. As Ezra Pound said, “music begins
1 Hamilton “Rhythm and Stasis,” 29, 40.

2 Budd “Musical Movement,” 209–23; Simons, “Ontology of Rhythm”; Scruton, Aesthetics of Music.
Dialogue on Rhythm 17
to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance . . . poetry begins to atrophy when
it gets too far from music.”3 Music, dance, and poetry originated as an integrated
practice. Macarthur insists that the dynamic account rests on an implausible view
of literal movement in music; Hamilton responds that the non-movement assump-
tion rests on sonicism—the view that music is a strictly sonic art, that does not
essentially involve bodily and visual experience.4 On his view, rhythm as order-in-
movement does not require an implausible notion of non-spatial literal movement.
Squires and Wiseman (Vitalia) develop the movement criterion, arguing that it
should be expressed as a capacity, not a disposition.
1. Projection, rhythm, and proto-rhythm
(palace green, durham)
skepticus: Good morning, Dynamicus! I hope you are enjoying the fine weather
today. What brings you to Palace Green so early this spring morning? Though
surely there is no pleasanter time of day, or more delightful season of the year.
dynamicus: In fact, my thoughts were taken up with the philosophical problem
we discussed recently, and I found it hard to sleep. I decided to take some early
morning exercise—perhaps its rhythmic nature prompted further ideas.
skep: Yes, these issues are absorbing. I find myself in sympathy with your philo-
sophical humanist approach, that treats music both as a sounding, vibrating
phenomenon, of changing patterns of intentionally produced sound in time,
and a performing art or entertainment. Like you, I want to reject both an ab-
stract, Platonic conception, and also the sub-personal standpoint of neuro-
philosophy. I want to insist, with you, that rhythm is essentially a felt person-level
phenomenon.
dy: Yes, a humanistic approach has important implications for the understanding of
rhythm. So you agree with my view that rhythm is intentional, while creatures or
artifacts that do not have or express intentions can produce only proto-rhythms?
skep: Not entirely, Dynamicus. My view is that while a rhythm might be experi-
enced as if it were intentional and meaningful, it may, in fact, be either non-
intentional or intentional, meaningful or meaningless. Musical rhythm is
intentional and apparently meaningful. But it seems obvious to me that there
are non-intentional meaningless rhythms, such as a train running on a track,
a heartbeat, or the drip of a leaky tap. We might call these natural rhythms and
distinguish them from human rhythms like music and dance, without denying
that making rhythms is natural to us.
3 Pound, ABC of Reading, 14.

4 This issue arises with other contributions in this volume, such as Gaiger and Durà-Vilà.
But let me turn to your argument that in the case of music or poetry, rhythm is
imparted by performers, and “imaginatively projected” by listeners.5 Music, po-
etry, dance and human bodily movement are paradigms of rhythm, you say, un-
derstood as the “imposition of accents on sequences of sounds or movements,
creating non-periodic phenomena usually within a periodic repetitive (met-
rical) framework.”6 And you stress that rhythm is humanly-produced—a ge-
netic claim about a sound’s causal origins that, I take it, may not be evident to a
listener.
dy: I would qualify what you are saying, Skepticus. I am not claiming that all
rhythms are humanly-produced. A drum machine produces rhythms, and these
are only indirectly humanly-produced—if they’re sampled, or given that the
machine itself is humanly-produced. I meant rather that human producers of
rhythm, and the human practices of music, poetry, and dance in which rhythm
is embedded, draw on and incorporate natural sounds, and later mechanical
and electronic sounds—often regarding these sounds as in themselves proto-
rhythmic, or rhythmic.
skep: I see. However, I take your more fundamental point to be that rhythm, in
its primary manifestations, is an intentional phenomenon. And as you say, the
rhythms associated with music, dance, and poetry constitute “an intentional
order.”7 An immediate emendation is to limit the realm of rhythm to intentional
bodily movement rather than bodily movement in general.
dy: That might be acceptable, Skepticus.
skep: Let us say that, on your view, rhythm is primarily an intentional phenom-
enon, whose expression we can and often do perceive in various human activi-
ties. It is thus an aspect of the human world—a claim that seems to fit well with
your humanist inclinations. Rhythms produced by inanimate things, such as a
dripping tap, you call “proto-rhythms” and treat them as secondary phenomena.
dy: Yes, that is my view.
skep: Now, turning to the question of projection, you seem to want to distinguish
perceiving intentional or “true” rhythm, from projecting “proto-rhythm,” the
latter being a phenomenon of natural or non-intentional orders of stressed and
unstressed accents in time, such as a heartbeat, waves on the shore, or a horse’s
gallop. Indeed sometimes you speak of rhythms themselves as both being
perceived and projected.
dy: “Pulse” would be an alternative term, to capture what you are calling “stressed
and unstressed accents.”
skep: But what we must remember is that the data for philosophizing here involve
a range of experiences of rhythm in both human and natural phenomena. So
5 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 29: “A humanistic account treats rhythm as an order distinctive of human
movement or movement-in-sound, an order imaginatively projected onto processes that do not literally
possess it.”
6 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 38, 26.
7 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 30.
I do not find the distinction between rhythm and proto-rhythm helpful. Perhaps
it has this to be said for it: the intentional case structures both non-intentional
and intentional rhythm at the level of phenomenology. Rhythm, however it is
produced, can often seem intentional and meaningful, even where it is not. But
for present purposes, let us follow your restricting the term “rhythm” to human-
produced phenomena. We can therefore ask, is “projection” needed to explain
our experience of rhythm?
dy: You believe it is not?
skep: Indeed. Your account appeals to projection principally to explain how we
hear rhythm in “proto-rhythmic” phenomena—heartbeats, waves, trains. You
argued that in these non-intentional, naturally recurring patterns of stressed
and unstressed sound, we cannot avoid projecting rhythm—as I recall, citing La
Monte Young’s composition “ ‘X’ for Henry Flint” (1960), where the performer
has the impossible task of producing an absolutely uninflected pulse without
meter. You said that this piece shows both how the performer cannot help
creating rhythm, and how the listener cannot avoid projecting it.
dy: Yes, that is a good summary.
skep: Well, there is a problem I believe, with the idea that rhythm is “projected.”
Projection presupposes a something that one projects onto. This can happen liter-
ally: images are projected onto a screen from a film-reel, or sounds are projected
into a space from a source; or figuratively: as when one’s joy is projected onto
the world at large. In the case of perceived rhythm—something experienced as
a feature of bodily movement or sound—projection implies one has access to
some subjective state of mind whose “projection” can plausibly account for our
experience of it as “in” the movement or sound. But what is this inner something
that we experience as outer?
dy: I am not sure there has to be an “inner” something—but pray continue.
skep: There does if the notion of projection is to make any sense. Perhaps the idea is
that rhythm is like color in this respect. Color is often thought by philosophers
to be a mental projection onto an essentially colorless world. But I reject the
coherence of this way of thinking. We have no genuine explanation of color in
projective terms insofar as we have no coherent idea of how color could be a
feature of the inner realm from whence it is supposedly projected. The failure
of projectivism here—one rarely noticed in projectivist discussions of color in
modern philosophy—is attributable to our having no coherent definition of
what we might call, pleonastically, a “color sensation.”
dy: This is very interesting, my dear Skepticus. However, you seem to assume that
my view is like Schütz’s well-known position. He argues that communication
rests on a “mutual tuning-in relationship” in which individuals come to share
their experience of “inner time.”8 In his view, rhythmic coordination is prior
to any collective agreement. This is not my view. The “inner” in “inner time” is
8 Schütz, On Phenomenology, 212.
redundant. I favor instead Clayton’s view of rhythm emerging spontaneously in

individuals and in interactions between them, and so being both natural (phys-
iological) and social in origin.9 This is the currently popular concept of entrain-
ment, discussed by music psychologists in this volume, which I think captures
the idea that rhythm is essentially a felt phenomenon.10 I differ from Clayton
and colleagues, however, in insisting that entrainment is an elucidation, not a
scientific explanation.
skep: Pray enlighten us, Dynamicus.
dy: I agree with the psychologists that entrainment is essential to music, and that
one responds to rhythm by getting in sync. So rhythm is essentially social. What
I object to is their view that natural processes themselves entrain. I also object to
their apparent denial that a human being can initiate rhythm, on the grounds—
they say—that one always entrains to something inner. Entrainment is no more
fundamental than rhythm itself.11
skep: Be that as it may, I still maintain that projection is an otiose explanation of
genuine rhythm and an unnecessary explanation of proto-rhythm. Suppose,
Dynamicus, we follow you and say that the primary experience of rhythm is
as intentional temporal movement—leaving aside for now the question of
what distinguishes mere temporal ordering from rhythmic movement. On
the view under discussion, rhythm is constituted, not merely caused, by inten-
tional stresses imposed on sequences of sound. It is a genuine feature, a percep-
tible order or pattern that characterizes a range of human bodily movements
and sounds—one that allows for ignorance, error, and discernment. But as you
argued concerning “ ‘X’ for Henry Flint,” the explanation of our experience of
rhythm is over-determined: the performer “cannot help imposing rhythm
and . . . the listener cannot avoid projecting it.”12 Is it not redundant to say that
one apprehends the rhythm created and imposed by the performer, and that one
also projects it?
dy: You have correctly characterized my view, Skepticus, though I’m not sure there
is over-determination.
skep: Surely all we need to say is that the performer cannot help imposing a rhythm,
an (apparently) intentional ordering, on the basic pulse for which they are re-
sponsible. We can translate your infelicitous claim that we cannot avoid projec-
tion of rhythm onto pulse, as the inevitability of experiencing rhythm in a pulse
even when there was no intention of producing a rhythm.
dy: I am not entirely persuaded, Skepticus. I would say that in the case of proto-
rhythm, there is projection. By “projection,” I mean just that rhythm is not
entirely an intrinsic feature of the sounds, but also of how they are heard.
However, rather than using the metaphor of projection, I would be happy to
9 Clayton, “Entrainment.”
10 Clayton, “Entrainment”; London “Metric Entrainment.”
11 Further discussed at Section 4.

talk of the listener interpreting or hearing-as—a metaphor that does seem

more appropriate in the case of rhythmic or metrical ambiguity, where there
is genuine rather than proto-rhythm. An excellent example is Debussy’s “Des
pas sur la neige” from his Preludes.13 I understand hearing-as on the model of
Wittgenstein’s seeing-as, and Wollheim’s seeing-in.14 But can I propose an ad-
journment of our discussion to a nearby café?
2. The movement in music
(bean social café, durham)
skep: To return to our topic, Dynamicus. I have been pondering your characteri-
zation of rhythm as “order within human bodily movement or movement-in-
sound.” You went on to claim that “there is a primitive order underlying” these,
“an order that involves a non-spatial yet literal sense of movement.”15
dy: Yes, that is correct.
skep: Well, I must say that this view seems highly problematic. Your aspiration to
provide an overarching account of rhythm applicable both to a certain kind of
bodily movement—such as dance—and a certain kind of sound, for instance
African drum music, is ambitious. But the problem arises with your account
of movement itself. As we know from the OED, one definition of “movement”
is that it is “an act of changing physical location or position or of having this
changed.” So your proposal seems to equivocate by combining a literal and a
figurative use of the term “movement”—literal regarding bodily movement, and
figurative regarding sound. Whilst sound does move through space at a certain
rate, that is not the relevant phenomenon here. Rather, you seem to advocate the
more radical and paradoxical idea that bodily rhythm and sound rhythm both
manifest “a non-spatial yet literal sense of movement.” But how could this be?
dy: Slow down Skepticus, you are losing me! You find my account incoherent?
skep: Yes. Movement is a spatial notion, so to speak of a “non-spatial movement” is
to use movement as a metaphor for a non-spatial phenomenon. In appealing to
movement literally in this context, you hallucinate a new sense. The only avail-
able options are a literal (hence spatial) use of the term, or a figurative use of the
term which may (but need not) be applied to non-spatial phenomena. Of course
you can give “movement” a new sense, but this must be a reasonable extension
from one of its existing senses.
13 Discussed in Cooper and Meyer, Rhythmic Structure of Music,  171–4.

14 See Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, Ch. 4, sec. 5.
15 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 29, 40. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 292 refers to movement in a
more or less Kantian space more fundamental than, and comprehensive of, the space of geometry and that of
physical objects.
To speak of the rhythm of a line drawing, for example, is to use the figure of
movement to describe something spatial and static, according to which one’s ex-
perience of the (fixed) line imaginatively engages with an idea of the movement
required to create (or retrace) it. And to experience the rhythm of a philosopher’s
thought, is to use the metaphor of movement to describe the changes and de-
velopment of a connected series of thoughts, where the comparison is with the
way one travels to a destination passing through various places on the way. Here
we have a metaphorical appeal to movement to describe a non-spatial phenom-
enon, viz. thought.
dy: Your objection is certainly a strong one, Skepticus.
skep: I will develop it further, Dynamicus. Your two suggested models of “non-
spatial movement” are based on confusions. Firstly, you say that the term “rapid”
means both “happening in a short time” and “happening at a fast pace” (OED),
and you then appeal to the first of these as an example of non-spatial movement.
But “rapid” in this sense is a purely temporal notion and not a form of move-
ment at all. We might conjecture that it was, perhaps, once a spatial metaphor—
based on the comparison with moving between or past various places in a short
time—that has ossified into a literal purely temporal (non-spatial) use with no
connection to movement.
dy: I see.
skep: Second, you suppose that “non-travelling movement around a point” is not
spatial because it doesn’t involve movement to a new location.16 But movement
need only be relative, not absolute, change in location. Consequently, it does not
require “travel” in your sense. Rotations around a point, as well as oscillations
to and from a point, both count as spatial changes in location, and hence as
movements.
As Scruton and others have noted, experiencing rhythm in sound is not an
experience of change of location. It is a non-spatial experience of an order of
changes in time that we can describe metaphorically, as in the case of the line
drawing, in terms of the movement required to create (or recreate) it; or perhaps
in terms of a comparison with the rhythm of various forms of ordered move-
ment. Scruton’s account of musical rhythm in terms of a metaphorical appeal to
movement survives your assault upon it.
dy: These are indeed serious objections, Skepticus. Perhaps our friend
Metaphysicus, who I see just arriving, will help me respond. Good morning,
Metaphysicus, how are you? What brings you here on this fine day?
metaphysicus: Good morning to you both. I felt the need to escape the oppressive
atmosphere of my study for some air to refresh my thoughts.
skep: Very understandable, Metaphysicus. We are engaged in a discussion on
rhythm, with which I believe you are familiar. Dynamicus has put forward some
puzzling claims that I am questioning. In particular, I believe that movement is

essentially a spatial notion, and so his idea of non-spatial movement, in music

and other rhythmic phenomena, must be metaphorical. Yet he denies this,
suggesting that rhythm is a literal non-spatial movement.
meta: Evidently you are unhappy with Dynamicus’ strongly dynamic model of
rhythm, Skepticus. Let’s backtrack a little, to recall the views of Boghossian
and Budd. According to their static conception, talk of movement in rela-
tion to rhythm is both metaphorical and dispensable, while Dynamicus’
view is closer to Scruton’s dynamic view.17 But controversially, while Scruton
regards talk of movement in music as purely metaphorical though essential,
Dynamicus suggests that music literally moves. Given that music clearly does
not move in the ordinary spatial sense, the upshot is a notion of real but non-
spatial movement—a much more radical form of dynamism than Scruton’s. For
Scruton, rhythm in music is dynamic merely insofar as it necessarily involves
the metaphorical projection of movement by the listener, the source of which
is the listener’s bodily movement. But for Dynamicus, music moves in a literal
(metaphysical) rather than figurative (metaphorical) sense.18
dy: That seems a fair summary of one of my proposals.
meta: In defense of Dynamicus, there is a way of responding to the worry about
incoherence, which involves holding that movement is spatial, but insisting that
the notion of space is broader than it may at first seem. This view concedes that
it is a conceptual truth that movement must take place in a space. But according
to the strategy I will explore, there are two different metaphysical notions of
space. The first is what I call geographical space, the ordinary three-dimensional
physical space we are all familiar with. The second and less familiar notion is
what we may call quality space—the kind of space represented by, say, the color
gamut chart. Of course, it is natural to assume that there is only a “color space”
in a metaphorical sense. However, there is a position in metaphysics that takes
a realist stance toward various quality spaces, as a means of understanding and
analyzing properties.
skep: These are unfamiliar notions to me, Metaphysicus—can you please explain?
Doesn’t the color spectrum occur in physical space?
meta: As I say, when Dynamicus suggests that ordered movement-in-sound is
literal but non-spatial, I take him to mean that it does not involve movement
in the ordinary geographical sense. But this leaves open the possibility that
movement-in-sound is movement in quality space, or some other real, meta-
physically defined space.
A realist about qualitative properties, such as sound, can endorse this
“quality space” view. So, Skepticus, you are wrong to dismiss a literalist view of
17 Boghossian, “Music in the Sound”; Budd, “Musical Movement”; Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm.”
18 Similarly, Zuckerkandl argues that music moves in a metaphysical, Kantian sense of space, even though
nothing relevant in the music physically or geometrically moves.
rhythmical movement simply on the grounds that it involves a metaphysically

incoherent notion of movement.
dy: These are interesting suggestions, Metaphysicus.
meta: My proposal agrees that it is an analytic truth that movement takes place
in space, but holds that as well as geographical space, there is also quality
space, which contains the dimensions of determination along which quali-
tative properties lie. According to this proposal quality space is just as real as
geographical space—that is, talk of quality space is not merely metaphorical.
Geographical space is familiar to anyone with ordinary perceptual faculties;
quality space is revealed only through metaphysical and scientific reflection. But
if there are good reasons for positing quality space, and if sounds are qualitative,
as seems plausible, then rhythm could involve distinctive kinds of literal move-
ment in quality space.
dy: This is an intriguing view, Metaphysicus, although Peter Cheyne comments that
rather than only people trained in metaphysical or scientific reflection, aural
quality space is surely revealed to anyone who can hear movement in music.
Such hearers might not be able to explain aural quality space articulately, but it is
nonetheless revealed to them.
skep: Dynamicus, I fear that you are being seduced by metaphysical speculation!
dy: My dear Skepticus, it seems that you belong with those anti-metaphysicians
who urge us to “just say no”—as President Reagan did in the case of drugs—
when asked to engage in metaphysical debate.
skep: That is a parody of my position, Dynamicus, as you well know! I say that
it is wise to adopt a skeptical attitude to the metaphysician’s claims to explain
appearances in terms of some supposedly fixed, “fundamental” or “absolute” no-
tion of “reality”—where the appearance–reality distinction invoked has nothing
to do with the everyday grammar of these terms. In the present case I am skep-
tical that Metaphysicus has provided a new sense of “movement” with regard to
quality space.
dy: Pray continue, my good Metaphysicus.
meta: Let me illustrate quality space by means of color properties. Color can be
represented as a 3D space with dimensions of hue, saturation, and brightness.
Colors can then be considered regions in this quality space, with determinate
colors being proper sub-regions of the determinable colors they fall under—so
that, for instance, scarlet would be a proper sub-region of the redness region.
And the most determinate specification of a color will correspond to a single
point on 3D color space. Note that color and sound cases are plausibly isomor-
phic, since sounds are also specified across three dimensions—pitch, timbre,
and loudness.
dy: Yes, I can see structural similarities between sound and color. But where does
movement enter the picture?
meta: Well, if movement must take place within a space, and if quality space is as
real as any other space, there may be literal yet non-geographical movement—as
Dynamicus posits in the case of rhythm. For quality-space theorists, such a

notion allows us to analyze qualitative change. Not only do things exemplify
qualitative properties, they also change them. Indeed, music itself can be un-
derstood as an artistically created sequence of changes of sound over time, what
Dynamicus calls “an art of temporal process.”19 Thus some realists about quality
space appeal to the notion qualitative movement.20
dy: This is a proposal I must ponder, Metaphysicus. But what do you make of the
temporal model of rhythmic movement, which I thought quite promising?
meta: This is meant to be a non-spatial model that falls naturally out of the view of
music as an “art of temporal process.” Recall your example of a rapid sequence
of gunshots. Since the succession in this case is purely temporal, and given that
the notion of rapidity has connotations with motion, you suggested this may be
a case of literal but non-spatial movement.
dy: That is correct.
meta: Now, I would say that in one sense, movement uncontroversially must have
a temporal dimension. For even in cases of ordinary spatial movement, as when
a physical body changes from occupying one physical location to another, such
movement necessarily takes time. However, whether there can be a purely tem-
poral notion of movement is much more controversial.
To resolve these disputes, we need principled metaphysical reasons for thinking
there can be non-spatial, or what I call non-geographical, movement—and
the quality- space proposal provides them. These reasons involve general
considerations about the nature of qualitative properties. Rhythm can then be
seen as one among several cases of qualitative movement, rather than a unique
case of it—though still a distinctive form, through the humanistic and inten-
tional aspects of Dynamicus’ theory. The quality-space strategy places this
theory on firmer metaphysical ground.
skep: I doubt that, my dear Metaphysicus.
dy: Enough of your sarcasm, Skepticus! My feeling about Metaphysicus’s proposal
is that movement in quality space needs to be close enough to ordinary spatial
movement to express how close music is to that. But it challenges me to think
more carefully about the point of insisting that music literally moves—that, for
instance, it makes people want to move (in dance, say). I need to ponder further
in what sense it moves—and what the “it” is that does not literally move. It seems
to me that proponents of this view assume that music is exclusively a sonic art,
neglecting bodily and visual dimensions.
meta: Indeed. But whatever view one takes on these questions, there are many in-
dependent theoretical reasons for favoring my view, which is increasingly pop-
ular among realists about properties. For Funkhouser, quality space theory

20 Thus Cowling, “Instantiation as Location,” 673, n. 16, advocates “locationism,” treating change as motion
through quality-space; he assumes realism about quality space, so the “motion” he speaks of is understood
literally. See also Mumford and Anjum, Causes from Powers, 23.
can be applied to all properties, including geometrical, causal, and functional

properties; it allows us to analyze how things fall under kinds, and also the dis-
tinction between determinable properties such as redness, and determinate
properties such as being scarlet.21 Quality space is used to analyze property in-
stantiation as a species of occupation, or the operation of causal powers.22
dy: Skepticus looks unconvinced.
meta: It is not just realist metaphysicians who should appreciate my arguments.
In natural science, abstract notions of space are used to represent the states of
systems such as configuration or phase spaces in physics. Like quality space,
such spaces are not spatial in the ordinary sense, since they typically have many
more than three dimensions. But some scientists and philosophers of science
regard such spaces as more than representational mathematical tools that corre-
spond to nothing in reality. The notion of non-geographical space should not be
dismissed too quickly.
dy: Thank you, Metaphysicus, for raising these important issues, worthy of further
investigation.
meta: My good wishes for your project, Dynamicus. I have to leave now for a work-
shop. So I wish you good-day, colleagues, and hope to see you soon.
3. Meaningful order
(later that day, palace green, durham)
skep: Dynamicus—when we consider the proposal of Metaphysicus, I hold that

“space” in “quality space” is being used in a metaphorical sense.23 A quality
space of colors, smells, tastes and so on is an abstract mathematical represen-
tation of qualities, modeled by a spatial array of qualities ordered along var-
ious dimensions by their similarities and differences, with degree of proximity
representing degree of similarity.
dy: I am inclined to agree, Skepticus. I appreciate the current popularity of realist
metaphysics, but that is not our path, I think.
skep: Metaphysicus’ proposal does not capture what you call “literal non-spatial
movement,” I feel. There is no movement in an abstract quality space unless
movement is being used figuratively to refer to changes in qualities in time.
However, you stressed the familiar sense of movement when you linked the hu-
manistic account of rhythm to “an order distinctive of human movement.” And
you argued that one should reject, as a “static” conception, the idea of rhythm
21 Funkhouser, Logical Structure, 25.
22 Cowling, “Instantiation as Location”; Mumford and Anjum, Causes from Powers.
23 See Nussbaum, “Musical Perception.”

as a mere pattern of different sound qualities that change in time: what you call
“simply order [of qualities]-in-time.”24
dy: Indeed, Skepticus.
skep: It is worth pausing to observe that the notion of changes of qualities in time
surely deserves the label “dynamic” no less than a phenomenon that (literally)
moves. The term “dynamic” need not ordinarily imply movement even if move-
ment can be properly be described as dynamic. For this reason I reject the static–
dynamic distinction as you are using it, Dynamicus. If musical rhythm is, as
I think, a pattern of changes of qualities in time, then it is dynamic in a perfectly
ordinary sense, without being a form of movement. Furthermore, your descrip-
tion of my conception of rhythm as “static” seems to me to imply that you take a
block-universe conception of time and deny that time involves genuine change.
The question is, ultimately, about one’s view of time.
dy: I would not want to commit myself here, Skepticus. But I do want to maintain
an ordinary sense of “dynamic” according to which it refers to movement and
not just change. That is the sense in which I have always used it.
skep: I see. But you agree that Metaphysicus’ proposal assumes a metaphysical
conception of movement at odds with your humanist conception of rhythm
embedded in human behavior and practices?
dy: Indeed. The proposal is ingenious, but I would regard its non-humanistic con-
ception as static, involving merely order-in-time.
skep: In my view, this speculative metaphysics is not sufficiently sensitive to the
human situation—to reiterate, realist metaphysics should be supplanted by the
enterprise of describing the conceptual landscape that we actually inhabit.
Leaving aside the static–dynamic issue, I want to argue that rhythm is experi-
enced as meaningful—intentional or purposive, whether it is or not—and that
it is part of the phenomenology of rhythm that it seems meaningful or humanly
significant.
One might call this an “as-if intentional” or “phenomenologically inten-
tional” account which we can deepen by exploring the notion of meaningful-
ness in this context. Some intentional phenomena are communicative, such as
speech or art, and some not—compare somebody walking down the street, in an
ordinary unreflective way, with the walk of a flaneur, trying to attract people’s at-
tention. Central cases of humanly-produced rhythm are not merely intentional
movements; they are intentionally communicative movements— where the
claim of communication is distinguished from that of empirical support, that
is, whether the phenomena in question can be considered a reliable symptom or
good evidence for various further claims. Just as human gestures intentionally
but wordlessly communicate gestural meanings so, too, most human rhythms—
excepting language and song— intentionally but wordlessly communicate
rhythmic meanings in bodily movements and sounds.
24 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 26, 29.

dy: This picture seems persuasive, Skepticus.

skep: The non-intentional rhythm of a moving train or windscreen wipers cannot
be said to communicate any meaning, but can be heard as if they did. This is
the main motivation for my saying that such phenomena are cases of rhythm,
since what is being apparently experienced is a meaningful (hence intentional)
order in time. We have a natural tendency to find meaning in a rhythmic order,
just as we tend to find fear in a fly struggling in a spider’s web, or awareness of
sunlight in a plant that turns towards it. Animistic beliefs and rituals in human
societies treat natural phenomena such as storms, volcanic eruptions, and the
cycles of the stars and moon as bearers of meaning. Of course in all these cases
I am talking about apparent meaningfulness, something consistent with mean-
inglessness non-intentional phenomena.
dy: I find much of this argument convincing, Skepticus.
skep: Understanding rhythm as communicative is a fruitful way of challenging
Malcolm Budd’s account, which denies that rhythm involves contact with
intentions or meanings. Since your account of rhythm as temporal order-in-
movement faces difficulties in sustaining the claim that the movement in ques-
tion is both literal and non-spatial, perhaps the appeal to movement is not the
right ground for criticism of Budd.25 I agree with him that rhythm is an order
of changes in time and not a form of movement—though movement through
space can provide an analogy for this order-in-time, which is related to the fact
that we can measure time by movements in space, such as the moving hands of
a clock.
dy: I do regard rhythm as order-in-movement, as we shall see. But pray continue
with your account of meaningfulness in rhythm, Skepticus.
skep: We must contrast two kinds of temporal ordering, one where the elements
merely follow one another in time—as on Budd’s account—and one where they
follow from one another, and so can be read as meaning-giving structures, as
developments or variations or resolutions. The first conception is of a bare order
of sounds in time; the second is of a meaningful (or apparently meaningful)
order of sounds in time. The vital distinction is not between static and dynamic,
but between meaningless and meaningful.
dy: Well, I think we disagree here.
skep: Consider Wittgenstein’s remark: “Understanding a sentence is much more
akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think.”26 For him, a mu-
sical theme has an apparent meaning or significance, and so there is such a
thing as an understanding of what music is in terms of it. We speak of a piece of
music as having an opening, making various statements, restatements, paren-
thetical comments, and perhaps a recapitulation before coming to a conclusion.
25 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 37: “movement is the most fundamental conceptualization of music.”
26 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §527.

Understanding here is like understanding a sentence—it involves a meaningful

development of notes, akin to a meaningful development of thoughts.
dy: I am very sympathetic to this idea, Skepticus—as shown by my characterization
of music as “thinking in sound.”27
skep: I am glad to hear it, Dynamicus. Logicians regard thought as non-temporal,
abstracting from time and psychology to focus on relations of implication—the
structural and conditional question of whether truth is transmitted from prem-
ises to conclusion. But if “thinking” means “reasoned change in view,” it must be
time-bound and embedded in psychology.28 Understanding a sentence and un-
derstanding a musical theme, then, both depend on understanding the rhythms
of thought that they express; both are governed by a sense of necessity, a “logic.”
Scruton talks of a “virtual causality that governs musical movement . . . one note
in a melody is heard to bring its successor into being.”29 But rather than invoking
the concept of causation, I suggest, the relation between notes or tones is better
understood as a virtual necessity, the normativity of meaning, of what logically
must follow from what.
dy: These are very insightful and persuasive arguments, Skepticus—though I think
that by “virtual causality,” Scruton offers a helpful synonym for “necessity.”
I agree with you that humanly-produced rhythm is an intentional, communi-
cative, meaningful activity, and that there is a logic to its expression in music,
dance, and poetry. However, I think that these considerations lend support to
my view concerning music and movement.
I am indebted for this line of thought to my old teacher Analyticus, whom I see
striding towards us. Good day, Analyticus!
analyticus: Good day, Dynamicus and Skepticus! What is your topic today?
dy: Rhythm of course! We are discussing how people respond to music, as Scruton
stresses, and are not just caused to move by it. “Response” in such cases has a
logical relation to “call,” as in “call and response”—not the purely causal sense
of scientific psychology. I was agreeing with Skepticus’ view that a rhythm is
meaningful.
ana: Yes, that seems plausible, Dynamicus. Grasping a rhythm involves repeating
and developing it in different melodies or harmonies, and recognizing it in dif-
ferent contexts—a matter of comprehension, not just perception. Rhythm is
something one grasps—it involves cognitive achievement. And one criterion
of having grasped it, is moving rhythmically. Such movements are controlled
responses, not (mere) effects, though they involve a pre-cognitive capacity of the
body-subject.
dy: This is a promising suggestion, Analyticus—though some melodies of the
most banal commodified pop music seem too simple to require “grasping.” At a
27 Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, Introduction and Ch. 4.
28 Harman, Change in View.
29 Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 229.

certain time of year in Britain, one cannot escape Slade’s pitiful anthem “Merry
Xmas Everybody,” with its shockingly bad note-choice—if indeed one can call
that a melody.
skep: Perhaps we should avoid your elitist views on popular culture, Dynamicus.
dy: Indeed. The humanist claim is that we would not call various sequences rhythms
if people did not react to them in certain typical ways.
ana: Yes—typical ways include continuing or repeating certain sequences or re-
lated elements of the sequence, by drumming, singing, or whistling; moving
bodily, in time with the sequence, by dancing, or tapping fingers or feet; and
noting and demonstrating changes or gaps in the repeated segments of the se-
quence. So I sympathize with your humanist insight, Dynamicus. Identified nat-
uralistically, the sound sequence would be the same whether we responded to it
or not. But if we did not in general respond to it in the ways suggested, it would
not be a rhythm.30
skep: I would say not that our response constitutes it as the rhythm it is, but that
our response can demonstrate whether we understand the rhythm or not,
Analyticus—at least for intentional or meaningful rhythm.
dy: You and I agree that “rhythm” is not a natural kind term, Skepticus—but from
this fact, I conclude that being a rhythm and being called a rhythm amount to the
same thing. However, we cannot pursue that deep issue here.31 Setting it aside,
it seems to me that Analyticus’ general position is correct. Matching the rhythm
of a drum beat is creative in at least a minimal sense, and, more minimally, so is
hearing it as a rhythm, as Skepticus stresses. On my account, the paradigm cases
of rhythm are human productions, conditioned by natural rhythms. My point is
that anyone familiar with music, dance, and poetry is able to initiate rhythms.
Music-making is a social phenomenon.
skep: I think here you are confusing what rhythms consist in, with what it is to un-
derstand them when they are intentional. Not all rhythms are intentional. The
rhythm of a train on its tracks is non-intentional, even if we naturally respond
to it as an intentional order. There is an apparent meaningfulness, akin to seeing
a crab’s tracks in the sand that look like a word. Being mere marks there is no
word; but we naturally respond as if there is.
But let us return to the original question of the relation of rhythm and move-
ment. Again I want to press you—how do you address my objection that talk of
movement in music must be metaphorical and not literal, as Scruton says?
dy: Recall Scruton’s argument that “The musical phenomena that we group to-
gether under the rubric of rhythm have their counterparts in other areas of
human activity”—speech, dance, physical labour.32 Dance, poetry, and music
are conceptually interdependent in that rhythm is essential to each; none can
30 Anscombe, “Linguistic Idealism”; Hamilton, “Rhythm and Movement.”
31 Anscombe, “Linguistic Idealism”; Hamilton, “Rhythm and Movement.”
32 Scruton, Understanding Music, 61.

be understood independently of rhythm. Hearing musical rhythm does not

only involve experiencing music as behaving like a human body; it also involves
experiencing the human body, the person, as behaving, moving, musically.
skep: What does that mean? How is a temporal phenomenon (music) like a spatial
phenomenon (bodily movement) except in an analogical or metaphorical sense?
dy: Skepticus, isn’t it begging the question to assume that music is a temporal and
not spatial phenomenon? As a performing art, it has many spatial dimensions.
I would characterize the assumption that nothing relevant in the music lit-
erally moves as resting on sonicism, the view that music is exclusively a sonic
art, or perhaps acousmaticism, the view that music is exclusively an unseen,
auditory—acoustic—art, focused on sounds without reference to the means of
their creation.33 I contrast such views with the conceptual holism of music and
dance, according to which music is a cross-sensory practice and phenomenon.
Scruton does not fully appreciate this conceptual holism. The link is stronger
than he suggests—one cannot understand music without understanding dance.
skep: I agree with some qualification. I would say something weaker: one cannot un-
derstand music without entrainment, i.e., without being able to engage in entrained
movement to the music. If such entrained movement counts as dance then your
thesis is established—but perhaps not all entrained movement does so count.
dy: That view is close enough to mine, I think. The basic sense of rhythmical move-
ment is dance-like, I believe—to hear music as movement is a fundamental way
of experiencing and conceiving it.
skep: I agree with your invocation of movement as a criterion of understanding mu-
sical rhythm, then. But that leaves untouched your original claim that rhythm is
literal non-spatial movement. To say music “moves” is a metaphor or analogue!
You still have given no sense to “literal non-spatial movement.”
dy: If one acknowledges that music has essentially spatial dimensions, and affinities
with dance, then there is no need for such a notion, which I’ve abandoned thanks
to your persuasive objections. But rhythm as order-in-movement does not rest
on non-spatial literal movement, and is not refuted along with it—so I still insist
on this idea of an order of movement. The static conception that rhythm is a pat-
tern of sounds and silences is surely refuted by the rhythmic nature of dance—
how does dance involve a pattern of sounds and silences? A static conception
has to make music and poetry the core cases of rhythm, and assert a merely
causal connection with dance—which is not my view.
skep: You are simply repeating your earlier, problematic position, Dynamicus.
Rhythm is a pattern of sounds and silences, or movements and stillnesses, but
one that is apparently meaningful. The static–dynamic distinction is unhelpful
as I have already explained. Why call an order in time “static” anyway? A rhythm
changes in time, so it is “dynamic” in a perfectly ordinary sense without being
33 e.g. Malina and Schaeffer, “Concrete Music and Kinetic Art”; Scruton, Understanding Music, 5–13, 22–3,
30–2, 58; Brian Kane, Sound Unseen, passim.
a form of movement. The New Oxford American Dictionary definition for “dy-
namic” regarding a process is this: “characterized by constant change, activity, or
progress.” So change in time counts and there is no requirement of any movement.
dy: There may be an ordinary sense in which “dynamic” does not refer to a form of
movement, but there is equally an ordinary sense in which it refers to movement
rather than change, and that is the sense I am appealing to. Rhythm constitutes
what I have termed an order of movement in so far as it implies a conceptual or
normative connection between music and dance.
I agree that much work needs to be done in characterizing an “order of move-
ment.” But the idea has a history. Plato in the Laws describes rhythm as “order
in movement.”34 Hanslick characterized music as “tonally moving forms,”
arguing that music presents the dynamic properties of emotional experience,
abstracting from emotional content.35 Messiaen defines rhythm as “the ordering
of movement,” which, he says, is “applicable to dance, to words, and to music.”36
Finally, Schütz writes that “Breathing is only one example of rhythmical bodily
movement. Others are walking, dancing, knocking and many operations of
working . . . rhythm always refers to actual or virtual bodily movements in space.”37
It is significant that so many of the terms used to describe music involve
movement, especially dance-movement: waltz, march, lullaby, rock ‘n’ roll,
sarabande, stomp, swing, thrash, hip-hop. Your rejection of the dynamic view
thus faces a dilemma: Either “rhythm” has a different meaning in “musical
rhythm” compared to “dance rhythm,” or rhythm is not a pattern of sounds and
silences—since that is not an adequate characterization of dance rhythm. And
to say that rhythm has different meanings in these cases seems implausible.
skep: I reject this dilemma. But as it is getting late, let us resume our discussions
tomorrow.
dy: Yes indeed, Skepticus.
4. Entrainment, the movement criterion, and rhythm

as “order of movement”
(tealicious tearoom, durham)
skep: Good morning, Dynamicus and Analyticus. I trust you are both eager for
further debate.
dy: Indeed we are, Skepticus. Can we begin by considering the phenomenon that
we touched on earlier, which psychologists call entrainment—the tendency of a
34 Plato, Laws, Bk 2, 665a.

35 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 29.
36 Messiaen adds that the definition is “incomplete,” though he doesn’t explain why: Messiaen, Music and
Colour, 67.
37 Schütz, “Fragment on the Phenomenology of Rhythm,” in On Phenomenology, 21.
subject to align their movement to an external auditory pulse? Psychologists de-

fine it as two rhythmic processes adjusting towards and eventually “locking in”
to a common phase or periodicity.38 Psychological research generally assumes a
dynamic but non-humanistic conception of rhythm, I would argue—focusing
on bodily rhythms such as heart-beat, blood circulation, respiration, secretion
of hormones, and menstrual cycles.
A humanistic conception denies that entrainment in these internal cases is
continuous with entrainment on the personal level—rather, they are distinct
phenomena with interesting affinities. On the humanistic view, individuals
adjusting their speech rhythms to match each other in conversation, or
entraining in musical performance, are categorially different from convergence
in circadian or menstrual cycles. Moreover, naturalistic accounts of entrain-
ment offered by psychologists involve a misconception—they mistakenly regard
entrainment as more fundamental than, and explanatory of, rhythm.
ana: I agree, Dynamicus. The misconception here is comparable to how
psychologists and scientistic philosophers of mind explain human memory
through memory traces; we are able to remember, it is claimed, because we store
knowledge and information. However, “store” in the relevant sense is itself a
memory-concept, co-defined with “remember”; it cannot explain the operation
of memory.
dy: Indeed. To argue that human rhythmic abilities arise from an ability to entrain,
is to make the same kind of mistake. Entrainment stands to rhythm as storage
stands to memory. The capacity to entrain does not explain our rhythmic
behavior, but is part and parcel of it; just as “storage” is part and parcel of
“remembering.” Indeed, as remembering involves more than storage—it also
involves retrieval—so rhythmic behavior involves more than entrainment: it
also involves a capacity to initiate rhythm. Only a subject unacquainted with
rhythmic behavior—such as a paralyzed, sense-deprived individual—could
not create a rhythm spontaneously. But one who is familiar with such behavior
can create new rhythms, just as a competent language-user can create novel
sentences.
ana: That seems right, Dynamicus.
dy: A humanistic conception treats rhythm as essentially a human phenomenon,
conditioned by the natural organic phenomena addressed by researchers on
entrainment. For humanists, people begin to experience waves on the shore
as rhythmic as they begin to create music and dance. The humanistic claim is
not that all rhythms are humanly-produced, but rather—to reiterate—that
rhythm came into being with, or at least is part and parcel of, human practices
of music, poetry, and dance. The producers of music, poetry, and dance drew on
and incorporated natural sounds—and in later eras, mechanical and electronic
sounds.
38 Clayton et al., “In Time with the Music,” 2.

ana: The contrasting naturalistic view—that these sounds already were rhythmic,
and that humans developed the capacity to mimic them, thus creating their own
rhythms—also has plausibility, Dynamicus. Conceptual integration of music
and life is plausible, because you classify rhythm as essentially musical and stress
ubiquity and ineliminability of rhythm in everyday life.
dy: I agree that this opposed view has some plausibility—I favor the humanistic
stance, but it is an achievement just to locate the most fruitful dialectic. That is a
deep issue. Can we instead pursue the claim of the psychologists that rhythmic
ability partly depends on, or arises with, entraining to natural rhythms? This
claim seems right, as does the psychologists’ assumption that the musical world
is a social one, where rhythms are emulated; rhythmic or metrical behavior
involves a common, social response. However, the psychologists are wrong to
deny that an individual can produce a rhythm spontaneously, without entraining
to anything. Entrainment, as psychologists conceive it, prioritizes responding
over creating, and indeed almost makes the latter impossible. Londinium claims
that “meter is related to, and may be a complex form of, entrainment behavior.”39
But entrainment and meter are interdependent concepts, and metrical behavior
cannot just be a form of entrainment.
ana: Indeed.
dy: Londinium commented to me that “creating rhythms outside of a social setting
is a degenerate case of entrainment—one half of the two-oscillator system that
entrainment requires.”40 When I make rhythms by myself, he argued, entrain-
ment occurs here too, by a coordination of “central timekeeper” and external
rhythms.
ana: I don’t understand why Londinium regards initiating a rhythm as a “degen-
erate” case of entrainment. Talk of “oscillation” sounds like a mechanistic ac-
count of what it is to grasp a rhythm.
dy: Yes, Analyticus. Entrainment cannot yield a complete explanation of musical
rhythm. So against the assumption that nothing relevant in the music moves
literally, I would develop Skepticus’ earlier suggestion concerning entrain-
ment, and argue that something relevant does literally move. Performers and
listeners move to the music, sharing a rhythmic, dance-like response. This is
not a merely causal connection, but a manifestation of musical understanding
and involvement—an internal relation between music and movement. As
Ezra Pound writes, “music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the
dance . . . but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance
music or all poetry lyric.”41 The connection is not just with dance, but with
human rhythmic activities of all kinds—marching, laboring, rocking a cradle—
which music accompanies and informs.
39 London, Hearing in Time, 12.
40 Email communication.

Thus we see that music, dance, and poetry arise as an integrated practice, and
form a conceptual holism or circle of interdependent concepts. This implies a
dynamic conception of rhythm. Except at the least dynamic end of the spec-
trum, as in plainchant, music creates an urge to move in response that shows
that one recognizes it as music, and recognizes the rhythm.
skep: You admit, then, that since there is no coherent notion of a literal non-spatial
movement, music involves no such thing.
dy: I have retracted that claim, or modified it to say “There is something relevant
that moves literally—the listener or performer moving to the music.” I am
arguing that music, dance, and rhythmic bodily movement (leaving aside poetry
and prose in the current discussion, though perhaps they could be included too)
belong to an order of movement a stronger claim than that made by proponents
of metaphorical accounts such as Scruton. I am suggesting that to make and re-
spond to music is to be disposed to move rhythmically.
skep: This is the entrainment issue we discussed some time ago; I think it is a
condition of understanding musical rhythm, not just a matter of what one is
disposed to do.
dy: To speak of “understanding musical rhythm” makes it seem too much like
a conceptual matter, but it might not be: infants respond at a very young age
to rhythm, emotionally and physically—is that a matter of understanding?
However, it looks like we agree on what I will call the movement criterion. The
movement involves bobbing one’s head, tapping fingers or feet, gestures such
as punching the air or leaping, as well as dancing. Inconsolable grief or sexual
arousal can dispose people to move rhythmically, but although neither requires
musical accompaniment, they invite it.
ana: What do you make of this objection to the movement criterion: that the dis-
position can be overridden by social convention, in classical concerts, or church
services? Such prohibitions result in what may be called motionless moving,
analogous to silent speech. At a certain point in history, silent reading became
the norm; similarly, perhaps, motionless moving became the norm for listening
to certain kinds of music.
dy: Indeed. The movement criterion is illustrated by children’s unlearned move-
ment to music—marching to martial music, for instance. There are no societies
where one is brought up to understand music without understanding dance, or
vice versa. It would be absurd to say that dance might have evolved independ-
ently of music. The contrary claim might be tempting, because of how modern
concert music has evolved—but this too would be mistaken, even if certain
forms of music are now evolving independently of dance. An individual might
be forbidden to move to music, or to dance—but a whole society? Maybe under
the Taliban—though such societies do not endure. Someone who says, “I am
able to move in time with the music, but I never feel like doing so” is someone
who does not understand it—medical conditions and syndromes excepted. An
example of the latter is the jazz trumpeter Tom Harrell; blowing and valving
movements aside, he is almost immobile when performing. This striking phe-

nomenon results from treatment for schizophrenia.42
We mentioned kinds of music and poetry to which the criterion seems not
to apply. Plainchant tried to exclude the human body from music—it is unmet-
rical, though not unrhythmic. Children would not move spontaneously to it,
as its rhythm is not dance-rhythm—though if asked to move, they might do so
appropriately.
ana: But what disposition or inclination is involved then, Dynamicus? Might we
say, more correctly, that someone who grasps a rhythm could make tracking
moves? “Disposition” is ambiguous. “She is disposed to shed tears when lis-
tening to music” cites a relative frequency. “She is disposed to jeer at Mick Jagger
when she attends his performance tonight” is about her possible intentions on a
particular occasion. This is the sense in which a person can feel disposed or in-
clined to do something; what is done will be intentional behavior, which is not
implied by the frequency sense of “disposition.”
dy: Doesn’t it have to be a disposition, Analyticus? There is a third sense of dis-
position in addition to relative frequency and possible intention—viz., “a re-
sponse that amounts to a criterion.” An injured person is disposed to exhibit
pain-behavior—such behavior belongs to an indefinite list including crying out,
clutching the affected part of the body, moaning, and so on. This is stronger than
the statistical or frequency claim, but weaker, perhaps, than intention. Similarly
with music, where defeating factors include social prohibition or stigma, feeling
tired, and so on.
The movement criterion shows that something relevant does literally move—
the listener and performer—as they respond to the music. And given that such
a response is a criterion of understanding, the movement criterion brings to-
gether my emphasis on movement, and your emphasis on understanding.
skep: It is surely not enough to say that most music naturally inclines one to dance
to it, given that we are now interested in explaining how dancing to music
contributes to understanding music.
dy: I am not sure that there is such an explanation—it seems more like a concep-
tual elucidation. I would add that most music naturally inclines one to dance—
the use of “incline” does not seem to be a philosopher’s weasel-word. But that
claim does not express the conceptual connection between music and dance,
that I am trying to elucidate. It’s interesting that proponents of entrainment
also make this connection, and that here also it seems to be contingent. For in-
stance, Theodorus Gracykus, in our volume, argues that “The centrality of en-
trainment explains our near-universal propensity to interpret music as human
gait and comportment”: “we grasp the music’s gait in a preconceptual recog-
nition process. Knowledgeable listeners feel the beat. [The listener who sits]
42 Hamilton, “Review: Koktebel Jazz.”
still in the concert hall will entrain to the occurrent music, anticipating how to
move to it.”43
Moving to the music is a kind of entrainment—but, to reiterate, entrainment
is an elucidation and not, as psychologists suppose, an explanation of the move-
ment. If someone taps their feet to music, no explanation is required—“Why
are you doing that?” would be the kind of question someone high on the autism
spectrum or a Martian visitor might ask.
skep: I most certainly grant this claim! Indeed I formulated a version of it inde-
pendently of Gracykus. The truth in your intuition of a deep link between music
and dance is not that the experience of music disposes one to dance—that is
causal and non-normative. Rather, it is that unless one dance or move to the
music—a capacity of following the music, entraining to its rhythm—then one
does not know what the music is, one cannot identify it as the music it is. That’s
a conceptual, normative notion—just what your humanistic account of rhythm
requires.
dy: That is well put, Skepticus—I see that I was wrong to insist that the movement
criterion involves a disposition rather than a capacity. We agree that there is a
deep conceptual connection between music and dance—yet to return to my
earlier claim, you want to say that “rhythm,” as it appears in “musical rhythm”
and “dance rhythm,” is ambiguous?
skep: It is not ambiguous. For a start one could hold, as you yourself once did, that
rhythm is disjunctive, characterizing music in one way (accenting sounds, which
do not literally move) and dance in another (accenting bodily movements,
which literally move): Rhythm is “order in movement . . . viz. the imposition
of accents on sequences of sounds or movements, creating non-periodic phe-
nomena usually within a periodic repetitive (metrical) framework.”44 This def-
inition of rhythm as “order in movement” is disjunctive, in my view, because it
applies to phenomena either literally (dance) or figuratively (music).
dy: I do not agree that this definition is disjunctive—but pray continue.
skep: I respect the intuition behind your definition: namely, that there is no re-
quirement to reduce the phenomena of rhythm to a unity. Clarification can be
achieved by expansion. Thus rhythm involves hearing or otherwise perceiving
accents in sounds—speech (which is not mere sound), non-intentional phe-
nomena (heartbeat)—and in movement—natural objects (cycles of the moon),
artifacts (movement of second hand of a watch or of a train), intentional move-
ment (dance, walking gait).
But we can go further, and say that rhythms in music and dance, as well as nat-
ural rhythms, have this in common: they are all patterns of changes of qualities
in time. That is, a dynamic pattern, if one uses the word “dynamic” to connote
change rather than movement—which is not how you use it, Dynamicus. Dewey
43 Gracyk, “Musical Expressiveness.”

was right, rhythm is “order in change”45—though as we have seen in the discus-

sion of meaningful order, that is not the end of the matter.
dy: The account that you suggest is certainly not the one I intended. My account
aims to be unifying and not disjunctive. A genuinely disjunctive account, such as
McDowell’s account of perception, finds little in common between the disjuncts.
But we are due to meet our colleague Vitalia shortly, and I think we should ask
her how she views the debate.
5. Human Movement
(pink lane coffee, newcastle)
vitalia: Good day, colleagues. I’ve overheard some of your discussion on the ques-
tion of rhythm, and some thoughts on these questions occur to me.
dy: Pray enlighten us, Vitalia!
vit: First I would agree with Analyticus and Skepticus in rejecting a dispositional
account—and would place their objections in a broader context. Most human
adults are not disposed to show pain-behavior when in pain. “Humans wince
and cry out at pain” would be a false empirical generalization, but a true nat-
ural generalization. In this context, “disposed” is a philosopher’s weasel-word.
To make a true empirical generalization, featuring a claim about dispositions,
one must introduce “normal conditions” and such-like.
Talk of dispositions loses reference to the subject’s history, and refers only to
their current state. Possession of a capacity, in contrast, is associated with cul-
ture and practice, and conforms with a humanistic approach. Dynamicus’ claim
should therefore be: just as the natural, pre-linguistic response to pain is pain-
behavior, so the natural pre-linguistic response to music is dance-behavior.
Humans can suppress that natural response, or communicate it in a non-natural,
linguistic way.
ana: Thank you for your support, Vitalia!
dy: These are interesting points that I must ponder.
vit: There is a further issue I would raise. It struck me while considering your hu-
manistic view, Dynamicus, that the movement in question is bodily movement.
It is the movement of a living self-conscious being, not those of an inanimate
object.
dy: Yes, of course—unlike Skepticus, I limit the realm of rhythm to the intentional
or voluntary.
45 Dewey, Art as Experience: “Because rhythm is a universal scheme of existence underlying all realization
of order in change it pervades all the arts, literary, musical, plastic and architectural, as well as the dance”
(150); “There is a rhythm in nature before poetry, painting, architecture and music exist” (147).
vit: Indeed. Because of our Cartesian heritage, philosophers often treat bodily
movement as movement of a thing that happens to be living. However, “life”
is not an accidental property of some objects. It is what, following Anscombe,
one can call a “form of description”—or following Hegel, a “logical cate-
gory.” Likewise, “human movement” is not movement that is accidentally of a
human being.
dy: These are sage comments, Vitalia.
vit: To describe the movements of a living thing is to invoke a form of description
quite unlike that which applies to the movements of inanimate objects. As I un-
derstand Dynamicus, human movement shares an order with sound-patterns
that we call rhythmic. To investigate this claim we need to think about what it
is for a human body to be moving. The criteria for this are quite different from
those for inanimate things. It can, for example, be wrong to talk of human move-
ment in the presence of spatial movement, and right to talk of human movement
at a moment when there is no spatial movement—for example, the moment of
stillness in the tango dancer’s body as she executes a voleo atrás. Conversely,
someone in traction, in hospital, may have their limbs moved by a pulley, while
not moving their body. Thus, the criteria for continuity and unity of movement
are quite different for a human being than for a lump of matter.
dy: That is very helpful, Vitalia. It seems that you and I agree, against Skepticus,
that rhythm is an essentially intentional notion, and indeed involves intentional
movement—and that you agree with my view that that there is an order of move-
ment shared by music, poetry, dance, and bodily movement.
vit: Yes, that is well-expressed, Dynamicus. I was unhappy with your suggestion
that music literally moves—“literal” is a strange term, and is not required by
your account of a common order between bodily movement and that of music.
That isomorphism makes it apt to describe the music as “moving.” I would there-
fore argue that it is wrong to describe the ascription of movement as metaphor-
ical, but that equally it is unhelpful to say “the music literally moves.”
dy: Do continue, Vitalia.
vit: The question “literal or metaphorical?” can be raised only after it has been
specified to which language-game the description “the music moves” belongs.
Contrast the everyday and scientific language-games with “solid.” Is the table
literally solid? Nothing falls through it; but physicists explain that solid things
are literally full of spaces between atomic particles. If we are describing the
movements of a raindrop down a window, it is metaphorical to describe them as
indecisive. A dancer’s movements may be indecisive, in contrast, in virtue of her
dance involving significant periods of stillness and immobility; this immobility
is, in the spatial sense, part of her movement. A performer may have her limbs
moved by other performers, while not moving her body.
skep: I agree with your first point, Vitalia. I deny that the music moves in any literal
sense, but I accept the importance of human movement as a manifestation of
understanding music—and other intentional rhythms—through entrainment.
Rhythm is an order of changes of qualities in time that strikes us as meaningful—

it is experienced as if intended to communicate something to the listener, even
if it is, in fact, non-intentional and meaningless like the beating of a heart. But
while there is an analogy between literal bodily movement and the way the
music changes in time, this is not an isomorphism of movement as you put it
Vitalia—so it is misleading to conclude that the music moves. There may be iso-
morphism between musical rhythm—an intentional order of sonic changes in
time—and dance rhythm, an intentional order of changes in bodily movement
in time and space. But rhythm itself is not movement. Movement can, of course,
have rhythm but that does not mean that rhythm is movement.
vit: The nub of our disagreement, Skepticus, seems to be that Dynamicus and my-
self hold that music and bodily movement share an order of movement, and you
do not.46 This leaves you with the problem of the ambiguity of “ ‘rhythm,” as it
appears in “musical rhythm” and “dance rhythm.”
dy: You deny this common order, Skepticus, because you are committed to what
I called sonicism, which regards music as exclusively an aural art, and mu-
sical rhythm as an intentional order of sonic changes in time. Sonicism sharply
separates music and dance.
skep: There is no ambiguity in “rhythm” on my account. To reiterate, we can say,
consistently with Dynamicus’ original definition, that the concept of rhythm is
disjunctive, characterizing both music and dance, and, indeed, characterizing
both natural rhythms (heartbeat, respiration) and human rhythms (music,
dance). But I prefer to say, with Dewey, that what all rhythms have in common
is an order of changes in time. My humanism is a matter of holding, in addition,
not that rhythms must be intentional—which is Dynamicus’ view—but that
rhythms are experienced as intentional or meaningful.
vit: Thank you for that clarification, Skepticus. It seems that we all agree in rejecting
a description of bodily movements as if they were movements of an inanimate
object—as an analogue of the naturalistically identified sound-sequence. With
such a form of description, the concepts of rhythm and dance get no grip. Under
this mode of description, any physical pause will be a cessation of movement
and any sound-pause a cessation of sound-sequence.
However, as Anscombe reminds us, our description of human bodies in
purely physiological terms is parasitic on vital forms of description. There would
be no movements to identify, were it not for the latter. We do not first identify
physical movements, and then on investigation come to apply vital descriptions.
Rather, we recognize and produce human movements, then by investigating
them, come to these other forms of description.
So, too, with the naturalistic description of sound: we recognize (and pro-
duce) rhythmic sound sequences, and by investigating them, we apply this other
46 The idea of an order of movement can be developed through the ideas of Simone Weil, explicated by
Winch, Simone Weil, esp. Ch. 4.
form of description. In the vital mode of description, physical-pause or sound-

pause does not imply that bodily movement or rhythm has ended. Such pauses
are internal to the concept of rhythm and dance.
dy: A very congenial line of argument, Vitalia.
vit: Thus we avoid the need to invoke dispositions. Dance, music, and rhythm are
forms of description that belong to human life. To recognize a musical rhythm—
a movement-pattern in sound—is to apply a description that can be expressed
in bodily movement, that is, dance. This need not imply anything about one’s
individual psychology and dispositions—I may be quite indisposed to dance.
But if we did not have the concept “rhythm”—that is, did not hear sounds as
rhythms—“dancing” would not be a possible description of human movement.
dy: To assert a conceptual connection between bodily movement and music is to
make a stronger claim than Scruton. He holds that the source of the metaphor of
musical movement is bodily movement, but in fact—to reiterate—they share an
order of movement, described in rhythmic terms.
skep: When Vitalia refers to “a movement-pattern in sound,” this cannot be taken
literally as relative change in spatial location. Music and bodily movement may
share rhythm, but rhythm is not any kind of movement; rather it’s an appar-
ently meaningful pattern of changes in time. Responding to musical rhythm in a
dance-like way and even producing music in a dance-like way—which is, at best,
all you have established—are distinct from claiming that “rhythm constitutes an
order of movement.” That is the nub of the problem. The constitutive claim is not
established by the cognitive or genetic claims.
dy: On that we differ, Skepticus. But at this pregnant point, my dear interlocutors,
we must curtail our discussion—our word-limit has been reached. Our readers
must decide whether they favor my still inadequately developed attempt to cap-
ture a long-standing intuition about the connection between music and move-
ment, your incisive critique, or the sage views of our other contributors.
Works Cited
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Boghossian, Paul, “On Hearing the Music in the Sound: Scruton on Musical Expression,” Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 60.1 (2002), 49–55.
Budd, Malcolm, “Musical Movement and Aesthetic Metaphors,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 43.3
(2003), 209–23.
Clayton, Martin, “Entrainment and the Social Origin of Musical Rhythm,” in Peter Cheyne,
Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics
(Oxford, 2019), C12.
Clayton, Martin, Rebecca Sager, and Udo Will, “In Time with the Music: The Concept
of Entrainment and Its Significance for Ethnomusicology,” European Meetings in
Ethnomusicology, 11 (2005), 1–82.
Cowling, Sam, “Instantiation as Location,” Philosophical Studies, 167.3 (2014), 667–82.

Dewey, John, Art as Experience ([1934]; New York, 1980).
Funkhouser, Eric, The Logical Structure of Kinds (Oxford, 2014).
Gracyk, Theodor, “Rhythms, Resemblance, and Musical Expressiveness,” in Peter Cheyne,
(Oxford, 2019), C10.
Hamilton, Andy, Aesthetics and Music (London, 2007).
Hamilton, Andy, “Rhythm and Stasis: An Almost Entirely Neglected and Major Philosophical
Problem,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 111.1 (2011), 25–42.
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magazine/810/review-koktebel-jazz-party-crimea.
Hamilton, Andy, “Rhythm and Movement: Music, Metaphor and Dance,” Midwest Studies in
Philosophy (forthcoming).1
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Harman, Gilbert, Change in View (Cambridge, MA, 1986).
Kane, Brian, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford, 2014).
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Oxford, 2012).
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(Oxford, 2019), C11.
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Leonardo, 5.3 (1972), 255–60.
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(Portland, 1994).
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Philosophy of Perception (Oxford, 2015), 495–514.
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(Chicago, 1970).
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Meaning, and Work (Oxford, 2007), 226–55.
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Zuckerkandl, Victor, Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, tr. Willard R. Trask
(Princeton, 1956).
2
Rhythm and Movement
Matthew Nudds
My focus in this chapter is on whether our perceptual experience of rhythm

involves an experience of movement. I will argue that it does: that a proper under-
standing of auditory perception shows that an important element of our experience
of rhythm—our experience of musical grouping—involves experiencing sounds as
produced by extra-musical events that include movement, and that we can there-
fore experience literal movement in rhythm.
Rhythm is not one process, but many. Lerdahl and Jackendoff make a useful dis-
tinction between grouping and meter. When we hear a piece of music, we hear the
individual notes or tones that compose it as grouped together and organized into
streams or phrases. They suggest that “from a psychological point of view, grouping
of a musical surface is an auditory analog of the partitioning of the visual field into
objects.” As well as perceiving musical sounds as grouped, “the listener instinctively
infers a regular pattern of strong and weak beats to which he relates the actual mu-
sical sounds.”1 This regular pattern of beats can be categorized, and constitutes the
metrical structure of the music—the temporal pattern of beats to which the listener
relates musical events. The metrical structure of a piece of music can crosscut the
grouping of tones so that tones belonging to different groups can contribute to the
determination of the metrical structure. Though all musical experience involves the
experience of groups of tones, not all music is experienced as having metrical struc-
ture. Grouping and metrical structure are therefore distinct elements of rhythm.
The metrical structure of a piece of music is determined by the relations between
moments of time that may not be occupied by any tone in the music. There may be
silence at a moment of time that is an element of the metrical structure. Therefore,
the metrical structure of a passage of music is not determined by relations be-
tween the actual tones that compose the music. Because the metrical structure is
not determined by relations between actual tones, it might be suggested that met-
rical structure is not, strictly speaking, something that we perceive, but a pattern or
framework that is abstracted from what we perceive.2 It is an abstract framework
1 Lerdahl and Jackendoff, Generative Theory of Tonal Music, 36, 12.

2 Lerdahl and Jackendoff describe meter as “induced” in the listener.
against which what we perceive is heard. The suggestion that meter is not some-
thing perceived is further supported by the fact that there is typically a gap between
what is notated in a score and what can be directly perceived in a passage of music as
performed. The gap exists because performers don’t reproduce a piece of music ex-
actly as it is written. Doing so would produce mechanical sounding, lifeless music.
Typically performers introduce small changes to the timing of the notes, changes
that have a role in explaining the expressive power of music.3 The metrical struc-
ture of the music is the notated structure relative to which these temporal changes
are heard. Again, it seems that the metrical structure is abstracted from what is
perceived rather than directly perceived in the music.
That there is a connection between metrical properties of music and movement
is evident in the way we can move to music by, for example, tapping a finger or
dancing in time to the meter of a piece of music. Empirical evidence that suggests
our capacity to perceive the metrical properties of music is connected to our ca-
pacity to move in time with the music. There is evidence, for example, that metrical
rhythm perception is influenced by the size and shape of our body, and that body
movement can influence our perception of the metrical properties of a passage of
music.4 This evidence suggests a constitutive connection between our capacity to
perceive the metrical properties of music and our capacities for bodily movement.
In asking whether there is a constitutive connection between our perceptual expe-
rience of rhythm and movement, however, my interest is not in this metrical com-
ponent of rhythm, but on the grouping component of rhythm and its relation to
movement. Whilst many writers have argued that there is a close connection be-
tween music and movement, they been skeptical of the idea that we can literally
hear movement in music. This skepticism is grounded in a conception of our expe-
rience of music and of the intentional object of that experience.
II
Malcolm Budd provides a characterization of music and our experience of it:
Music is based upon the human capacity to hear sequences of bare sounds in
various ways: to hear a rhythm in a series of sounds; to hear two simultaneous
rhythms in a series of sounds; to hear a series of sounds as a melody . . . to hear
a rhythm . . . is in each case to be aware of a form of sounds or a form in sound,
perceived without anything else being . . . grasped . . . than sounds that are
3 Repp, “Patterns of Expressive Timing.”

4 Repp, “Sensorimotor Synchronization,” discusses the connection between tapping and meter. Phillips-
Silver and Trainor, “Vestibular Influence,” and Trainor et al., “Vestibular System,” discuss the influence of the
vestibular system on metrical perception. Chen et al., “Synchronization to Musical Rhythms,” provides brain-
imaging evidence that implicates the motor system in the perception of meter.
Rhythm and Movement 45
experienced in that form . . . The experience of music is au fond purely auditory: it

consists of interconnected modes of hearing mere sounds . . .5
One consequence of this conception of music is that “music as an art-form is not

based upon music’s capacity to represent or refer to items in the physical world.”6
This conception of music goes together with a common conception of auditory
experience as the experience of sounds and sounds alone, of auditory experience
as purely auditory. Anything else that can be heard in hearing sounds is not an ob-
ject of experience, but merely suggested to us by the sounds we hear. Because the
experience is purely auditory, the structure and order in our perceptual experience
of sounds can be accounted for “without anything else being present to or grasped
or thought of by the mind than sounds.” Budd allows that there are connections
between music and “non-musical phenomena,” but these connections are not in-
trinsic to musical experience. So if there is a connection between music and move-
ment, in particular between rhythm and movement, it is not a connection that is
intrinsic to the music. And it is not, properly speaking, a perceptual connection.
Roger Scruton views our experience of music similarly in some ways to Budd,
arguing that it is acousmatic, such that music is experienced as sounds apart
from the circumstances of their production, and attended to as they are in them-
selves: “One who experiences these sounds [apart from their physical causes]
experiences all that he needs, if he is to understand them as music.”7 According to
Scruton, music is made up of “tones,” which he distinguishes from mere sounds.
Tones are the “intentional object of the musical perception.”8 These sounds are
elements of a musical phrase or group, and are connected together by what he calls
“virtual” causality. Virtual causality is the relation that groups sounds together as a
musical phrase. Scruton therefore distinguishes music from ordinary sounds in two
ways. First, music involves sounds considered acousmatically. Second, music can
be distinguished from ordinary sounds through the virtual causality of grouping.
It follows that music is autonomous in much the same way it is for Budd: “What we
understand, in understanding music, is not the material world, but the intentional
object: the organization that can be heard in the experience.”9
Scruton thinks that we do hear movement in music if we hear it as music.
However, he argues that this movement must be distinct from the movement of
things in the material world. Movement in the material world involves something
changing its location within a spatial frame of reference. We can’t make sense of
music changing location in this way: “Musical space and musical movement are
not even analogous to the space and movement of the physical world.”10 How, then,
5 Budd, Music and the Emotions, x.
6 Budd, Music and the Emotions, x.
8 Scruton, Aesthetics of Music,  19–20.

can we make sense of musical movement? It’s a sense of movement generated by

the structure of tones, but of tones whose structure is not explicable in terms of the
structure of events in the material world. Because of the way in which music is dis-
tinct from the material world, the movement of music cannot be literal movement,
and if the movement is not literal, then it is metaphorical.
Before turning to an account of the metaphorical content of our experience
of movement in music, it’s worth looking at what connections listeners actually
make between music and movement. An insight into this is provided by a series
of experiments carried out by Zohar Eitan and Roni Granot, who investigated the
relation between change in various musical parameters and motion in space.11
Participants were asked to visualize a cartoon character of their choice. They were
then played brief passages of music and had to visualize their character moving in
an imaginary short film with the music as the soundtrack. They then completed a
forced-choice questionnaire about the way their imagined character had moved.
The answers to these questionnaires were analyzed to reveal associations between
properties of the music and the movements of the character.
A number of associations were found.12 For example, rises in pitch were asso-
ciated with spatial ascent, but also with moving away, acceleration, and higher
energy movement. Falls in pitch were associated with the opposite kinds of move-
ment: spatial descents, slowing down, lower energy, but not with approaching mo-
tion. Changes in inter-onset intervals (the times between tones) were associated
with changes in imagined speed. Increasing and decreasing inter-onset intervals
were associated with ascent and descent. In addition, there were found to be
associations between articulation and movement. For example, gradual increases
in staccato were associated with moving away. Not all the associations were found
to be symmetrical. Dynamics, pitch, and tempo were all associated asymmetri-
cally with movement. For example, diminuendos were associated with descent, but
crescendos were not associated with ascent; pitch descents evoked spatial descents,
but pitch ascents were not associated with spatial ascents.
These experiments show that listeners fairly consistently associate certain
features of music and movement. We associate certain patterns or groups of tones
with movement and, consequently, hearing those patterns or groups brings to mind
the movement. Does that show that our experience of music is connected in some
significant way with movement? There are reasons to doubt that it is sufficient to
show that.
First, associations like those found in the experiments are ubiquitous. Many
experiments not involving music have discovered similar kinds of associations,
some of which are surprising. For example, when asked “are lemons fast or slow?”
people consistently answer that lemons are fast;13 when shown pictures of a spiky
11 Eitan and Granot, “How Music Moves.”

12 There were no significant differences between those with and without musical training: Eitan and Granot,
“How Music Moves,” 240.
13 Woods et al., “Fast Lemons and Sour Boulders.”
object and a bulbous object and asked which is “Bobo” and which is “Kiki,” they
consistently say that the spiky one is Kiki.14 The fact that lemons and speed are as-
sociated doesn’t in itself show anything interesting about our understanding or
experience of lemons. The problem lies partly with the experiment. From the fact
that, when prompted, we consistently associate lemons and speed, it doesn’t follow
that the association plays any role in our unprompted thought about or experience
of lemons. It might be some entirely trivial connection that leads us to say, when
forced to choose, that lemons are fast rather than slow. The same is true of the con-
nection between music and movement. The fact that, when prompted, we consist-
ently associate certain properties of music with certain kinds of movement doesn’t
show that the association plays any significant role in our thought about or experi-
ence of music.
Second, there’s nothing right or wrong about such associations. We can’t draw
the conclusion from the fact that we make associations between properties of music
and kinds of movement that we ought to make those associations. We can’t, there-
fore, say of someone who doesn’t make the association, or who associates differ-
ently, that they have gone wrong or failed to appreciate something that is there in
the music. If someone who fails to make an association has not failed to appreciate
something that is there in the music, then it is difficult to see how the association
can be significant for our appreciation of music. Budd’s suggestion was that only
features of the music are significant for our appreciation of music; the existence of
associations doesn’t undermine that.
Third, if what we are trying to explain is an aspect of our perceptual experience of
music, then appeal to these associations don’t help. It doesn’t do so because nothing
tells us that the associations reflect a feature or aspect of our perceptual experi-
ence of music, rather than something semantic, or simply some cognitive bias that
“brings to mind” the association in the light of our perceptual experience of music.
The mere fact that we make these associations is not, therefore, significant for un-
derstanding our experience of music.
So the fact that we make these associations doesn’t tell us much, but doesn’t it
imply the existence of an underlying connection between music and movement that
explains why we associate them? Isn’t this underlying explanation of the associations
significant for understanding our experience of music? Perhaps. However, there are
likely to be different underlying connections that explain the variety of different
associations, and few of these connections promise to be significant.
That there is no single explanation of the fact that we make associations be-
tween music and movement is evident from the range of different explanations that
have been suggested.15 For example, the idea that the intensity of a stimulus can
be matched across modalities. There is a connection between pitch height and the
14 Ramachandran and Hubbard, “Window into Perception.” Spence, “Crossmodal Correspondences,”

reviews several such studies.
15 Spence, “Crossmodal Correspondences.”
way music is notated. Lateral pitch position corresponds with the layout of piano
keyboards. Further, that we associate high pitch and spatial height may be a conse-
quence of the fact we describe both as “high.” Each of these connections explains a
different association. Some are perceptual and reflect a statistical correspondence
in our environment (which may be trivial, as in the keyboard example); others are
semantic and reflect a fact about language (e.g., uses of the word “high”).
None of this rules out the possibility that there is a connection between music
and movement that results from some deep fact about auditory perception, and
below I’ll outline an account of auditory perception according to which there is
such a connection. But before that, I want to look at an account of movement as as-
sociated metaphorically with music.
Music is often taken to have metaphorical content. Usually this is understood
in a linguistic way, involving thought or judgment. Thus understood, metaphor
will not help explain any constitutive link between our experience of music—and
in particular, rhythmic grouping—and movement. But we don’t have to think of
metaphorical content as linguistic. Christopher Peacocke has defended an account
of perceptual experience, and of our experience of music in particular, that sees
metaphoric content as nonlinguistic. I’ll briefly outline his account and then assess
whether it can ground a constitutive connection between rhythm and movement.
Peacock begins by distinguishing three kinds of content that a perceptual ex-
perience can have.16 First, there is the familiar perceptual content: in virtue of ex-
perience having this kind of content, we experience the world as being a certain
way. For example, in seeing a cat, we have an experience in virtue of which it seems
that there is a cat in front of us. Second, there is the kind of content involved when
we see a picture: in virtue of experience having this kind of content, we can ex-
perience something as the depiction of something else. For example, in seeing a
drawing or painting of a cat, we can experience the drawing or painting as a de-
piction of a cat, distinct from the painting. In such cases it does not seem that we
are seeing what is depicted in the painting. In seeing a picture of a cat it does not
seem that there is a cat there. But that the picture is a picture of a cat is something
that we experience. Finally, there is the kind of content that Peacocke is interested
in: metaphorical content. In virtue of our experience having this kind of content,
Peacocke suggests, we can experience something metaphorically, as something else.
He provides a convincing example: seeing Francisco de Zurbarán’s painting of four
pots as people.17 It doesn’t look to someone having this experience that there are
people in front of them. It is a depiction of pots that are experienced metaphorically,
as people. A group of real pots could also be experienced metaphorically, as people.
It is distinctive of Peacocke’s account that metaphorical seeing-as does not require
linguistic understanding, and it is not a matter of thinking or judging that they are
people. The metaphorical content is an aspect of the experience.
16 Peacock, “The Perception of Music,” 257–8.
17 Peacock, “The Perception of Music,” 240, reproduces Zurbarán’s “Still Life with Pottery Jars” (c.1635).
How is it that we have experiences with metaphorical content? Metaphor char-

acteristically involves an isomorphism between two domains. We experience
something metaphorically as something else in virtue of that isomorphism. In
the case of Zurbarán’s painting, there is an isomorphism between the appearance
of the depicted pots and the appearance of people, and the pots are experienced
metaphorically as people under that isomorphism. According to Peacocke, such
experiences occur as a result a sub-personal perceptual process that detects an iso-
morphism between two domains, setting up a correspondence between mental
representations of the items in each of these domains.18 Under the correspond-
ence, some representations of the metaphorically represented domain are copied
to some special kind of storage, binding them with their corresponding mental
representations in the sub-personal state underlying an experience that has the
metaphorical content. In this way their content enters the metaphorical content of
the experience.
This account of experiencing metaphorically can be applied to our experience
of music. There is a wide range of musical properties that can lead to metaphorical
experience, and a wide range that can enter into the content of metaphorical experi-
ence.19 Peacocke gives a number of examples. The following two give some sense of
the breadth of his account. The first involves hearing a symphony as a certain kind
of process:
. . . in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, one [can hear] the emergence of order, unity,
and strength . . . built up from what were previously only fragments scattered in
many different places. One may experience this metaphorically, as a process of
emotional development. But in hearing it that way, one may also be aware of the
process as being of a general type, with many possible instances. A political pro-
cess, a creative process, an intellectual process may all be instances of the type . . .20
The second involves hearing a single chord as sad. A minor chord by itself sounds
sad. According to Peacocke, the relation of the perceived minor chord to its (un-
heard) major is perceived metaphorically as an instance of the relation sadness has
to a non-sad state of mind: sadness is experienced from the inside as subdued; an
ordinary state of mind is not subdued. The relation of states of mind is isomor-
phic to that between minor and major chords. Sadness enters into the content of
the metaphor, which helps specify the content of the auditory perception of the
minor triad.
This account can explain how our experience of music and rhythm can have met-
aphorical content concerning movement. There are relationships between musical
tones that are sufficient to sustain an isomorphism of the kind Peacocke describes
18 Peacock, “The Perception of Music,” 263–4.
19 Peacock, “The Perception of Music,” 263.
20 Peacock, “The Perception of Music,” 265.

between music and different kinds of movement, and so to ground experiencing the
music metaphorically as movement. A number of the associations between music
and movement described in the association experiment could be of this kind.21 To
take a simple example, changes in inter-onset intervals of tones may be isomorphic
with changes in the rate of footsteps as someone walks or runs faster, and so may be
metaphorically experienced as changes in speed of movement. That suggests that at
least some examples of hearing movement in music may be explained in terms of
our experiencing the music metaphorically as that movement.
It would seem, then, that Peacocke’s account of hearing “metaphorically-as”
provides the basis of an explanation of how movement can be part of the content of
an experience of music, and so explains how something extra-musical can be part
of the content of an experience of music. But metaphorical content doesn’t cap-
ture anything that is intrinsic to our experience of music. To say this is not to say
that the metaphoric content isn’t part of the content of our experience of music,
because on Peacocke’s account it is. The problem is that the metaphorical content
is something additional to the musical content of the experience. Consider the ex-
perience of someone who fails to experience metaphorical content in the music in
some way. They will miss something about the music that is there to be appreciated,
but they will still experience the music as such; and there’s no reason to think that
they couldn’t experience the music as having whatever properties would make the
metaphorical content appropriate. They may simply lack the understanding, or the
imaginative or other capacities, required to bring to bear the metaphorical content.
So metaphorical content is not intrinsic to experiencing the music, even if it is es-
sential to enjoying the full experience that the music can provide. For someone who
fails to experience the metaphorical content, what the experience lacks is some-
thing extra-musical.
If the connection between our experience of rhythm and movement is meta-
phorical, then movement is not intrinsic to our experience of rhythm as such. In
failing to hear a rhythm as involving movement we would miss something about
the rhythm that is available to someone who does hear the movement, but we would
still hear the rhythm. So metaphorical content is not intrinsic to our experience of
rhythm as such, though it may be essential to a richer experience of the rhythm that
involves an appreciation of the metaphorical content made available by the rhythm.
The metaphorical content does not help explain features of the rhythm as such, nor
does it explain why we experience tones as grouped or what grouping consists in.
One kind of explanation of the expressive powers of music appeals to the idea of
resemblance. We can recognize a passage of music as resembling a human expres-
sion of emotion.22 According to this resemblance account, we experience music as
expressive of an emotion because it sounds the same in some respect as a human
expression of that emotion. For example, we can perceive music as having a pitch
21 It would be an interesting exercise to show that all the association examples can be explained in this way.
22 Kivy, Sound Sentiment.

contour that is similar to the pitch contour of a vocal expression of an emotion.

A passage from Handel’s Messiah, “Rejoice Greatly, O Daughter of Zion!”, resembles
the voice rising in joy.23 The vocal lines of Dido’s lament, in Purcell’s Dido and
Aeneas, resemble human vocal expressions of grief and intense loss.24 Our experi-
ence of the music comes to have content concerning the emotion in the same way
our experience of a vocal expression of the emotion comes to have content con-
cerning the emotion. A passage of music may resemble other kinds of expressive
behavior. For example, there may be a structural similarity between music and the
expressive motion of the human body.25
This account in terms of resemblance can be extended beyond the expressive.
Eric Clarke has suggested that the connection between music and movement
derives from the way sounds specify their sources. “The structure of music can and
does specify objects and events in the world . . . and kinds of action,” including
movements.26 Clarke draws a parallel between music and painting. The pigment
in a painting is such that the experience we have when looking at a painting can
be like that we have when looking at what is depicted in the painting. He suggests
that music can work in the same way, by producing experiences of sounds that are
like those produced by events in the world. There is a resemblance between the
experiences of music and the experiences we have of sounds produced by events in
the world. In virtue of that resemblance,
music may create perceptual effects with the disposition of discrete pitches and
instrumental timbres in time that reproduce, or approximate to, those that we ex-
perience with the continuous acoustical transformation that are characteristic of
real world events.27
Clarke argues that there is perceptual information that specifies motion in

music that is the same as that involved in the perception of motion in everyday
circumstances. The motion is neither real nor metaphorical, but “fictional” in the
way a scene in a picture is.28
For example, in everyday circumstances when something approaches it gets
larger in the visual field. As a consequence, when something gets larger in the
visual field it can seem to be approaching (even when it is not). There are musical
equivalents of that looming effect. A musical crescendo can produce sounds that
mimic the auditory equivalent of looming in the visual field.29 Another example
23 Kivy, Sound Sentiment, 51.

24 Peacocke, “The Perception of Music,” 269.
25 Kivy, Sound Sentiment, 53–4. Assuming one may perceive someone’s emotion, this explanation in terms
of resemblance is a perceptual account. Someone who rejected that assumption might claim that the resem-
blance merely puts us in a position to recognize the emotion.
26 Clarke, “Motion in Music,” 217.
Clarke gives is a passage from Fatboy Slim’s “Build it Up, Tear it Down.” Clarke
describes the music in detail.30
The perceptual effect of this passage, Clarke says, is of a continuous movement
toward an occluded sound source that is progressively revealed. The explanation of
the effect is that the music changes in a way that resembles the way our experience
of the sound made by an occluded sound source changes as we approach it. The
spectral composition of a sound changes with distance: higher frequencies are more
effectively occluded by objects and dissipate in the environment more quickly, so at
a distance a sound appears darker and to lack higher frequency components. As we
approach a sound source the appearance of the sound changes: it becomes brighter
in a way that is mimicked by the music.
There is something right about this suggestion, particularly the idea that there
is perceptual information that specifies motion in music that is the same as that
involved in the perception of motion in everyday circumstances. But it’s a mistake
to think that music specifies “fictional” rather than real motion (analogously to the
way pictures depict). To see why, we need a better understanding of how auditory
perception enables the perception of events in the world, including movements. In
the next section, I set out an account of auditory perception that shows how that is
possible.
III
Sounds can be produced by solid objects, by liquids (e.g., flowing water), and by
gasses (e.g., the wind).31 Objects produce sounds when they are caused to vibrate
by impacts, scraping, rolling, or deformations. Call these events, the events that
cause an object to vibrate, “sound-producing” events. Sound-producing events are
events that we can pick out in ordinary ways (“tapping the desk” picks out a sound-
producing event). They are individuated in terms of objects and interactions be-
tween objects as ordinarily conceived. Sound-producing events cause vibrations.
Consider any relatively reverberant object,32 such as a metal plate or tray. Tapping
such an object causes it to vibrate; the vibration continues for a period of time
and gradually dies away. The vibration of the object is distinct from the tap that
causes the vibration. We can therefore distinguish two events: a sound-producing
event (the tap), and the object-vibration (the reverberation) caused by the sound-
producing event. There are different accounts that might be given of the ontology
of sounds,33 but most accounts view sounds as vibratory events. In particular, they

31 In what follows my discussion will focus on sounds produced by objects, but could be extended to sounds
produced in other ways.
32 The distinction that I draw here is clearest in the case of reverberant objects, but it also applies to objects
that we would not normally regard as reverberant.
33 Casati and Dokic, “Sounds,” provides a survey of ontology of sound. O’Callaghan, Sounds: A Philosophical
Theory, and Casati and Dokic, La philosophie du son, defend the event view. Pasnau, “What is Sound?”, rejects
the event view.
view sounds as the object-vibrations that are caused by sound-producing events. So

when we experience a sound we experience a vibratory event, an object-vibration.
Objects vibrate along a number of different dimensions according to their shape,
size, and material composition, how they were caused to vibrate, and whether they
are constrained in any way (by resting on a surface or being otherwise supported).
Each dimension of vibration corresponds to a mode of the object’s vibration. Object
vibrations cause pressure waves in the surrounding medium—typically air—that
propagate through the medium to reach our ears. The sound wave that reaches our
ears may be the result of more than one object vibration. In order to produce an ex-
perience of individual sounds, the auditory system must interpret the sound wave.
It does so in such a way as to produce a representation of the sound-producing
events in the environment responsible for the sound wave. This is a process known
as “auditory scene analysis.”34 Some aspects of this process of interpretation are rel-
atively well understood. In general terms, the auditory system functions to deter-
mine the occurrence of those sound-producing events in the environment that best
explain the pattern of frequency components that make up the sound wave detected
by the ears, and it groups together frequency components into individual sounds
according to whether they were produced by a single event.
Auditory scene analysis groups frequency components both at and over
time: frequency components that are detected simultaneously are grouped ac-
cording to whether they were produced by the same of different events; and fre-
quency components detected over time are grouped according to whether they are
a continuation of a previously detected event or a new event. This process is both
bottom-up and top-down. For example, frequency components of the sound wave
are grouped together in a bottom-up way on the basis of the temporal, harmonic,
and phase relationships between them; frequency components are grouped together
in a top-down way on the basis of past experience of that pattern of components
having occurred together. The result of auditory scene analysis is an experience that
represents two things: it represents the events in our environment that (are likely to
have) produced the sound wave detected by the ears, and it represents sounds cor-
responding to those events.
Given that auditory experience has this structure—representing both sounds
and their sources—it is possible for it to misrepresent in two different ways: by
misrepresenting sounds or by misrepresenting the sources of sounds. The latter is
far more common than the former. When sound waves are produced in ways that
are abnormal from the point of view of the auditory system, it may result in a non-
veridical representation of sound-producing events. When this happens we have an
experience of sounds that seem to have been produced by an event or events that
did not in fact produce them. The result is a kind of illusion: a non-veridical experi-
ence of sound sources. We experience this kind of illusion when we listen to stereo
loudspeakers. Loudspeakers are designed to produce sound waves that would
34 Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis.

normally be produced by events of various kinds occurring in our environment—

by a number of different instruments being played for example. The result is that we
experience sounds that seem to have been produced by events—by the playing of
instruments—that did not in fact produce them.
There is a widespread conception of auditory perception that views its function
as the perception of sounds. According to this conception, the auditory system
functions to tell us what sounds there are in our environment. According to the
account I have sketched, the auditory system functions to track sound-producing
events in our environment, rather than the sounds produced. So we should con-
ceive of auditory perception as a perceptual system whose function is the percep-
tion of sound sources rather than sounds. That’s not to deny that we experience
sounds; it is to claim that we experience sounds as a consequence of perceiving the
sources of those sounds.
Why think that the auditory system functions to track the sources of sounds
rather than sounds? First, it follows from the assumption that the function of per-
ception in general is to promote our survival, and that it does so by telling us about
the things in our environment that matter to our survival. It is the ordinary events
occurring in our environment—the snapping of a stick or the footsteps behind me,
the running water in the distance—that can make a difference to our survival; not
the sounds produced by these events. It is possible for the auditory system to re-
cover information about these ordinary events, so, from an ecological perspective,
it makes sense that the auditory system functions to track them.
Second, it is not possible to explain our experience of sounds in terms of a percep-
tual system that functions to track sounds. Sounds are object-vibrations, so if the au-
ditory system functions to track sounds it must function to track object-vibrations.
But it cannot have that function. To see why, consider how object-vibrations could
be individuated. There are different ways in which the overall vibration of an object
could be individuated. We could simply list each different mode of the vibration
and so think of the object as vibrating in many different ways; or we could add to-
gether these different modes to produce a single complex vibration, and so pick out
the object-vibration in terms of the single complex vibration that begins at the mo-
ment the object is struck, lasting until the object returns to a state of equilibrium.
Neither way individuates object vibrations in a way that corresponds to the sounds
we hear. A single object can vibrate in such a way that we hear two sounds. For ex-
ample, a reverberant object that is tapped twice in quick succession produces two
sounds. If these sounds are object-vibrations, then how are those object-vibrations
individuated? It can’t be in terms of the overall vibration of the object. Some of the
modes of vibration of the object belong together as one sound, and others belong
together as the other sound. What determines which go with which? There are two
possible explanations.
According to the first explanation, the vibrations are individuated in terms of the
experience to which they give rise: there are two vibrations because we experience
two sounds. Each experienced sound is causally dependent on only some modes
of the object’s vibration. So two vibrations can be individuated as the complex sum
of the modes of vibration on which each experienced sound causally depends. If
this explanation of how we individuate object vibrations is right then we can’t ex-
plain why we hear two sounds by appeal to the fact that the auditory system detects
two object-vibrations. Rather, there are two object-vibrations because we hear
two sounds. So the suggestion that the auditory system functions to track object-
vibrations is undermined.
According to the second explanation, the vibrations are individuated in terms
of what caused them. There are two distinct events—two events of tapping the
object—that cause the object to vibrate. Some of the modes of the object’s vibration
are caused by one of these events and some are caused by the other. So two object-
vibrations can be individuated as the complex sum of the modes of vibration caused
by each of the events. If this explanation of how we individuate object vibrations is
right we can’t explain why we hear two sounds by appeal to the fact there are two
object-vibrations that the auditory system detects; rather we hear two sounds be-
cause the auditory system detects two sound-producing events. Again, the sugges-
tion that the auditory system tracks object-vibrations is undermined.
What picture of auditory perception are we left with? It is one according to which
the auditory system functions to represent ordinary sound-producing events in our
environment. It does so by interpreting the sound wave produced by the vibrations
caused by those events in such a way as to produce an experience of sounds that
correspond to the events whose occurrence would best explain that sound wave.
Auditory experience represents both sounds and the sound-producing events that
produced them, both sounds and their sources; and we experience the sounds we
do as a consequence of the fact that we perceive their (apparent) sources.
Once we recognize that auditory experience represents both sounds and their
sources we have the materials for explaining both auditory grouping and the audi-
tory perception of movement. We experience sounds as grouped together in two
ways: as temporally extended sounds (whose parts are experienced as grouped in a
single ongoing sound), and as grouped sequences of sounds. To experience sounds
as grouped in both these ways is for them to seem to have a single source. This is a
consequence of the way auditory scene analysis groups frequency components over
time. We experience a temporally extended sound as having been produced by a
single event, and a sequence of sounds as having been produced by a sequence of
events that form part of some ongoing process. It follows that auditory grouping is
not explained in terms of a relation—such as Scruton’s “virtual causality”—between
sounds themselves, but in terms of relations between events in the environment
that appear to produce them.
If the auditory system represents events in our environment, what properties
does it represent those events as having? This is an empirical question and an-
swering it requires empirical investigation. We know that sound waves carry a great
deal of information about sound sources: information about the nature of the ob-
ject, including its size, shape and material constitution; what happened to it that
caused it to vibrate; and about the environment in which it is vibrating. It is reason-

able to think that the auditory system recovers this information, and empirical in-
vestigation tends to support this. There is evidence that we can, on basis of hearing
the sounds produced, perceive the material properties of objects, the force with
which an object was struck, and the size and shape of an object.35
In addition, we can recognize a wide variety of events on the basis of hearing
them. William Gaver suggests that our capacity to recognize complex events in our
environment can be explained on the basis of capacities to recognize more basic
events.36 The basic kinds of sound-producing event that we can recognize include
movements. For example, we can recognize the sound of something rolling—a ball,
say—and tell how fast it is rolling; we can recognize a sound as produced by the
dragging or scraping of something across a rough surface; we can hear a sequence
of sounds as produced by the footsteps of an animal. The best explanation of our
capacities to do this is that auditory experience represents sound-producing events
as events of certain specific kinds and not merely as bare happenings responsible for
the sounds we hear.
The perception of music is not special. Our experience of music is explained
by the operation of the same perceptual processes that explain our experience of
sounds in general. That means that the psychological processes that explain our ex-
perience of music are continuous with the psychological processes that explain au-
ditory perception. In particular, the organization of sounds in music is explained in
the same way it is in auditory perception in general: the grouping of musical sounds
is explained in terms of the same processes that explain the grouping of environ-
mental sounds. Therefore, to experience a sequence of musical sounds as grouped
is—as it is for sounds generally—to experience them as produced by a sequence
of events that form part of some ongoing process. That is true even when the ex-
perience is non-veridical. That is, we can explain the grouping of musical sounds
in terms of their seeming to have been produced by a single event or process even
when they were not so produced. This may happen when different instruments—
different sound sources—produce a sequence of sounds, which are such that the
auditory system treats them as having a single source because, for example, they are
harmonically related.
What differences there are between our experience of music and our experi-
ence of sounds more generally is a consequence of the fact that musical sounds are
produced in a way that is abnormal from the point of view of the auditory system.
They are produced by the playing of instruments that are designed and played
with the aim of producing harmonically pure sounds with little temporal structure
35 Wildes and Richards, “Recovering Material Properties,” discusses evidence of hearing material
properties; Freed, “Auditory Correlates,” likewise for hardness; Kunkler-Peck and Turvey, “Hearing Shape,”
and Lakatos et al., “Simple Geometric Form,” for shape; Li et al., “Walking Sounds” for walking; Houben et al.,
“Rolling Balls,” for rolling. Carello at al., “Object Properties,” provides general discussion.
36 Gaver, “How do We Hear in the World?” and “What in the World do We Hear?”; McAdams, “Recognition
of Sound Sources.”
(compared to sounds produced by typical environmental events). So in the case of

music, although we experience sounds as produced by sound-producing events,
our perception of the events that produce musical sounds is often impoverished
and may be illusory. Furthermore, we normally don’t attend to sound-producing
events in listening to music—we adopt an “acousmatic attitude,” attending to mu-
sical sounds apart from the circumstances of their production (unlike environ-
mental sounds where we attend to the source event rather than the sound).
This account of auditory perception undermines the account of our experience
of music as purely auditory. We saw above that Scruton argues that, since move-
ment in the material world involves something that changes location and since we
can’t make sense of music changing location, any musical movement is not anal-
ogous to movement in the physical world and so cannot be understood literally.
But if the outline of auditory perception that I have sketched is right we can make
sense of experiencing a kind of movement in music that is movement in the phys-
ical world. Once we allow that our auditory experience, and so our experience of
music, has content concerning events in the world, we can make sense of our expe-
rience of music involving an experience of movement—the movement of things in
the world—even if sounds do not themselves move.
A difficulty for any attempt to give a literal or perceptual account of movement
in music is to explain what it is that is supposed to be moving. “In hearing the sub-
ject of a Bach fugue . . . it is not at all clear what is moving or where that movement
is taking place.”37 According to the perceptual account I sketched, there are two
kinds of movement that may be part of our experience of music. Some of the events
that produce musical sounds are movements, and it may be possible to perceive
these events as movements. The first kind of movements that may be part of our
experience of music are the actual movements involved in producing the music.
When a violin is played, the bow moves over the strings. We may perceive the re-
sultant sounds as produced by the bow’s movement, and we may perceive features
of the movement—its speed, how forceful it is, and so on. Not all the events that
produce musical sounds are movements. Sounds can be produced by, for example,
striking, plucking, or blowing events. Although these events are normally brought
about by movements—by the movements of performers—they are not themselves
movements. It may be that we can perceive musical sounds as produced by these
events, but that is not to perceive them as produced by movements.
The second kind of movement that may be part of the content of our experience
of music is merely apparent movement. When we hear a sequence of sounds it can
seem that the sounds were produced by events that did not in fact produce them.
A sequence of sounds can seem to have been produced by movement that did not
actually produce it. A simple example would be a series of musical sounds which are
such that they seem to have been produced by walking. They can seem this way in
virtue of having properties that lead the auditory system to represent the series of
37 Gjerdingen, “Apparent Motion in Music?”, 142.

sounds as produced by walking even if they were not in fact produced that way. That
a sequence of sounds seems to have been produced by walking is part of the content
of the experience, not simply something we imagine or cognize, and not simply a
matter of the sounds resembling the sounds made by actual walking.
A more interesting example is provided by studies of “expressive timing” in mu-
sical performance. When a piece of music is performed, the performer will normally
make changes in the detailed timing of the notes so that what she plays deviates
from the temporal pattern or structure of the music represented in the musical no-
tation. The changes that performers introduce to timing have been investigated.38
By analyzing the performances of a piece of music by different performers, an av-
erage timing profile for a piece of music can be produced. These analyses show that
the changes introduced by performers have an archetypal acceleration-deceleration
pattern, and that the shape of the timing curve is analogous to forms of physical
or biological motion.39 There is a similarity in the temporal structure of physical
motion and the temporal structure of the music as performed. When we hear a se-
quence of sounds with this timing pattern, the sounds seem to have been produced
by a certain kind of movement. We experience the musical sounds as having been
produced by a certain kind of movement. It’s not implausible to think that the per-
former introduces changes to the timing of the music to achieve just this effect.
It is plausible that our experience of these events, which actually or apparently
produce the sounds we hear, can explain some of the expressive powers of music
in a way similar to that suggested by Jerrold Levinson.40 Levinson’s account of the
expressiveness of music has two components. An account of what can be heard in
music, in particular the idea that we hear the gestures of the performers; and an ac-
count of how hearing those gestures can explain our hearing the music as expressive
of, e.g., emotion.41 The first component has some affinities with the account I have
outlined. Levinson suggests that when we hear a passage of music we imagine the
gestures of the performer who produces it, which gestures we take to be responsible
for the sounds we hear.
The gestures rightly heard in music are only heard in their specificity if the ap-
parent performing gestures behind the sequences of sounds per se are taken into ac-
count. For the gestures we are right to hear in musical sequences are those we hear
in them when we are cognizant of the instrumental actions understood to generate
such sequences.42 The gestures we hear in the music—the musical gestures—are a
function of the performing gestures and so “are partly determined by what we take
performers of the passage to literally be doing in producing it.”43
38 Repp, “Patterns of Expressive Timing.”

39 Friberg and Sundberg, “Model of Final Ritardandi.”
40 Levinson, “Authentic Performance.”
41 On the second component, Levinson says “The expressiveness of music is grounded in the fact that
the actions or gestures one hears in a passage of music recall the actions or gestures that serve as behavioral
expressions of emotions, which allows us to hear the former as the latter”: “Authentic Performance,” 82.
42 Levinson, “Authentic Performance,” 83.
My account of auditory perception fits with the idea that we can hear the
performers’ gestures in music, but there are two significant points of disagreement
with Levinson. The first concerns what it is to hear events in music. On my account,
the events we hear are part of the content of our auditory experience. They are
events that we experience as the apparent sources of the sounds we hear, not events
that we merely imagine, cognize, or associate with the sounds we hear. The second
concerns which events we hear in music. According to Levinson, what we hear are
the performing gestures “that we imagine as responsible for the sounds we hear.”44
On my account, the events we hear may be the events that are actually responsible
for the sounds we hear—the sound producing events—and in that case they will be
events that were brought about by the performer (it is a further step to say that we
hear them as events for which a performer is responsible). But the events we “hear”
in music may not be the events that actually produced the sounds. They may simply
be events that apparently produced the sounds, and in that case they are not events
for which a performer was responsible. The explanation of our hearing music as ex-
pressive can appeal to the fact that we hear performers’ gestures in music, whether
as a result of experiencing the events that actually produce the sounds or merely
appear to do so.
An important element of rhythm in music is our experience of musical sounds as
sequentially grouped. I have given an account of what it is to experience a sequence
of sounds as grouped: it is to experience them as apparently produced by a sequence
of extra-musical events that are related as parts of an ongoing process. Grouping is
central to our experience of rhythm in music, so understanding the role of extra-
musical events in our experience of grouping is central to understanding our expe-
rience of rhythm in music. Further, I have suggested that we can experience sounds
as apparently produced by movement and that experiencing sounds as produced by
movement is part of the content of our experience of musical sounds as grouped,
and not something that we simply recognize or judge on the basis of hearing sounds.
The movement we hear in music can be literal movement perceived (or apparently
perceived) in the music. This account of the content of our experience of music is
an account of one element of our experience of music and rhythm. That our experi-
ence of music has this kind of content doesn’t rule out its being related to movement
in other ways, for example by having metaphorical content concerning movement.
Indeed, it might have metaphorical content partly in virtue of having content con-
cerning literal movement.
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3
The Ontology of Rhythm
Peter Simons
1. Introduction
The experience of rhythm is practically universal among humans and so familiar

that we rarely think about it. Rhythm is one of the central elements of music in all
its forms. But what is rhythm? This, the ontological question, is the one Aristotle
taught us to answer first if we wish to know about something. What are we talking
about? To answer it turns out to be surprisingly intricate and not as straightforward
as one might initially imagine. But that is the task here.
The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first usage of “rhythm” in English to
1560, in connection with prosody, and to 1576 in connection with music, with the
Latin rhythmus first cited in English in 1531. The word of course goes back to the
Greek rhythmós, having to do with dance, and, at its root, flow (rheō). The OED def-
inition of the English word in connection with music reads:
The systematic grouping of musical sounds, principally according to duration and

periodical stress; beat; an instance of this, a particular grouping or arrangement of
musical sounds.
From such a broad lexical description, which aims to capture the spread of usage,
we do not expect ontological precision, but the lexicon fixes the general area in
which we must investigate. While the term “rhythm” has been used in connec-
tion with other areas, such as sedimentation in geology, we shall confine attention
to rhythm as perceptibly unfolding in time. We shall also be looking especially,
though not exclusively, at rhythm among sounds, and again, in particular, as to
be expected, at rhythm in music. However, we should bear in mind that, like the
majority of terms in everyday use, the term does not have a precise definition or
delimitation, and nor should we expect it to have one. We shall see in fact that
one of our more intricate tasks is to indicate the limits of what counts as rhythm.
Because of this intricacy, we shall start with very basic considerations and move
forward slowly.
The Ontology of Rhythm 63
2. Rhythms as Characters of Processes
Having determined that we are only interested in rhythms as they pertain to time,
this indicates that we should be considering something which is spread or extends
over time. Such things are processes. In familiar cases they can be movements
such as the swinging of a leg or a pendulum, the jiggling of a foot in time to music,
the steps of a dance. They do not have to be musical: the walking of a person, the
breathing of a fish and the galloping of a horse are also rhythmical, and not just in
sound. Mostly here though we are interested in processes associated with the pro-
duction (and perception) of sounds, such as the beating of a drum, the tapping of a
finger, the clicking of a finger, the sound of a piece of machinery, and so on. These
processes are not themselves rhythms, so a rhythm as such is not a process. Rather
rhythm, where present, is something that the process has, exemplifies, which
characterizes, pertains to, or is inherent in the process. It follows from this that a
rhythm cannot exist in isolation, but has to be the rhythm of something. In philo-
sophical terms, this makes a rhythm a property, not a substance. Since I do not want
to enter here into the ontological disputes around properties, we shall stick with the
more neutral term “character,” which carries little philosophical baggage. So I shall
call rhythms characters of processes. At the end I mention briefly my metaphysical
position on properties or characters as particulars.
To call a rhythm a character of a process is not to render it in any way static or to
deny that the rhythmic character unfolds through time. Quite the contrary: because
the character concerns a process, taken as it unfolds in time, it is paradigmatically
not static, unlike say a graphical pattern.
3. Rhythms Typically Involve Repetition
Not all characters of processes are rhythms: they do not unfold in the right way. For
example, one character of a process is its duration. The flight of a projectile, such as
a well struck cricket ball, is a process, and it has a certain duration, for example four
seconds. But this duration is not a rhythm. Nor is the process’s location, nor is its
cause, nor is its perpetrator if it has one. Some processes have no rhythm, the flight
of a cricket ball from being struck to coming to rest being a case in point. For a pro-
cess to have a rhythm there must be some kind of repetition, possibly but not nec-
essarily exact, within the process. A pendulum swings to a rhythm, to and fro. Each
swing takes roughly the same amount of time, so talk of a rhythm is appropriate.
Each swing, first one way, then the other, resembles earlier and later swings, so there
are repetitions. The double swing, to and fro, is a temporal part or subprocess of the
longer process of swinging, and these subprocesses come one after the other in a re-
petitive way, until the process stops or runs down. So it is of the essence of processes
with rhythm that there be successive subprocesses of generally like kind. We might
at a pinch say that a pendulum which swings only once and is then stopped has a
rhythm, but only by courtesy of our knowledge that it would continue to swing with
a certain rhythm if left undisturbed.
We shall not then in general count processes without any kind of internal repeti-
tion or variation as having rhythm, which rules out the cricket ball flight. However,
there are cases of unrepeated (though repeatable) processes where we are reason-
ably inclined to ascribe a rhythm to the process, even when its internal structure
does not consist of exact or approximate repetition of very similar subprocesses.
They are on the limit of, but not outside, the extension of the concept of the rhyth-
mical. For this to apply however, there must be some qualitatively discernible
internal variation in the process which gives it a kind of unrepeated temporally ar-
ticulated pattern. A spatial analogy may help. A ploughed field with its repeated
furrows is regularly patterned. It is a spatial analogue of the simple pendulum or
the heartbeat. A mountain range with its peaks, ridges, shoulders, valleys, cliffs,
hollows, etc. is irregular and unrepetitive, but it still instantiates a highly complex
pattern of ups and downs, variations in altitude across locations. That pattern may
not be repeated, but it could in principle occur more than once. It is the same with
an irregular process. However, where the process is completely or nearly homo-
geneous, we are inclined to deny that it has a rhythm, just as we are inclined to
deny that a flat featureless plain has a pattern. The nearly homogeneous flight of the
cricket ball has no rhythm.
4. Repetitive Processes in General
Where processes have repetitions, we are inclined to look for rhythms. We do so

even when the repetitions are not exactly regular. To take a physiological example,
our heart beats in a cyclical way and produces the regular lub–dub noise familiar to
physicians. But heartbeats are not perfectly regular, as the heart speeds up or slows
down in response to bodily and environmental conditions. We then describe the
rhythm as inconstant or changing, but we do not deny one exists altogether. When
a heart fails to contract and beat in a repetitive way, as in ventricular fibrillation,
physicians speak of arrhythmia or lack of rhythm, although they also refer to other
anomalies of heartbeat as either arrhythmia or dysrhythmia. (Bless the physicians,
they have a name for everything.)
There are extremely many kinds of repetitive process in nature: they occur at all
scales and in all domains. Many are familiar from everyday experience. The rota-
tion of the earth, once per day, is evident from the apparent motions of heavenly
bodies, notably the sun. The orbiting of the moon around the earth shows up in
the lunar cycle. The orbiting of the earth around the sun shows up in the seasons
and in the visible shifts in the heavens. At smaller scales, the rate at which an elec-
tromagnetic field oscillates is manifest in different colors of light, different radio
wavelengths, and so on. The speed at which material particles vibrate to and fro
about a mean position manifests itself as sound tones of different pitches. On an

intermediate scale, our own heartbeats, rates of breathing and rates of walking or
running constitute natural rhythms for our own bodies.
What is characteristic of all these repetitive processes is that they consist of a se-
quence of parts, one succeeding the other, usually without interruption, such that
each part is similar in its characteristics to the parts before and after it, where such
similarity is frequently itself a matter of succession of like parts. So the diurnal rep-
etition we call day and night follows the same pattern every time: the sun rises in
the east, moves across the sky in a smooth arc and sets in the west. During the night,
though we cannot see it, the sun continues its cyclical journey around and beneath
us to reappear in the east. Of course the cause of this apparent motion of the sun is
the rotation of the earth, but it too is a smooth cycle, with the earth rotating anti-
clockwise as seen from the North Pole and a smooth succession of great semicircles
being in the plane in which lie both the line between the poles and the line between
the centers of sun and earth.
5. Perceptible Repetition
Not all repetitive processes are perceived by us as repetitive. Some repeat too
rapidly, others too slowly. An example illustrates the vague borderline between
rhythms we perceive as such and those we do not. A regularly repetitive short noise
like a click or the combustion phase of a single-cylinder engine may be experienced
as repetitive and rhythmical if its frequency is roughly between 0.6 Hz and 8 Hz. If
it is slower, the perception is of a series of disconnected clicks or bangs, whereas if
it is faster it is perceived as a drone or a pitched note. So we do not experience slow-
frequency repetitions as rhythmical, nor ones whose frequency is too high, even
though these are of the same general kind as processes we experience as rhythmical.
It has often been remarked that the frequencies we perceive as rhythmical corre-
spond closely to those of the human heart and of a single human step, and no doubt
this is not accidental.
For the purposes of considering rhythm as it concerns music there is no point
served by taking repetitive processes which are not perceived as rhythmical as
exhibiting rhythm. For example, the regular vibrations of air molecules that are
produced by an oboe sounding a 440 Hz A for orchestral tuning are rhythmical
from a physical point of view, but they are perceived as pitch, not rhythm. When we
come to consider longer temporal stretches, the upper limit of duration is less clear.
Rhythmical combinations such as repeated motifs or melodies are experienced as
repetitive, but on the other hand they are often recognized as repetitive rather than
as rhythmical. In any case, we are accustomed to discerning rhythmical repetitions
lasting several seconds, so we shall not be excessively fussy or precise in looking for
an upper bound.
6. Coping with Complexity: Clades
One of the difficulties facing an ontological account of rhythm is that the term
appears so elastic. There are very simple cases of rhythm, such as the one-two-three
of waltz time, and there are extremely complex cases, such as the irregular rhythms
of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the overlaid syncopated rhythms of a Bach fugue,
gamelan music, or the polyrhythms of Indian or West African music. In such cases
as this there is no prospect of finding a traditional definition giving necessary and
sufficient conditions for being a rhythm: there will be examples straying outside the
supposed boundary.
A second classificatory paradigm also turns out to be unhelpful. This is the idea
of a focal or prototypical example. This works well in certain areas where neces-
sary and sufficient conditions are lacking. For example, it works well with basic
colors: samples of red surround the prototypical region of red, which is what
humans across the world take as the brightest and reddest red, and something
is red to the extent it is similar to this focal case. But there is no focal instance of
rhythm making something more or less of a rhythm to the extent that it resembles
the focal case.
Rather than give a mere pot-pourri of examples, we will approach the task of
saying what rhythm is by adapting a method of biological classification. Biologists
classify organisms together only if they share a common ancestor. So sharks,
salmon, and dolphins, though they are all streamlined aquatic animals, do not
share a recent ancestor, and to find their last common ancestor you have to include
with them snakes, mammals, birds, and much else that is very unlike them. By con-
trast humans, chimps, gorillas and orangutans do share a recent common ancestor.
The collection of all the descendants of a single ancestor species is called a clade.
Biological systematists work to establish clades. Now in the area of rhythm there
are no biological ancestry relations, so this method will not work, but a formal an-
alogue of it may. Consider the idea of number in mathematics. Numbers include
the natural numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, . . . ; the negative numbers; the fractions or rational
numbers; the real numbers; the complex numbers; and . . . and here we can choose
to extend the idea further to quaternions and other field structures such as Clifford
algebras, and Conway’s hyperreal numbers; or we can stipulate that numbers will go
just up to, say, the complex numbers and no further. There is no absolute fact of the
matter saying what is a number and what is not. Rather there are certain properties
characteristic of some of them, and then when we move to another sort, we have
some properties retained and others lost or replaced. When confined to the natural
numbers subtraction does not always give a result, for example when we (try to)
subtract 5 from 2; but in the integers, there is a result: −3. With the integers we gain
a new property, closure under subtraction. The family of structures starting from
the natural numbers and extending further out as properties are allowed to vary
(here formal, not empirical properties), constitutes what we can call a formal clade.
The suggestion then is that, in order to tame the complexity, we treat rhythm as
a formal clade. We start with straightforward cases, and then see what transpires
as we vary and add complications. The result will, as in the case of number, not be
a matter of discerning an antecedently existing essence of rhythm, but will never-
theless be charting variations in a complex landscape. Somewhat more than in the
case of number, we will be constrained by empirical limits. Mathematicians are
notoriously flexible in what they will accept as a formal structure of interest. We on
the other hand ought to remain anchored to the givens of human psychology. It is
no use calling something a rhythm because it is a variant, an extension or modifi-
cation of something else we call a rhythm, if it fails to impinge on our experience.
For example, a sonic repetition that is too loud, too quiet, too fast, too slow, or too
complex to be even potentially recognizable as a rhythm will not count. A rhythm
of five, six, seven, eight beats, with one accented, is perceptible by us; a rhythm
of nine beats on the other hand is typically perceived as a compound rhythm of
three threes. A rhythm of twenty-nine beats with one accent would simply not be
recognized by us as rhythmic, though physically it is just as good as waltz time.
A polyrhythm of 3 against 2 is easily recognizable and perceptible as such as a
rhythm, a polyrhythm of 53 against 51 is not, at least not by humans. Maybe other
creatures than ourselves could recognize it as such, and if so, good luck to them: to
us it would sound just a mess. So we will stick for now with terrestrial and indeed
with human limitations.
7. Beginning with Simple Things: Pulse, Cycle,

Tempo, Beat
Consider as simple an example as possible: a clock ticking. Assume each tick sounds
exactly like every other and that they are regular, that is, evenly spaced. The dura-
tion of each tick is short compared with the duration of the silence between ticks,
each tick has the same duration as the others, and each silence (or Abklang if the
sound dies away perceptibly) has the same duration as the others. This is as repet-
itive (and indeed monotonous) a process (or sequence of processes; we shall not
make a distinction) as can be imagined. Repetitions such as this are rare in music,
though not unknown. A modern near-example is the repeated opening chord of
Stockhausen’s Klavierstück IX, which occurs over 200 times (overlooking dynamic
changes and microvariations).
We call each tick or other sound in such a sequence a pulse, and the aural whole
consisting of the pulse and its following silence up to the next pulse, a cycle. Because
each pulse and silence is of the same duration, so is each cycle, and the rate or speed
of cycles is the repetitive process’s frequency or tempo. Like that of other regularly
repetitive phenomena, the frequency can be measured in cycles per second (hertz,
Hz), or in cycles per minute, or indeed cycles per other temporal unit, just as the du-
ration can be measured in seconds, minutes, microseconds, or whatever.
A common synonym of “pulse” is “beat.” We shall use the latter term not as a
synonym for “pulse” but as indicating either a pulse or a time at which there is no
pulse but at which, given the context, we naturally expect a pulse, and which we
typically mark mentally as if there were a pulse. A clear example is where we have
a regular pulse which occurs three times and then misses once, “skips a beat” as
we say, as in the pattern “one two three (and) one two three (and) . . . ,” in musical
notation
Counting both the pulses and the pulse gaps as beats gives us a regular sequence of
beats again, as there would be if there were only regular pulses, but now we have two
kinds of beats: sounding and silent.
8. Elements of Rhythmic Pattern
The example just given illustrates a characteristic feature of rhythms in general,

which is that a certain pattern of sounds is (typically) repeated. The case of an un-
broken cycle of equally spaced pulses is itself a pattern, but of the most monotonous
and uninteresting kind, and there would be no toehold in our thought for the no-
tion of rhythm if that were the only sort of pattern. The pattern of three pulses and a
silence, repeated over, is very slightly more interesting.
Not every kind of repeated temporal pattern of sounds automatically constitutes
a rhythm. A repeated melodic motif or phrase such as
exhibits a temporal pattern but not self-evidently a rhythmic one. Rhythm in fact
abstracts from relative pitch, with a small caveat to be entered presently, whereas a
motif such as this is all about relative pitch. Some rhythms may be due to pitch vari-
ation alone, but they are a limiting case. Usually, for a repeated pattern to count as a
rhythm, there is a contrast between strong, loud, or accented beats on the one hand,
and weak, soft, or unaccented beats on the other. This is before we take account of
length or duration of sounds. The 3 pulses + 1 silence pattern conforms to this be-
cause a silence is the limiting case of an unaccented beat. So the 3 + 1 pattern is a
rhythm. An only slightly more complicated rhythm is given by this pattern (omit-
ting fermate):
or its close relative
both of which play prominent parts in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. These patterns
show up the next level of complexity. One aspect of this is the different durations of
the pulses, as indicated by the different note values showing the relative durations
or lengths of the notes. Typically, in Western music there is an obvious felt or indi-
cated beat such that most (not all) note durations and silences are integral multiples
or integral fractions of this, and this is reflected in musical notation. The other is
that the groupings constituting patterns or subpatterns may have, or be given, beats
which count as beginning a repeating time stretch, or period. In Western music,
the first beat of such a period is often stressed, or is regarded as stressed (this can of
course be locally overridden), and the periods are marked in Western music by bar
lines, as
and depending on the number and type of beats in the bar we get a time signature,
so in the case of the Beethoven
and the “numerator” of such time signatures indicates the number of beats in a bar.
It is often said of a piece that it is in, say “3/4 rhythm” or “waltz rhythm,” but this
is a waste of a word. It is better to say a waltz is in 3/4 time. The rhythm of a motif in
waltz time, such as the famous motif (ignoring grace notes)
of Johann Strauss Jr.’s “The Blue Danube” is a rhythm that, as in many cases, cuts
across the time, the felt “one two three” of waltz time with its stressed first beat
of each period. The reason it is not unnatural to talk of “waltz rhythm” is that the
unadorned “one two three” is itself a rhythm, and of course it guides the dance,
but as the example shows, the actual rhythm of a motif written in waltz time may
be very different. The waltz time recurs in every bar, but the “Blue Danube” motif
spreads across five bars, starting with an upbeat at the end of the first and fin-
ishing on the downbeat of the fifth. Unadorned rhythms like this, which derive
from stressing the first beat of a certain time, or of main stress and subordinate
stress in compound time such as 6/8, we call base rhythms. They are a subclass of
monorhythms.
9. Monorhythms
We now have enough conceptual resources to define a simple rhythm, or as we

shall call it, a monorhythm. It is a repeatable (and typically repeated) pattern of
sounds and silences, which may be of different relative lengths or durations, where
some of the sounds may be more accented than others. This abstracts away from
non-rhythmical elements such as pitch and timbre. It also abstracts away from
tempo: not only can the same rhythm be played faster or slower, but composers
have frequently repeated a rhythmical pattern at half or double tempo. We cannot
abstract away from tempo completely because as we saw initially, there are fairly
narrow limits on how quickly or slowly sounds may succeed one another to be
perceived as rhythmical. But within those limits there is flexibility. Also variation
in amplitude (loudness) is permissible, provided the sounds remain audible but
not deafening (both of these factors being likewise relative to human perceptual
capabilities).
To specify or notate monorhythms we therefore need only three elements: one
to indicate the presence or absence of sound, one to indicate the relative lengths or
durations of these sounds or silences with respect to a beat duration taken as basic
unit, and one to indicate relative stress or accent. Standard musical notation excels
in the first two of these regards, the conventional notation managing relative lengths
of notes (sounds) and rests (silences) very well, insofar as these are integer multiples
or fractions of some basic beat. Stress and accent are less systematically notated.
Partly this is because standard bars or periods intimate a downbeat stress quasi-
automatically, partly because dynamic markings and accents give other indications
of more irregular strong and weak sounds, and partly because such differences tend
to be managed “on the fly” by practiced musicians. Note that periods (bars) and
bar lines are not a necessary element of rhythm or rhythmic notation respectively,
common and convenient as they are. A more systematic notation for stress could
theoretically make bar lines unnecessary. Also silences of different lengths could
be taken as maximally unstressed “sounds” of those lengths, thereby saving one el-
ement, if artificially.
10. Pattern, Repetition, Abstraction
Before moving to more complex rhythms, let us pause to consider some of the
ontological implications of what we have found so far. Rhythms, we said, are re-
peatable patterns in sound and silence. That they are repeatable, that the same
rhythm or rhythmical pattern is found now here, now there, gives them the status
of universals, not particulars. That they are not simple, but consist in patterns
of relationships among different elements, means they are not simple but struc-
tural universals. A simple universal is something like being middle C, or having a
pure sine wave timbre. By contrast the three shorts and a long Beethoven rhythm
requires more. To exemplify or instantiate it faithfully we need to produce three
noises of (more or less) equal intensity and length and at equal temporal intervals,
and follow them by a fourth noise which lasts a certain multiple of duration
longer than each shorter noise, and then to repeat the pattern in a regular way,
with or without an intervening silence. We must therefore pay attention to the
relationships among the different noises and silences. In a spatial analogue to this
temporal example, consider molecules of methane. To be a molecule of methane
is to consist of five immediate parts: one carbon atom, and four hydrogen atoms,
disposed tetrahedrally about the carbon and covalently bonded with it. Likewise,
to be an instance of the Beethoven motif is to consist of four parts, three equal
and one longer, in specified temporal (serial and durational) relationships to one
another.
This brings us to the dependent nature of rhythm. There is no such thing
as a bare rhythm, on its own and subsisting independently of anything else.
A rhythm is always the rhythm of some complex of sounds in relationship.
That was what we meant by saying that rhythm is not a substance. Nor is it the
universal or kind of a substance, as for example the kind methane molecule is.
A single methane molecule can happily subsist on its own: it is not the methane
molecule of anything else. A rhythm is more like a shape, or a speed: a shape
is always a shape of something (if only a portion of space), a speed is always
a speed of something. It is a kind of temporal pattern, a pattern of some pro-
cess. What can subsist independently is not the Beethoven motif per se, but
the realization of the Beethoven motif in certain concrete sounds (which are
themselves in turn dependent, requiring a source and a medium). If we wish
to talk about an individual instance of the Beethoven motif—as found in this
particular group of sounds—then the instance of the motif is a structural trope
or property instance, inhering in the sounds and dependent upon them in con-
junction with other elements of the sounds which make them as they are—their
pitch, intensity, timbre, tempo, etc.
11. Compound Rhythm
Sometimes a rhythm comes in a sequence of subgroups. Rhythms in 6/8 time are

typically felt and played as consisting of two groups of three, 9/8 as three groups
of three. These are usually marked by stresses every third beat and a strong stress
every second or third stress. A common form of rhythmical change in baroque and
classical music is the hemiola, in which two groups of three beats are replaced with
three groups of two beats (or vice versa), giving the impression or effect of a shift
from triple to duple meter or back, without changing the time signature. Bruckner
was fond of a two plus three rhythm; the main motif of the first movement, “Ruhig
bewegt, Allegro molto moderato,” of his 4th Symphony in E♭ being a prominent case
in point (there are many other examples):
A slightly more complex example is the rhythm of Bernstein’s song “America”

from West Side Story:
12. Complex Rhythms
A complex rhythm (the term is used here relatively loosely) consists of a series or
succession of monorhythms, making a repeatable whole. The Bernstein example
just given is a very simple case, another being the “Blue Danube” motif. There is
no theoretical upper limit to how many monorhythms can be strung one after an-
other, but as usual there are anthropological limits. For example the whole first
movement of C. P. E. Bach’s solo flute sonata in A minor H 56 could be considered
as instantiating a single rhythm, but no one ever would take it thus. A more trac-
table or followable pattern is the Allegro con spirito theme of the first movement of
Haydn’s Symphony No. 103 in E♭ major, following the famous drum-roll and slow
introduction:
A piece where a complex rhythm is repeated so often that it soon becomes easily
recognized, not to say tedious, is the underlying drum rhythm of Ravel’s Boléro:
A case of slightly greater complexity which is also recognized intuitively as a

rhythm, albeit a more exceptional one, based on a sequence of five beats, is the re-
peated rhythmic figure in the first movement, Mars, of Holst’s suite The Planets:
Examples could be multiplied almost without limit. Complex rhythms which are
idiosyncratic enough can be readily recognized and used for fun to ask people to
identify the melodic figures they underlie, as in Joseph Cooper’s use of the dummy
keyboard in the old British TV quiz show Face the Music. For instance, this figure
is fairly easily identifiable as that of the familiar theme of Paganini’s 24th Caprice in
A minor for solo violin, made the subject of many variations, from Paganini himself
to Lutosławski.
13. Polyrhythms
When two or more rhythms, in the first instance monorhythms, run simultaneously
so that at some point they start together, and the resulting complex pattern repeats
itself, or can be repeated, cyclically, then we have a polyrhythm. The simplest poly-
rhythm widely found is a 3 against 2 polyrhythm
which, if the separate generators sound similar, takes on the appearance of a single
complex rhythm
but if they sound differently, is clearly two rhythms overlaid. If the onset of the triple
is delayed by a sixth of a measure the different tresillo or Habañera rhythm results:
The next step up is a pattern of 4 against 3:
which begins to stretch most people’s ability to produce: the combined effect strikes
me and probably most westerners as rather African:
Polyrhythms of this kind and of greater complexity are characteristic of Latin

American and sub-Saharan music.
From here on, polyrhythms with more complex overlays and with overlays of
more than two rhythms become increasingly difficult to (re)produce although they
can be recognized with some facility. The limits of what is humanly recognizable
are fairly narrow: a polyrhythm of 7 against 5 or 6 for example would strike most as
somewhat chaotic, although the pattern would be recognized on repetition. As ever,
there are no formal limits to how many rhythms and of what kind could be overlaid,
but the practical and recognition limits are narrow, the former more so than the
latter.
Polyrhythms are the natural outcome of several voices or instruments singing or
playing together in non-unison. Even simple overlays of 2 against 1 or 4 against 2,
etc. can sound good when taken by different parts. When several complex rhythms
are superimposed, things begin to approach the exalted rhythmic complexity that
can be found in the great polyphonic composers such as Gabrieli, Monteverdi, or
Bach, or in modern jazz.
14. Nominalism and Actualism: Two Disputed

Philosophical Positions
This brief section is for philosophers. As a metaphysical nominalist, someone

who believes in the existence of only particulars and denies that there are ab-
stract repeatables, it might seem as though I cut the ground from under my own
feet by denying actual repetition: is not a rhythm something that repeats, a pat-
tern? Certainly that is how we talk, and such talk is both harmless and useful. But
the different occurrences of a sound pattern are new individual sound sequences
that resemble the old, and we are well able to recognize the resemblances in sound
sequences, as we are in other cases of resemblance. To talk in the metaphysically
correct way is possible, but it sounds unfamiliar, lengthy, and somewhat barbaric,
so I have run with the platonic fox rather than hunted with the nominalist hounds.
A nominalist ontology for music would be in my view the correct one, and that
would include rhythm, but to work out its details and provide a suitable vocabulary
must be a job for another time.
Metaphysically, the only rhythms there are, are rhythms that actually exist, at
some time or another. A biological clade consists only of actual organisms, the actual
descendants of a common ancestor species, excluding merely possible organisms that
did not as a matter of fact arise. Rhythms are like this too: until a certain kind of rhythm
is first realized, there was only the mere possibility of its being instantiated. It is another
area of philosophical dispute whether unrealized possibilities are in any sense “real.”
My own view is that they are not: this is called actualism. It in no way counts as sti-
fling creativity or suggesting there are other than practical limits to what rhythms there
might be. It is simply to avoid hypostasizing possibilities.
15. Summary: The Formal Clade of Rhythms
The kinds of rhythms we have identified pass from the simple to the increasingly
complex, and we need to ask how this increasing complexity arises and where its
limits are. The latter question is easily answered: there are no theoretical limits to
how complex a rhythm can become, though there are fairly narrow if ill-defined
limits to what is humanly recognizable, which are toward the lower end of the
complexity spectrum. As to the modes of complexification, as far as I can tell there

are essentially two: sequencing and overlay, giving rise to complex rhythms and
polyrhythms respectively. A rhythm is either a monorhythm or is derived from
other rhythms by sequential addition or by superimposing two or more other
rhythms. By these modes of combination, all rhythms are formal descendants of
pulses, basic rhythms, and monorhythms, and so, I suggest, form a formal analogue
of the biologist’s clade.1
1 I am grateful to the participants of the Durham Conference and to Peter Cheyne for valuable comments
and suggestions. There will be cases I have not considered and which stretch the concept of rhythm beyond
what I have envisaged here, but I would have given them had I thought of them. That I mention pulse should
not be taken to imply that all rhythms have or stress pulse, only that many straightforward and obvious ones
do. I should also emphasize that the similarities and regularities on which rhythms build can be approxi-
mate: exact repetition in music sounds mechanical. Against another criticism, however, I remain firm. There
are processes which lack any rhythm. A completely homogeneous sound or a smooth rectilinear motion lacks
the internal diversity of parts required for rhythm to gain a hold. If all processes are rhythmical, the concept
rhythm is then doing no work. But it does do work. Therefore, not all processes have rhythm.
4
“Feeling the Beat”
Multimodal Perception and the Experience
of Musical Movement
Jenny Judge
1. Introduction: The Neglect of Rhythm
Philosophers have no rhythm—or, at least, so a reader becoming acquainted

with the philosophy of music might suspect. Discussions of form, ontology,
and expression abound, but philosophical treatments of rhythm are rare. This
seems extraordinary. While a concern for form, ontology, and expression is, in
some sense, common to all the arts, an appreciation of rhythm is uniquely, or at
least paradigmatically, musical. An examination is central to understanding how
music moves us—and it moves us quite literally in nightclubs, on treadmills, and
even in the privacy of our own kitchens. Its neglect by philosophers requires re-
medial action.
This chapter is an attempt to show that when we turn our philosophical atten-
tion to rhythm, many new puzzles emerge, the analysis of which brings the phi-
losophy of music into closer contact with the philosophy of mind and perception.
I distinguish meter and rhythm, arguing that meter, like rhythm, contributes to
the perceptual experience of music in its own right. I claim that the experience of
musical beat—attributable to musical meter, rather than rhythm—is multimodal
in a stronger sense than happening to involve perceptual content across different
senses.
The term “perceptual content” is frequently deployed in the philosophy of per-
ception, but it may require some explanation. One can think of the term “content”
in two ways. One can talk about the contents of buckets, or cupboards, or handbags;
one can also talk about the contents of a newspaper. Content can thus be physical—
what is literally inside some vessel—or informational. Hence, the term “perceptual
content” could mean either (i) what is “contained” in the mind when one has a per-
ceptual experience, or (ii) what is conveyed to the subject having the perceptual
experience. In the philosophy of perception, “perceptual content” usually refers to
the latter sense, according to which it is natural to think of the senses as channels
through which one may discover things about the world. “Auditory content” refers
Feeling the Beat 77
to that which is conveyed to me when I have an auditory experience, “visual con-

tent” picks out whatever I find out about the world through a visual experience, and
so on for each sensory modality.1
In this chapter, I argue that the experience of musical meter, or “beat,” involves
what Casey O’Callaghan terms “intermodal feature binding,”2 whereby percep-
tual content arising from different sensory modalities is bound to a common en-
tity (such as when I experience the roundness of a ball through touch and sight).
However, the experience of beat is a curious case, as I elaborate. Paradigm cases
of intermodal feature binding involve the binding of content across exteroceptive
senses that yield information from outside the body. The experience of beat, on
the other hand, involves the binding of exteroceptive content (the auditory expe-
rience of musical sounds occurring in the environment) and interoceptive content
(experiences of one’s own body). Specifically, I shall argue that the experience of
beat involves intermodal binding between auditory and vestibular content: that is,
content arising from the functioning of the vestibular system, which tracks body
orientation, movement, and balance.3
A consideration of the multimodal perceptual content of the experience of
“beat,” I go on to argue, yields an appealing perspective on the puzzle of musical
movement. Roger Scruton notes that the experience of movement in music, though
vivid, is nevertheless paradoxical, because musical sounds themselves are not actu-
ally moving, and so movement properties cannot feature in the contents of the per-
ceptual experience of music.4 We have to appeal to something other than perceptual
content to explain the experience of movement—specifically, to “metaphorical per-
ception.” My response is that if the perceptual experience of music encompasses
more than the auditory experience of musical sounds, then it doesn’t follow, from
the fact that musical sounds fail to have movement properties, that our experience
of movement cannot be justified by (extra-auditory) perceptual content. I will claim
that there is, after all, legitimate movement-related content present in musical expe-
rience, in the case of the experience of the beat—and so there is no need to appeal to
metaphorical perception.
A note, before I continue: I am targeting a motivation for the appeal to metaphor-
ical perception. I am not targeting the notion itself, nor am I claiming that the per-
ceptual experience of beat, in the bare sense I outline here, is enough to explain the
full-blown experience of movement in musical “space” that Scruton has in mind.
I merely want to undermine the seeming inevitability of appeals to metaphorical
perception, by directing attention to the rich, multimodal perceptual content in-
volved in rhythmic experience.
1 Siegel, Contents of Visual Experience, gives an overview of the notion of perceptual content, and its sur-
rounding debates.
2 O’Callaghan, “Not All Perceptual Experience,” 139–46; “Intermodal Binding Awareness,” 82–97.
3 The vestibular system consists of receptors in the inner ear, and their connections to other parts of the
nervous system.
4 Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 13–15, 21, 49–71.
And so, to rhythm. What is it, and more pressingly, what do music theorists mean
by “meter”?
2. Rhythm, Meter, and “Beat”: A Perceptual Account
Theorists of music and poetry commonly distinguish between rhythm and meter.
On one common view, which Andy Hamilton calls the “abstract” account, one may
consider rhythm as the bare temporal patterns present in a piece of music: groups
of sounds and silences, or simply “order-in-time.”5 Meter, on the other hand, is the
pattern of stress in which rhythms are grouped. In a piece of music, meter is usually
indicated by the time signature. A waltz, for example, will have “3” in the upper part
of its time signature, as in ¾: this means that the piece has three (crotchet) “beats”
in each measure or bar. Though two different waltzes may be composed of any
number of different rhythms, they have the same triple meter. “The Blue Danube”
and “Moon River,” for example, contain different rhythmic patterns, but each piece
has three beats per bar, occurring in the pattern strong-weak-weak.
On this abstract view, meter is thought to be, in Christopher Hasty’s words,
“a more or less independent structure that rhythm uses for its own ends.”6 Hasty
notes that
it is customary to view rhythm as a rich and fully sensuous embodiment of music’s

temporal progress and metre as rhythm’s shadowy, schematic counterpart—
abstract, mechanical, and devoid of any intrinsic expression.7
Rhythm is in the music, it is sometimes implied, but meter is not. Some authors
characterize meter as a kind of habitual response to rhythm. For instance, Justin
London suggests that meter is “an aspect of our engagement with the production
and perception of tones in time”8—implying that meter is really a way of describing
our behavior, rather than a feature of our experience, or of the music itself. If meter
is an abstract entity, or even a property of behavior as London suggests, does it re-
ally feature in immediate musical experience?
The phenomenology of musical listening suggests that it does. We needn’t ob-
serve our own periodic behavior in response to Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish,” or infer
5 Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 26, et passim, criticizes this “abstract” characterization of rhythm,
proposing instead that rhythm is an essentially dynamic, human phenomenon. On Hamilton’s view, rhythm
is the product of human action: it is “order-in-movement” rather than merely “order-in-time.” Rhythms must
already possess legitimate movement properties in order to count as rhythms in the first place; they are not,
for Hamilton, static and abstract to begin with. This is one valid way to counter Scruton’s appeal to metaphor-
ical perception in order to explain the experience of musical movement. It is, however, a different approach
to the one pursued here. Rather than challenging extant “abstract” accounts of rhythm, I focus on musical
meter: the experience of patterns of stress within musical rhythms. I address the perceptual content involved
in such “beat” experiences; I do not directly address the content of experiences of rhythm, taken generally.
6 Hasty, Meter as Rhythm, 4.
7 Hasty, Meter as Rhythm, viii.
patterns of stress when perceiving the first movement of Beethoven’s “Waldstein”

Sonata, to become conscious of the regular metrical structure. Hasty thinks that the
“abstract” conception of meter is an artifact of musical pedagogy, which distracts
from its real experiential import. Meter is key to musical experience, he argues. The
experience of stressed beats is so crucial, in fact, that “the layman may well call this
phenomenon rhythm pure and simple.”9 Hamilton agrees with Hasty, arguing that
the abstract conception of meter ignores “the felt regularity of the underlying pulse
or groundbeat.”10
Nevertheless, London suggests that, while meter is best thought of as an ab-
straction, it does have a phenomenal counterpart in the music itself: the “beat.”11
The beat is what shows up in experience. Meter is “phenomenally manifest” to us,
says London, “as our perception of a pattern of accentually differentiated beats.”12
Michael Thaut proposes something similar, arguing that, while meter is best thought
of as an abstraction, we detect a series of “pulses” in the music, which are organ-
ized in a metrical hierarchy.13 The precise nature of the relationship between “beat”
or “pulse” and meter remains, however, somewhat opaque in these discussions. Is
“beat,” or “pulse,” identical to meter, or does it stand in some other, weaker relation
to it? Neither London nor Thaut elaborates on the issue.
In what follows, I will claim that there is a component of the perceptual expe-
rience of music—call it “beat” for clarity—that depends on meter, rather than on
non-metrical rhythm. “Beat” might turn out to be identical to meter, or it might
merely be related to it—an examination of the relationship between beat and meter
is reserved for another occasion. The main point, for present purposes, is that there
is an aspect of the immediate, perceptual experience of music that is attributable to
meter rather than to rhythm. Meter shows up in the perceptual experience of music
in the form of the “beat.”
The relationship between experiences of meter and rhythm is akin to that be-
tween the experiences of melodies and their parts. Mohan Matthen argues that
patterns of sound—such as the tune of the American national anthem—manifest
in experience in their own right, not solely in virtue of the prior perceptual expe-
rience of their components.14 There are, he argues, experimental and phenomeno-
logical indicators that a process is automatic and sensory, which melodies satisfy. If
a beat satisfies these indicators too, this gives good prima facie reason to suppose
that beat is perceived, rather than merely inferred on the basis of the perception of
rhythm. First, Matthen argues that separate conditionability is a reliable indicator
that a given process is perceptual. If subjects’ behavior can be influenced by an en-
tity, this counts as a reason to suppose that the entity is being perceived. Beat seems
10 Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 136.
11 London, “Rhythm and Time in Music.”
12 London, “Rhythm and Time in Music,” 5.
13 Thaut, Rhythm, Music, and the Brain.
14 Matthen, “Diversity of Auditory Objects.”

to be separately conditionable from rhythms and melodies. Indeed, its behavioral

effect—our tendency to move along with it—is a cornerstone of musical experi-
ence. This suggests that meter, or beat, is perceived directly.
Constancy is a further indicator to which Matthen appeals. Melodies, he claims,
are constant: they are the same from different “points of view,” as it were. A melody
remains the same melody, even when transposed into a different key. Rhythm also
seems to be constant in this regard, remaining the same with changes in tempo; and
a musical beat appears to be constant in the same way. I can recognize an instance of
march time, or a waltz, no matter what tempo it is played at, what melodies or indi-
vidual rhythms feature in it, or what instruments play it. Moreover, new experiences
of musical meter satisfy the further constraint of familiarity. Repeat instances of
waltzes are readily recognizable as such, and feel familiar, even when we have not
heard that particular waltz before.
It thus seems that there is good reason to think that musical experience involves
meter in an immediate, perceptual way. The “beat” is separately conditionable, con-
stant from different “points of view,” and satisfies the “familiarity” constraint.15 So
far I have discussed hearing. Now I want to make the further claim that beat, unlike
melody for instance, can be perceived by more than just auditory perception.
3. The perceptual experience of “beat” is multimodal
I now argue that if a beat can be perceived—that a pattern of metrical stresses in

time can show up in perceptual experience in its own right—then those stresses do
not have to arise in auditory perception. They can be tactile impulses, or even ves-
tibular signals.
Juan Huang et al. investigated the role of touch in the perception of beat.16 They
showed that subjects report experiencing identical heard rhythms, which were am-
biguous as to meter, as being in either march-time or waltz-time, in accordance
with the pattern of tactile stimulus to which they were exposed at the same time. If
they experienced a tactile impulse coinciding with every second tone, they heard
the rhythm in march-time (that is, the experienced a strong-weak pattern in the
musical sounds); a tactile impulse on every third tone led to an experience of waltz
time (a strong-weak-weak pattern). It seems, then, that beat can be felt through
tactile perception, and not just heard. The authors observe that the sense of touch
is particularly important in performance, but also plays a role for audiences, when
listeners tap their hands and feet to a rhythm. However, it is not the only extra-
auditory factor to consider. I may nod my head along to a beat, without tapping my
15 Again, if “meter” is defined as something existing apart from “pulse” or “beat,” which are considered as
its phenomenological counterparts, this does not derail the argument; for, even in that case, something other
than rhythm, and related to meter, is experienced perceptually, rather than experienced only in virtue of a
perceptual acquaintance with rhythm.
16 Huang et al., “Feeling Music.”
feet or my hands. It seems plausible that this kind of movement, with no attendant
tactile stimulus, could also play a role in beat perception. The set of experiments
reported by Laurel Trainor et al.17 suggests that this is indeed the case, because a
regular vestibular signal can also contribute to the perception of beat.
Trainor and colleagues stimulated the vestibular system directly by putting
electrodes behind the ears of immobilized participants, introducing a current to
simulate the sensation of the head being moved from side to side. They found that
this sensation strongly biased the subsequent beat perception of the adults they
tested, none of whom experienced any direct tactile stimulation. As in the Huang
et al. studies, subjects were presented with a heard rhythm, which was ambiguous
as to meter. This remained the same across presentations, but subjects experienced
different metrical structure, in virtue of (and corresponding directly with) varia-
tions in the pattern of vestibular signal to which they were exposed. It seems that
not only can tactile perception contribute to the experience of beat, but the vestib-
ular system can too.
The perceptual experience of musical beat can thus involve content, not only
from audition, but also from tactile perception and the vestibular system. It seems
to be some kind of multimodal experience. But what kind? Is it just multimodal in
that it happens to involve experience in multiple modalities, in the sense that all
experience probably does? Or is it multimodal in some deeper sense? O’Callaghan
claims that the legitimacy of treating the senses as discrete channels of informa-
tion is undermined by the existence of perceptually apparent intermodal fea-
ture binding.18 When one perceives features as belonging to the same thing, on
his account, those features are bound in one’s experience.19 Paradigm examples
of this kind of binding awareness are intramodal. I visually experience objects as
having both colors and shapes; I hear sounds as having both pitch and loudness.
O’Callaghan argues that one may also have experiences of objects that bear features
in multiple modalities. There is, for example, a perceptually apparent difference be-
tween experiencing a thing’s being red and a thing’s being smooth, on the one hand,
and experiencing the same thing as being both red and smooth on the other. In the
former case, nothing in the content either of my experience of redness or my expe-
rience of smoothness guarantees that I experience the same object as having both
redness and smoothness. The experience of intermodal binding cannot be exhaus-
tively explained by appeal to the sum of the experiences in each modality involved,
understood as discrete channels, along with the mere fact of their co-occurrence.
O’Callaghan appeals to the notion of multimodal phenomenal content to capture
this difference.
When I experience a beat, it seems to me that I both hear and feel the same unified
beat. This is certainly how listeners are, in general, inclined to report their musical
17 Trainor et al., “Vestibular System.”
18 O’Callaghan, “Not All Perceptual Experience.”
19 O’Callaghan, “Intermodal Binding Awareness.”

experience. It does not seem to me that I am hearing a beat, and simultaneously
just happening to tap my foot and nod my head in a coincidentally regular fashion.
Rather, I am having an experience of an auditory, vestibular, and tactile event. If
asked to describe my experience, I would say that I hear and feel the same beat.
A problem surfaces, however. Audition and tactile perception both track objects.
The vestibular system, however, does not track objects. It tracks a relation between
the subject’s orientation and the gravitational field, but this relation is neither an
object, nor experienced as one. We are rarely aware of the operation of our ves-
tibular system at all, apart from in cases where it malfunctions, which experience,
that of vertigo, is still not of any kind of sensory object. One might worry that the
vestibular system can’t bind features to objects at all, even intramodally. How, then,
could it be involved in any experience of intermodal binding? This conceals a fur-
ther worry: that the vestibular system isn’t really a genuine sense modality.
The vestibular system usually functions in the background. If I move my head,
I might not be aware of the vestibular signal. I might not even realize that I have
moved it. The signal might just play the role of enabling or directing perception in
my other, exteroceptive modalities. For example, suppose that I tilt my head, in a
way regulated by my vestibular system, the better to see my computer screen. I don’t
have to be aware of my vestibular experience to do that; indeed, I don’t even have
to have a vestibular experience to do it. So, in normal cases, the vestibular system
could just unconsciously guide performance in other modalities. Perhaps this is
what happens in the case of the musical beat. It could be that the regular vestibular
signal leads to increased auditory attention, for example, at the salient points, and
it is this attentional effect that influences the experience of beat. But this seems un-
likely, because musical beat is not like most everyday cases of vestibular experience,
such as the experience of tilting my head to see my computer screen. The vestib-
ular signal does not recede into the background when we move to a beat: it shows
up vividly in awareness. There is a phenomenal contrast, to use Siegel’s term,20 be-
tween cases where I only hear a beat, and cases where I hear and feel it, by nodding
along. If the effect were merely cognitive, it is unclear why the vestibular compo-
nent should contribute any phenomenological change.
The vestibular system is, I claim, contributing to the direct perception of musical
meter. I really do feel the beat, through the movement of my head, when I nod along
to the music. I hear and feel the same beat. If audition is perceiving exteroceptively
here—perceiving a beat, understood either as some kind of entity located at a dis-
tance from me, or as a property of such an entity—then the vestibular system is
doing so, too. That is, when we feel a beat, the vestibular system is behaving as an ex-
teroceptive modality. We have an interoceptive experience—we experience the beat
“within ourselves,” as it were—where this experience tracks an event occurring
outside our bodies, in the world. Yet we do not experience two beats: one heard,
20 Siegel, Contents of Visual Experience, passim.

and one felt. We experience one and the same beat—but that beat is experienced
through two sensory modalities simultaneously.
I have claimed, then, that the perceptual experience of the musical beat is mul-
timodal, and not just auditory. I now want to suggest that this view opens up a new
perspective on the experience of musical movement. Specifically, I argue that a con-
sideration of this multimodal perceptual content undermines the seeming neces-
sity of an appeal to metaphorical perception.
4. Movement in “beat”: an alternative

to metaphorical perception
Scruton observes that movement is a central component of musical experience.21

Melodies move up and down; tones follow each other through musical “space”;
harmonies shift. To experience music without experiencing this movement would
be, as Scruton emphasizes frequently (and rightly), to fail to experience music. All
of this musical movement is puzzling, however, because tones move, but their phys-
ical components—sounds—do not. There is nothing relevant actually moving in
the environment, when I listen to music, and yet I hear movement all the same.
Paul Boghossian refers to this as the thesis of musical anti-realism: the idea that
“sounds do not literally have the musical properties we hear them as having.”22
This friction—between the properties that musical sounds actually have, and the
properties we experience them as having—motivates an appeal to “metaphorical
perception” in characterizing musical experience.23 The idea is that in musical ex-
pression (the target of Peacocke’s “The Perception of Music”), and also in move-
ment (Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music), we have a feature of musical experience
that cannot be fully accounted for by appeal to its perceptual content, because
the things being perceived auditorially (the musical sounds) do not have the ap-
propriate properties. We must appeal, goes the thought, to a different kind of
perception—namely, metaphorical perception—to account fully for the content of
the experience in question.
But what does this mean? How could perception be metaphorical? Peacocke gives
a useful account,24 further unpacked by Boghossian,25 which is initially formulated
with respect to vision.26 We may distinguish between three types of seeing. Firstly,
we may see X as X: I see a group of pots on a table, for instance. Secondly, we may see
X as a depiction of Y: I see a painting, say, as depicting a group of pots on a table. The

22 Boghossian, “Explaining Musical Experience,” 122.
23 Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding; Aesthetics of Music; Understanding Music; Peacocke, “The
Perception of Music.”
24 Peacocke, “The Perception of Music.”
25 Boghossian, “Comments on Peacocke.”
26 I am discussing Peacocke’s explication of metaphorical perception (as clarified by Boghossian) rather
than Scruton’s, because I find the former account to be clearer—even though it is Scruton who applies meta-
phorical perception explicitly to the experience of musical movement.
third kind of perception occurs when we see X metaphorically as Y: I see the pots in
the painting as a group of people.27 This is not an instance of depiction: the painting
depicts pots, and not people. Yet somehow, I see the pots as people at the same time.
This experience is not, goes the thought, grounded by my visual experience in the
same way that the first two kinds of experience are; but it is an immediate feature of
my experience, for all that. When we see the pots as people, it is not that we have a
perceptual experience of pots, and then imagine, in an effortful way, that those pots
are people. We just immediately see the people, as we may immediately see a face in
the clouds.
Peacocke thinks that metaphorical perception can explain our experience of sad-
ness in music. This is not an instance of straightforward hearing: there is nothing
that is really sad, currently perceived through audition. Is it a depiction of sadness?
It is unclear how a concept can be “depicted,” first of all; and moreover, the music is
not a depiction of a sad person, in the same straightforward way that the painting is
a depiction of pots. How, then, am I to account for my real, immediate experience of
sadness in the music? Peacocke thinks that this must be an instance of metaphorical
perception. It is a genuine experience of sadness, and the sadness is experienced as
being in the music; but this experience is simultaneously overlaid with the under-
standing that there is nothing really sad present.
Scruton thinks that the same goes for musical movement. We do not actually hear
sounds moving, yet we experience movement in the music all the same. Scruton
thinks that metaphorical perception is the best way to account for this experience
of movement. Metaphorical perception is a function of imagination, he argues; it
“is effected at the highest level of rational interest, while being transcribed into the
perception itself.”28 It is an experience that only rational beings, possessed of imagi-
native capacities, can have, he thinks. When we experience musical qualities, as op-
posed to sonic ones, we are not experiencing secondary qualities; such qualities are
“not objects merely of sensory perception.”29 Scruton proposes that these qualities
are “tertiary qualities,” which are “neither deduced from experience nor invoked in
the explanation of experience. They are perceived only by rational beings, and only
through a certain exercise of imagination, involving the transfer of concepts from
another sphere.”30
I will not discuss Peacocke’s application of metaphorical perception to musical
expression here. Nor will I claim that an account of musical movement—the expe-
rience of tones as rising and falling, traveling quickly or slowly, and so on—in terms
of metaphorical perception cannot succeed. My aim is more modest, but also more
radical, because I want to undermine the initial anti-realist stance—the claim that,
27 I am referring, here, to the painting Pots, by Zurbaran, which Peacocke also discusses in this context.

since sounds do not literally have movement properties, our experience of those
properties cannot arise in virtue of the contents of our perceptual experience.
The answer to the question “Do musical sounds really move?” is an unequivocal
“No.” However, I want to suggest that “Do musical sounds really move?” is not the
question we should be asking. We should begin by describing the perceptual con-
tent of musical experience. Instead of asking “Do musical sounds move?” we should
ask, “Is there movement-related perceptual content present in the experience under
consideration?” We can answer this question in the affirmative, at least in the case of
the beat, because of the presence of content from the vestibular and tactile systems,
as I will elaborate shortly. Thus, the motivation for the appeal to metaphorical per-
ception is undermined because, on my account, there really is something in the per-
ceptual experience of beat that grounds the experience of movement. Even if one’s
auditory perceptual content on a given occasion is insufficient to ground the expe-
rience of movement, this does not mean that one’s perceptual content on that occa-
sion, when described fully, cannot justify the experience. We need not appeal either
to depiction, or to metaphorical perception, conceived of as an imaginative process,
to justify our immediate experience of movement. There is work to do, however,
to establish this claim. In particular, I need to show that there really is movement-
related content in beat experience.
We may distinguish between two cases of beat experience: (1) I hear a beat and
move along to it; and (2) I hear a beat but remain completely immobile. In case
(1), I am having an occurrent vestibular experience, elicited by my physical move-
ment, which is intermodally bound to my auditory experience. I am having a real
experience of movement, then, and this movement-related content is experientially
bound to what I hear. Thus, the need to appeal to metaphorical perception, in ac-
counting for the experience of movement in the beat, is circumvented. But what
about the second case? Suppose that I hear the beat, but remain totally immobile.
I am not experiencing intermodal binding, in this case. I am just having an auditory
experience. And yet I do experience movement in the beat. It seems that we have to
resort to metaphorical perception to justify the experience of movement after all.
Or do we? Consider, by way of comparison, another case of intermodal binding.
Take my experience of the roundness of a ball. My experience of roundness is an
experience of something that I can both see and touch. Even if I am only seeing the
roundness of a ball on a given occasion, I know that if I were to touch it, I would
feel, not just some roundness or other, but the same roundness as the one I see.
Roundness itself is a notion that is built out of its visual and tactile components: it
seems implausible that I should see roundness while experiencing no connection
whatsoever to felt roundness. It would not be roundness that I saw, in that case. So,
when I see roundness without feeling it at the same time, it doesn’t follow that my
perceptual experience is not characterized, in part, by tactile perception. My visual
experience of roundness is not, by contrast, affected by auditory phenomenal char-
acter. I don’t see roundness as the kind of thing that I could hear, but I do see it as
the kind of thing that I could touch. O’Callaghan refers to this kind of experience as
“cross-modal perceptual completion.”31 He argues that this kind of perceptual ex-

perience has phenomenal character that no “pure” unimodal perceptual experience
could have.
Perceptual “completion” occurs when I have a perceptual experience as of a com-
plete object, despite the fact that I can only see parts of it. It is usually characterized
as an amodal process: a perceptual process that operates across sensory modalities,
rather than within any particular one. Suppose I see a cat standing behind a picket
fence. Parts of the cat are occluded by the slats of the fence. However, I see the cat’s
body as continuing behind the fence; if the cat were to move and reveal itself to be
just an assemblage of oblong cat-parts held together invisibly in space, I would be
taken aback. I perceptually experience the cat to continue behind the barrier; the
currently invisible parts of the cat make a difference to the phenomenal character
of my visual experience. My perceptual experience is of a “complete” cat, in other
words, despite the partial nature of the visual stimulus. O’Callaghan suggests that
“amodal” completion is not a perfect label here—rather, this is a kind of intramodal
(within vision) completion. Now, given that intramodal completion seems plau-
sible, so too is cross-modal completion, suggests O’Callaghan. Though I may only
be having a visual experience of a ball, the character of my perceptual experience
is affected—or “completed,” in other words—by its tangible, though currently un-
touched, features. Cases of cross-modal completion are cases where “a perceptual
experience generated by stimulating only one sensory system presents an object as
something that bears features of another modality without presenting those hidden
features.”32 Importantly, the phenomenal character of perceptual experience is af-
fected by this cross-modal completion. For example, a visible surface experienced
as that of a solid object may differ phenomenologically from the visible surface ex-
perienced as holographic.
The experience of beat, when I hear it but do not move along, is, I suggest, an in-
stance of cross-modal completion. I experience the beat as being the kind of thing
that I could move to, just as I saw the ball as being the kind of thing that I could
touch. This means that my auditory experience of the beat is vestibular-and touch-
involving, even when I am not moving, in the same way that my visual experience
of a round ball is touch-involving when I am not touching it. I claimed earlier that
an experience of roundness that was not touch-involving would not be an expe-
rience of roundness. So, too, I want to claim that an experience of beat that was
not vestibular-involving and touch-involving would not be an experience of a beat.
Even when I just hear it, content from my vestibular and tactile experience still plays
a role in characterizing the experience. It completes the perceptual experience, just
as the unseen parts of the cat complete that perceptual experience. This is how I see
the roundness of a ball as something I can touch, and it is also how I hear a beat as
something that I can move along to.
31 O’Callaghan, “Not All Perceptual Experience.”
32 O’Callaghan, “Not All Perceptual Experience,” 147.

Hence, when I am moving to the beat, I experience intermodal feature binding
between auditory and vestibular content, and thus my experience has movement-
related content. When I am listening, but not moving, I do not experience occur-
rent intermodal feature binding—but I do experience cross-modal completion
between audition, tactile perception, and the vestibular system, which means that,
even though I am not moving, my experience is affected by movement-related phe-
nomenal character. The distinction between the two kinds of movement-related
content is what we should expect, given the phenomenal contrast between cases
where we move along to the beat, and cases where we feel the beat while remaining
still. We can, therefore, account for a sense of movement in music—albeit a basic
one—by considering the richness, often ignored by purely auditory conceptions of
music, of the perceptual experience of a beat. And if we can account for the ultimate
experience in terms of the perceptual content involved, the move to metaphorical
perception begins to seem avoidable.
Three objections should be deflected. The first targets the notion of cross-modal
completion. The completion that happens when I look at a ball, and see it as the
kind of thing I could touch, might just be an instance of amodal completion, with
no consequences for phenomenal character. That is, I might be having a unimodal
visual experience of roundness, which may be better thought of as an amodal pro-
perty (one not associated with any sense modality in particular). When I look at
the ball, it could be that I have some expectations concerning tactile content, but
that these expectations do not contribute any character to the visual experience.
Hearing the beat, but not moving to it, might be analogous. I might be having a uni-
modal auditory experience of an amodal feature (the beat). I might also have some
expectations concerning movement. But these “movement expectations” may not
affect the character of my experience. However, I think that this fails to do justice to
the character of the experience of listening to music. It seems elemental to the expe-
rience of beat that I frequently feel like I want to move along with it, and tap my toe
to it; sometimes, I have to actively restrain myself from doing so (if I am in a con-
cert hall, for instance). It seems to me that we really do have a movement-involving
phenomenal experience when we listen to music but remain immobile. We long to
move to it. An account that appeals to expectations that have no consequences for
phenomenal character seems somewhat wan.
The second objection is the following: Why is vestibular experience, or tactile
experience, “movement-involving” in a way that auditory experience on its own
is not? Even the barest auditory experience involves movement in the sense that
it was caused by something moving—specifically, the vibration of an object in a
medium. Despite this “movement-involvement,” auditory experience alone cannot
account for the experience of musical movement, as everyone agrees. Why should
the appeal to movement-involvement be effective in the case of multimodal per-
ceptual experience, then? The mere fact that tactile experience, or vestibular expe-
rience, is produced by something moving doesn’t prove anything, because auditory
experience is produced in the same sort of way. But this is not quite right. Auditory
experience involves movement in a causal way, certainly, but it does not neces-
sarily involve movement-related content. Notice that the perceptual experience of
a sound is not an experience as of motion in the same way that touch, or vestibular
experience, are experiences as of motion—either of one’s own body, or of the envi-
ronment in relation to one’s own body. One may enjoy genuine auditory experience
without ever discovering that vibrating objects are at the ultimate source of one’s
experience. Physicists had to conduct empirical investigations, after all, in order to
figure out that sounds rely, for their existence, upon the usually invisible vibrations
of objects. No scientific discovery is necessary for touch, or in the vestibular case.
Movement is present in one’s vestibular experience, and in touch, in a way that it is
not in auditory experience. It is unthinkable that one could have a tactile or vestib-
ular experience that one did not already experience as involving movement.
The third objection is as follows: My account of content from a given modality
being “involved” in an experience in another modality is just metaphorical percep-
tion in disguise. I experience something heard as something I could also touch; so,
I experience something seen as metaphorically touched, in a sense. This may be so;
but if we allow this to count as an instance of metaphorical perception, then the
floodgates are opened, and every experience of intermodal binding—every expe-
rience of roundness, hardness, softness, roughness—now involves the deployment
of metaphor on the perceptual level. Perhaps the advocates of metaphorical per-
ception would be happy to bite this bullet, but I suspect otherwise. Metaphorical
perception is supposed to be reserved for a special subset of perceptual (often aes-
thetic) experiences, which are not explicable, it is thought, on ordinary accounts. If
intermodal binding involves metaphorical perception, then nearly everything does;
and this is, I think, an unpalatable prospect.
Back to the experience of beat. I think that the idea that musical experience is
movement-involving, even when we are not moving, is what Scruton is alluding to
when he describes musical engagement, as “involving a kind of latent dancing—a
sublimated desire to ‘move with’ the music.”33 Jerrold Levinson picks up on this
comment of Scruton’s, speculatively suggesting that music may actually be, rather
than merely involve, latent dancing.34 He does not, however, elaborate on this idea,
merely noting its appeal. I hope to have been able to give some indication of what
might lie behind this intuition, which is an attractive one for many philosophers of
music; but more importantly, I hope to have shown that we do not need to appeal to
imaginative capacity, or to metaphorical perception, in order to account for it.
It is of course possible, or even likely, that a basic sense of stressed beats cannot
fully account for the experience of musical movement. It could be that the kind of
perceptual experience of musical movement that I have been discussing is not suf-
ficiently detailed to capture musical movement in a more full-fledged sense: tones
moving in musical space, from high to low, speeding up and slowing down, and so
34 Levinson, “Aesthetic Appreciation of Music.”

on. Metaphorical perception might, after all, be required to account for this richer
sense of musical movement. And it might also be required, as Peacocke suggests,
to explain musical expression. I am happy to concede this as a possibility. I merely
want to highlight that we do not have to accept the initial “anti-realist” claim, which
makes the appeal to metaphorical perception seem inevitable in the case of move-
ment. For, at least when it comes to beat, there is movement-related content in my
perceptual experience. I am having a bona fide perceptual experience as of move-
ment, which is both heard and felt. It is not just that I really experience myself as
moving, and by some kind of illusory imaginative transfer, the sound is heard as
moving, too. Rather, the movement has a heard aspect, and also a felt one.
I have been discussing the experience of “beat.” I am not making claims about the
experience of rhythm more generally, about musical movement in a richer sense,
or about the broad utility of appeals to metaphorical perception. Nevertheless, I am
sounding the following note of caution: assuming that music is just a matter of sounds,
and of auditory experience, risks making intellectualist accounts of musical experience
seem inevitable, when they may not be.
5. Conclusion
I began by outlining the distinction between rhythm and meter. I claimed that there is
a component of the perceptual experience of music—the “beat”—that is attributable
to meter. I argued that the experience of beat is multimodal: specifically, that when
we “hear and feel” a beat, this experience is an instance of intermodal feature binding,
where content in audition is bound to content in tactile and vestibular perception.
I went on to suggest that a consideration of this multimodal content offers an alterna-
tive, perception-based explanation of the experience of movement in a musical beat,
which deflates the seeming necessity of an appeal to metaphorical perception. Beat ex-
perience is not exhausted by auditory experience; it also involves, I argued, vestibular
and tactile experience, both of which give rise to movement-involving perceptual con-
tent. This is true, I claimed, whether or not we are actively moving to the beat. Thus, our
experience of movement in the “beat” is justified by the perceptual experience itself;
the seeming necessity of an appeal to metaphorical perception is thus undermined.
An “experience-first” approach to music, which begins from a consideration of
perceptual experience rather than sounds, has at least two consequences for the
philosophy of music. First of all, it represents a continuation of the extant chal-
lenge, formulated by authors such as Aaron Ridley, Andy Hamilton, and Kathleen
Higgins, to the view that music can be adequately theorized in isolation from the
cultural, biological, and historical factors that have shaped it.35 The second is, how-
ever, more novel, insofar as it undermines the dominant assumption that music
is fundamentally about sounds. I hope to have shown that rescuing rhythm and
35 Ridley, Philosophy of Music; Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music; Higgins, Music of our Lives.
meter from the sidelines of the philosophy of music not only makes for a more rep-
resentative characterization of music, but also challenges the validity of the “uni-
modal” manner in which music has heretofore been approached. Rhythm is not
just a matter of sounds. It is not even just a matter of auditory experience. Aspects
of musical experience—central ones, at that—are deeply multimodal. Considered
in this light, music raises many questions for philosophers of perception, and the
door is opened for music to feature prominently in debates beyond the confines of
the philosophy of art.
Works Cited
Boghossian, Paul, “Explaining Musical Experience,” in Kathleen Stock, ed., Philosophers on
Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work (Oxford, 2007).
Boghossian, Paul, “The Perception of Music: Comments on Peacocke,” The British Journal of
Aesthetics, 50.1 (2010), 71–6.
Hasty, Christopher F., Meter as Rhythm (Oxford, 1997).
Higgins, Kathleen Marie, The Music of Our Lives (Philadelphia, 1991).
Huang, Juan, Darik Gamble, Kristine Sarnlertsophon, Xiaoqin Wang, and Steven Hsiao, “Feeling
Music: Integration of Auditory and Tactile Inputs in Musical Meter Perception,” PLoS ONE,
7.10 (2012).
Levinson, Jerrold, “The Aesthetic Appreciation of Music,” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 49.4
(2009), 415–25.
London, Justin, Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter (Oxford, 2004).
London, Justin, “Three Things Linguists Need to Know about Rhythm and Time in Music,”
Empirical Musicology Review, 7.1–2 (2012), 5–11.
Matthen, Mohan, “On the Diversity of Auditory Objects,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology,
1.1 (2010), 63–9.
O’Callaghan, Casey, “Intermodal Binding Awareness,” in David J. Bennett and Christopher S.
Hill, eds, Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness (Cambridge, 2014), 73–104.
O’Callaghan, Casey, “Not All Perceptual Experience is Modality Specific,” in Dustin Stokes,
Mohan Matthen, and Stephen Biggs, eds, Perception and Its Modalities (Oxford, 2014), 133–65.
Peacocke, Christopher, “The Perception of Music: Sources of Significance,” The British Journal of
Aesthetics, 49.3 (2009), 257–75.
Ridley, Aaron, The Philosophy of Music: Theme and Variations (Edinburgh, 2004).
Scruton, Roger, The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture
(London, 1983).
Scruton, Roger, Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation (London, 2009).
Siegel, Susanna, The Contents of Visual Experience (Oxford, 2010).
Thaut, Michael H., Rhythm, Music, and the Brain: Scientific Foundations and Clinical Applications
(London, 2005).
Trainor, Laurel J., Xiaoqing Gao, Jing-jiang Lei, Karen Lehtovaara, and Laurence R. Harris,
“The Primal Role of the Vestibular System in Determining Musical Rhythm,” Cortex, 45.1
(2009),  35–43.
5
Dance Rhythm
Aili Bresnahan
1. Introduction: The Difference between Natural and

Intentional Rhythm
Dance encompasses a large range of phenomena including social dance, con-

cert dance, dance as therapy, education, or exercise, political dance, and religious
dance. All forms of dance are considered art for the purposes of the discussion to
follow, where art refers to any culturally developed and skilled activity. This chapter
provides an account of intentional rhythm in dance (“dance rhythm”) where rhythm
as it pertains to dance refers to a regular, repeated pattern of beats and emphases in
movement.1 Rhythm is then divided into natural rhythm and intentional rhythm
found in art. Dance rhythm (intentional rhythm that belongs to a dance that is part
of its essential features) is thus distinguished from rhythm in dance (natural rhythm
which is not part of a dance’s essence and which occurs due to the natural rhythms
of the body). (For the remainder of this chapter these terms will be used according
to the meanings provided here.)
Natural rhythms include the rhythm of the tides, seasons, the pulse of a heart-
beat, and the rhythms of sexual reproduction.2 Natural rhythm is given to us in the
world or found to be there. It has not been developed by training and does not nec-
essarily occur in the cultural world in which dance, music, and poetry are distinct
practices, each with varying methods of teaching and performance. In the human
person, natural rhythm means rhythm at the level of human biology, as Joseph
Margolis argues, though he might not agree that what he calls an encultured human
person can ever act at the biological level alone.3 Thus rhythm in dance captures
the idea that a dance might have natural rhythm from a dancer’s breath or pulse,
without this contributing to the dance’s distinctive features. Qua dancer, these do
not count as dance rhythms unless they are focused on, or enhanced by, the thought
process of an encultured person.
This chapter takes its cue from John Dewey’s view of art as intentional trans-
formation, and Margolis’ sense that this transformation is effected by the
1 Sheets-Johnstone, “Man Has Always Danced,” provides an alternative account of rhythm in dance.
2 Dewey, Art as Experience,  153–5.
3 Margolis, Historied Thought, Constructed World, 224.
culture-influenced self. Dewey considers a child learning to cry on purpose to get a

parent’s attention. Since “the relation between doing and undergoing is perceived,”
rather than merely a “blind” expression, “there is now art in incipiency.” Thus, he
writes,
An activity that was ‘natural’—spontaneous and unintended—is transformed

because undertaken as a means to a consciously entertained consequence. Such
transformation marks every deed of art.4
Dewey’s argument is that what makes the new kind of crying art is that it is
performed with the agent’s awareness of its role in human intercourse. However,
this chapter rejects the thoroughgoing “Intentionality” with a capital “I” that
Margolis champions,5 where the actions of persons are understood primarily as
those of cultural agents rather than as individuals. The transformation I argue for is
a metaphysical one of the natural into the artistic, through awareness and purposes
of the artist in a cultural context. It is thus more deeply rooted in artistic practice
than Arthur Danto’s “transfiguration of the commonplace.”6
My account also differs from that of Susanne Langer, for whom the ordinary is
transformed into art by the creation of symbolic forms of human feeling. By con-
trast, this chapter acknowledges that social dance involves transformative inten-
tionality as well; dance rhythms occur in both high art dance and in other forms.7
Intentional rhythms are those created by human persons to develop, diversify,
or attend to the range of natural rhythms, for purposes reflecting the particular
genre of art. Though constructed or person-made, room is allowed for intentional
rhythms of proto-persons in the animal kingdom. Natural, bodily rhythms are also
transformed by dancers into ones serving artistic, social, or other purposes.8
When dance self-consciously transforms ordinary movement, reflexively lis-
tening to, and responding to, natural bodily rhythms, it is showing something im-
plicit, of which audience and dancers are not normally aware. The task dance of the
Judson Dance Theater, where a performer came onstage, made and ate a sandwich
and walked off, had the rhythm of eating and of walking—not stylized, but part of
the postmodern dance movement, seeking to eliminate the division between art
and life. My claim is that the intention of focusing on sandwich-making as dance
transforms mere movement, and transforms natural rhythm into dance rhythm if
the dance encourages focus on natural rhythm as dance rhythm. This is what I mean
by intentionality—pragmatism in philosophy, and the postmodern movement in
art, has meant that appreciating ordinary experience can transform the natural
elements of human life and experience into art. Art may transform an element of life
4 Dewey, Art as Experience, 65.
5 Margolis, Historied Thought, Constructed World, 194–8, et passim; Bresnahan “Artistic Creativity.”
6 Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace.
7 Langer, Feeling and Form.
8 Bond, “Recurrence and Renewal,” 178.

Dance Rhythm 93
into a unified and heightened experience (Dewey), in an enculturated world with

culturally developed capabilities and practices (Margolis), or it may focus atten-
tion on the aesthetic value of the ordinary (Danto, and postmodernism). Thus the
Judson Dance Theater dance performs no longer just the making of a sandwich and
its movement should not be interpreted as such. Rhythms not there to be attended
to are rhythm in dance, but not dance rhythm—for instance, if the intended focus
was the sandwich-making rather than the rhythm of walking to the table.
This account of dance rhythm is humanistic in holding that the human act of
converting mere movement to dance transforms natural into intentional rhythm.
Dance rhythm is thus similar but not identical to Andy Hamilton’s dynamic, hu-
manistic sense of rhythm as “order-in-movement,” in which perceivable “accents are
imposed on a sequence of regular sounds or movements.”9 The account presented
in this chapter separates natural rhythm from intentional rhythm in order to iso-
late the underpinnings and connections between mere sound and mere movement
before they have been transformed into music and dance. There is an organic con-
nection between music and dance at sound and movement levels, and this would be
overlooked if natural rhythm were not addressed.
We now explore some of the rhythmical connections that exist between music
and dance, highlighting the intentional–natural rhythm distinction.
2. Musical Connections
As dance and music are intimately connected, it is often hard to tell whether there
is a dance–music synthesis, or the dance is following the music, or vice versa. This
essay holds that, in all three cases, the type of rhythm is intentional insofar as it
occurs in dance and music qua dance and music. Any types of natural rhythm that
underlie the dance or music are contingent upon movement and sound, rather than
upon movement transformed through human intentionality into dance, or sound
similarly transformed into music.
First, there are dance–music syntheses and collaborations where the components
are in tandem or in combined practice. To draw from Western traditions, dance
occurs frequently with music, illustrated by baroque music and dance, or the waltz.
Indeed, Western dance and music were originally integrated, their separation being
a later development. Most dance scholars place the origin of Western dance in
Ancient Greek rituals that integrated religion, theatre, and music.10 In non-Western
countries such as those in Latin America, dance and music also arose together.
Dance–music syntheses occur in social dance, competition, and in concert dance
that emerged from social dance. Samba, tango, and salsa are all heavily intentional
rhythm-infused forms of dance embedded in a clear and identifiable musical style,
9 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 26–7.
10 Jowitt, “Modernism: Modern Dance”; Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music.

essential to their national cultures.11 In these dance–music syntheses, rhythm is in-

tentional rather than natural; dancers and musicians have integrated these artforms
in a purposeful way.
Second, dance is often set to music, and following the music can be an object. As
in social dance, a dancer must dance on the beat, and the simplest kinds of dance
to perform are to or with music that has a regular, metric, rhythmic pattern (as in a
country square dance). Indeed, dancers often choose music that makes them want
to dance, and often this is music that has an intentional, recognizable, and repeated
structure of beats and emphases in sound. When dance follows this type of music
it is certainly dance rhythm as defined above. Following the music is more diffi-
cult where complex rhythms, such as those by Igor Stravinsky, John Cage, or Anton
Webern, are involved—as in the choreography of Jiří Kylián who set Symphony of
Psalms and Svadebka to Stravinsky, and Stepping Stones to Cage and Webern. Thus,
dance that follows music can assist the audience to perceive the intentional rhythms
of the music in an enhanced visual rather than auditory way, as well as to see the
new dance rhythms that result.
Some forms of dance interact with music. In African dance–music syntheses
or collaborations, for example, the master drummer is in charge of leading
improvisations, influenced by feedback from the dancers.12 Thus, even when dance
follows music, there may be a dynamic relationship. Again, this decision to follow a
repeated pattern of beats and emphases is part of the intentionality that is inherent
in dance rhythm.
Finally, there are also dance–music syntheses and collaborations, such as in
jazz, where the band follows the chorus and tap dancers rather than the other
way around.13 Some large, classical ballet companies expect orchestras to follow
the dancers. This seems also to be true in the many cases where musicians serve as
accompanists to the dancers in a supporting role.
The vast majority of dance–music syntheses and collaborations do feature inten-
tional rhythm, and the idea of a dance–music piece containing only natural rhythm,
but no dance rhythm or music rhythm, strains credulity, especially because music
rhythm, as mentioned earlier, may not require that the pattern of beats or emphases
repeats. We leave the possibility of non-musically rhythmic music for another
occasion.
3. Dance Rhythm Need Not Be Connected to Music
Dance transforms internal bodily rhythms—pulse, heartbeat, or breathing, or a

natural walking pace—into dance rhythms, in the way that Dewey and Margolis
11 Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots.
12 Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues,  14–15.
13 Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues, 94ff.

Dance Rhythm 95
consider characteristic of art. It also uses natural rhythms such as those of the tides,
falling leaves, snow, and rainfall, as in the Native American rain dances that simulate
thunder, and the pounding of rain. Contemporary dance often focuses on internal
bodily rhythms, developing them into dance movements understood viscerally and
kinesthetically. Dance scholar Sondra Fraleigh notes that early twentieth-century
modern dance made much use of breath rhythm, notably through the teaching of
Doris Humphrey.14
The rhythm of these natural breaths is transformed into art, into dance rhythm,
by focusing on the rising and falling of one’s chest, and representing breaths in
movement that encompasses other parts of the body. The regular pulse of a dancer’s
resting heartbeat might be the impetus to begin a slow, steady movement that
accelerates as she dances, possibly in syncopation with the body. A dancer might
set a baseline with her feet that mirrors bodily pulse, and then counter it with the
upper body. Likewise, a dancer might breathe in a certain way while still, then ac-
celerate rhythmic movements as his breath quickens. Or they may keep the orig-
inal rhythm of resting breath in their bodily movements even while their breathing
rhythm changes. A dancer might also look for rhythmic inspiration in the ebb and
flow of waves against the shore, moving in a pattern that represents the feeling of
their movement with their arms and legs, perhaps rolling on the floor in the way the
waves collect and roll energy and small stones and shells. Thus the dance might end
up as a dance-rhythmic variation on the natural rhythms of pulse or breath, or the
movement of the waves and tides.
Dance that focuses on natural or cosmic rhythms has been part of spiritual and
religious practice in both Western and non-Western cultures, and the whirling
dance of the Sufi dervishes is a well-known case in point. Havelock Ellis reports
that early Christians danced as part of their religious practice.15 The Indian dance
of the Siva seeks to align human dancing with that of the gods, in turn maintaining
the movement of the cosmos.16 One might ask how a dancer can know or intuit the
rhythm of the cosmos and the gods in order to align with them, but dance creation
is often a mystical process. Planetary movement might be represented in a rhythmic
360-degree rotation of torso, arms, head, and legs.
In music and poetry too, transformation of internal bodily rhythms can create
music rhythm and poetic rhythm. Music transforms the energy of waves and the
sound they make when they break upon the shore. In poetry, the rhythm of speech
might already have stops, starts, and breaks that are dependent upon and also trans-
form the breaths people need to take to say a phrase. The same may be inferred
for musicians who play wind instruments or who sing. Thus it may be that dance
rhythm, music rhythm, and poetic rhythm are connected to similar internal bodily
or natural rhythms. Dance rhythm is also caused by rhythm in music or poetry in
the sense that it can follow or represent these rhythms.
14 Email communication to the author.
15 Ellis, “Art of Dancing,” 9.
16 Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Siva; Mathur, Cultural Rhythms, 9.

In the early twentieth century, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze promulgated the ideas

that music relies on internal bodily rhythms, and that movement, gymnastics, and
dance could help musicians to learn their own rhythms, rather than rely on ex-
ternal rhythms set by a music teacher or score.17 His movement training method
for musicians was called “eurhythmics,” and it was used to develop both rhythmic
ability and expressivity. First, a music student needed to register the rhythms of the
human body.18 For a musician to reach the highest level of artistry, however, her
body had to transform these rhythms into an expressive art even while maintaining
a natural effect in their expression.19 Thus Jaques-Dalcroze believed that musicians
should experience their own natural bodily rhythm in order to create intentional
rhythm in performance. These intentional rhythms, this chapter holds, thereby be-
come music rhythms through intentional variegation and enhancement under the
rules of the genre of music in which it takes place.20
Even if music and dance are connected at their originating root level of the nat-
ural, or of an earlier point in history where they were synthesized, they can develop
and change enough from there throughout time to be relations rather than clones.
In 1913, for example, Mary Wigman performed Hexentanz without music. Merce
Cunningham was also known to rehearse his dancers without any music and then
add the music later (even as late as the initial performance). He did this so that
dancers would not dance to the music in the sense of following it.21 We may also
turn to works of dance that occur in silence, such as Emanual Gat’s Silent Ballet.
Indeed, dancers often create dances without music. Establishing that dance rhythm
can occur without music is, of course, not yet to establish that dance can eschew in-
tentional rhythm altogether. The next question to be addressed is whether there can
be such a thing as dance without dance rhythm.
4. Dance without Dance Rhythm
This section claims that dance can lack dance rhythm if it fails to have intentional
regular, repeated pattern of beats and emphases in movement, even though there is
some unavoidable natural rhythm in the dance due to internal bodily rhythms. In
Balkan and in Greek dancing, for example, some dances start with a long piece of
instrumental music that has no identifiable beat and that is both slow and uneven
enough metrically that the dance movement to it might be classed as non-dance
rhythmic. There might also be dance that follows funeral wailing that does not have
a repeated, intentional dance-rhythmic structure; likewise dance movement that
followed free-style poetry. This chapter is reliant on an account of dance rhythm
17 Jaques-Dalcroze, Rhythm, Music and Education; and Eurhythmics, Art and Education.
18 Jaques-Dalcroze, Eurhythmics, Art and Education, 7, 183.
19 Jaques-Dalcroze, Eurhythmics, Art and Education, 86.
20 Louppe, Poetics of Contemporary Dance, esp. 50 and 83.
21 Kostelanetz, ed., Merce Cunningham, provides more on Cunningham’s methods.

Dance Rhythm 97
that might diverge from an account of music rhythm or poetic rhythm through
differences in understanding what “rhythm” refers to in music, poetry, and dance.
It is possible, for example, that there might be rhythm in dance that is not only not
dance rhythm, as this chapter understands it, but that uses music rhythm or poetry
rhythm, in the sense that these disciplines understand rhythm.
Another example of dance without intentional dance rhythm might be Steve
Paxton’s contact improvisation, a form of creative contemporary dance with the
primary aim of transferring energy and movement dynamics between dancers and
developing new movements in concert. Contact improvisation requires no explicit
adherence to a pattern of beats and is free enough to allow any participant to move
however they please, in contact with another person. It is not clear that dances
created in this way must be intentionally rhythmic.
A dancer can create a movement with a primary purpose that includes avoiding
intentional repeated pattern of beats or emphases. There would still be rhythms of
dancers’ breath and walking, but these would be unintentional and incidental. Thus
Lauri Stallings, in And All Directions I Come to You, aimed to interrogate how we asso-
ciate with one another in public space in “a constant flow of intuition and place . . . by
letting time happen to offer emancipatory moments and a gathering among strangers.”
Intentional repeated patterns of beats were not a primary concern. Thus one can find
dances that lack the sort of dance rhythm proposed by this chapter, in which rhythm
is either changed in some way from its natural state or the primary purpose of the
dance is to highlight its rhythmic nature. It follows that dance rhythm is not a nec-
essary condition for dance writ large, although there may be rhythm in dance that is
unavoidable due to dancers’ identity as both persons and biological organisms.
In conclusion, the primary theory of rhythm advocated by this chapter is the
concept of dance rhythm, a sort of rhythm that is not simply the rudimentary kind
found in the processes of the natural world, the truth of which has been shown
through the use of danceworld examples. Dance is a minded activity of the human
person that has social, political, entertainment, and artistic human purposes, and
that can and does involve the use of rhythm. There is no dance at the level of biology
only, and no dance rhythm at that level. Neither must dance, qua dance, involve
dance rhythm, since dance is a kind of activity that can, but that need not, include
intentional, repeated patterns of beats or emphases in movement. Finally, dance
exists that has contingent and non-essential elements that may have natural rhythm
as defined earlier. When it does this is merely rhythm in dance.
Works Cited
Bond, Karen E., “Recurrence and Renewal: Enduring Themes in Children’s Dance,” in Thomas
K. Hagood and Luke C. Kahlich, eds, Perspectives on Contemporary Dance History: Revisiting
Impulse, 1950–1970 (Youngstown, 2013), 161–92.
Bresnahan, Aili, “How Artistic Creativity is Possible for Cultural Agents,” in Dirk-Martin Grube
and Robert Sinclair, eds, Pragmatism, Metaphysics and Culture: Reflections on the Philosophy of
Joseph Margolis (Helsinki, 2015), 197–216.
Chasteen, John C., National Rhythms, African Roots: The Deep History of Latin American Popular
Dance (Albuquerque, 2004).
Coomaraswamy, Ananda, The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays (New York, 1918).
Danto, Arthur C., Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA, 1981).
Ellis, Havelock, “The Art of Dancing” [1923], Salmagundi, 33–4 (1976), 5–22.
Gat, Emanuel (chor.), Silent Ballet, dance performance, Emanuel Gat Dance, 2008.
Hamilton, Andy, “Rhythm and Stasis: A Major and Almost Entirely Neglected Philosophical
Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile, Eurhythmics, Art and Education, tr. Frederick Rothwell, ed. Cynthia Cox
([1930]; New York, 1980).
Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile, Rhythm, Music and Education, tr. Harold F. Rubinstein ([1920];
New York, 1921).
Jowitt, Deborah, “Modernism: Modern Dance,” in Michael Kelly, ed., The Encyclopedia of
Aesthetics, vol. 4 (Oxford, 2014), 374–8.
Kostelanetz, Richard, ed., Merce Cunningham: Dancing in Space and Time (Chicago, 1992).
Langer, Susanne K., Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key
(New York, 1953).
Louppe, Laurence, Poetics of Contemporary Dance, tr. Sally Gardner ([1997]; Alton, 2010).
Malone, Jacqui, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visual Rhythms of African American Dance
(Chicago, 1996).
Margolis, Joseph, Historied Thought, Constructed World: A Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the
Millennium (Berkeley, 1995).
Mathur, Nita, Cultural Rhythms in Emotions, Narratives and Dance (New Delhi, 2002).
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, “Man Has Always Danced: Forays into the Origins of an Art Largely
Forgotten by Philosophers,” Contemporary Aesthetics, 3 (2005): https://contempaesthetics.org/
newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=273.
Stallings, Lauri (chor.), And All Directions I Come to You, dance performance/roaming instal-
lation, with glo at Creative Time, Drifting in Daylight event (New York, 2015): http://www.
lauristallings.org/world-premiere-2015/.
PART II
E MOT ION A N D E X PR E S SION
6
The Life of Rhythm
Dewey, Relational Perception, and the “Cumulative Effect”
Garry L. Hagberg
Why does rhythm speak to us so deeply? Patterns of accented or percussive sound

that move us are meaningful. Yet we are hard-pressed to say what associations or
connotations create that meaning. What is required is something more elemental
than personal or idiosyncratic associations; it is something that gives rhythm’s uni-
versal power articulate voice. This chapter argues that at this level, John Dewey’s Art
as Experience has some deep insights.1 Here, I will focus on their implications for
jazz improvisation.
1. The Reflection and Re-Creation of Life’s

Rhythms: Dewey and John Coltrane’s Quartet
Dewey uncovers a reciprocal relation between the organism and its environment
that it is represented by rhythm:2
Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march
of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it—either through effort or
by some happy chance . . . the recovery . . . is enriched by the state of disparity and
resistance through which it has successfully passed. If the gap between organism
and environment is too wide, the creature dies. If its activity is not enhanced by
the temporary alienation, it merely subsists. Life grows when a temporary falling
out is a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with
those of the conditions under which it lives. These biological commonplaces . . .
reach to the roots of the esthetic in experience.3
1 Dewey, Art as Experience, discussed in Hagberg, “Dewey’s Pragmatic Aesthetics.”

2 The importance of the organism-in-environment model is recognized by recent music theorists, though
with little reference to Dewey. Clarke, Ways of Listening, Chs 1 and 3, importantly proceeds from and develops
the work of psychologist James Gibson in environmental terms.
In this passage we see the ideas of (a) falling out of step with one’s surroundings,
(b) recovering rhythmical congruity with it, (c) the value of the experience of in-
congruent disparity for enriching subsequent experience, and (d) the growth of
life as a result of a “more extensive balance” with surrounding conditions. These
conditions may be anthropological as much as biological, but in describing the
tensions and resolutions of an organism (or person) within an environment, they
simultaneously describe “the roots of the esthetic”—Dewey’s most fundamental in-
sight about rhythm. For Dewey, the aesthetic involves not only a mimesis of nature,
but is already in nature; art is one with its environment:
The first characteristic of the environing world that makes possible the existence
of artistic form is rhythm. There is rhythm in nature before poetry, painting, ar-
chitecture and music exist. Were it not so, rhythm as an essential property of form
would be merely superimposed upon material, not an operation through which
material effects its own culmination in experience.4
Detailed examples will explain the importance of Dewey’s insight on rhythm.

The classic performances of John Coltrane’s Quartet, with drummer Elvin Jones
and bassist Jimmy Garrison, exemplify Dewey’s insight. Close listening reveals
the plausibility of Dewey’s mimetic relation between rhythm and the biological
and anthropological experience of living, of life itself. Recorded live at The Village
Vanguard in New York on November 3, 1961, Coltrane’s “Impressions” uses an
AABA 32-bar song-form structure, probably derived from Miles Davis’ earlier
modal piece “So What,” which Coltrane had been playing with Davis. I will focus
on Jones’ complex interconnection with Garrison, as a sort of hyper-intelligent
rhythmic propulsion machine.
The sense of propulsion is established from the first beat, giving the sense of step-
ping into a rapid-fire 4/4 rhythm that has already been running—like the space be-
yond the borders of a photograph that one knows is there but is not technically
visible, or like picking up a telephone and suddenly listening in on a rapid-fire con-
versation. In this sense it suggests something that predates our presence to it—the
“surrounding conditions” that are the given state of affairs and to which, in Dewey’s
sense, we must adjust. Through the fifteen minutes of this piece, this propulsion
is never lost, and its end also seems to suggest continuity beyond its audible limit.
But much happens within this uninterrupted propulsion that Dewey’s words de-
scribe. In the initial statement of the melody (0:01–0:29), Jones and Garrison are
in lock-step through the AA, establishing the rhythmic ground or “surrounding
conditions.” The listener has an embodied sense that we are, in Dewey’s sense,
together.
With the beat that begins the B section (0:16–0:22), Garrison departs into a
syncopated walking bass-line, in opposition to Jones’ non-syncopated propulsion.

The Life of Rhythm 103
While it lasts only five seconds, it places the listener where Garrison is: Dewey’s
“falling out of step with one’s surroundings.” Then, in the beats (0:20–0:22) closing
the B section leading up to the last A, Garrison returns to a walking 4/4; he and
the listener are “recovering unison” with the surrounding environment. In Dewey’s
terms, the experience of being back in step in the final A generates an enriched
sense of rightness—not “mere return to a prior state.” Garrison’s syncopated move
within that context is a “state of disparity and resistance” through which we have
passed. There is a foundational level of felt, embodied, rhythm in the re-stabilized
context of the final A (0:22–0:28).
Note also Dewey’s image of “too wide” a “gap,” with the resultant fate: “the crea-
ture dies.” This performance sounds, as we say, alive.5 The rich content of Dewey’s
metaphor comes from his account of the root of aesthetic experience.6 Even in
the brief moment that Garrison syncopates his bass line against the surrounding
rhythmic conditions, one senses the direct musical analogue to an immediate en-
vironmental threat: one is not sure Garrison will make it back. That sense of risk is
then felt often throughout the performance.
Dewey makes another observation of central importance:
Here in germ are balance and harmony attained through rhythm. Equilibrium
comes about not mechanically and inertly but out of, and because of, tension.
There is in nature, even below the level of life, something more than mere flux
and change. Form is arrived at whenever a stable, even though moving, equilib-
rium is reached. Changes interlock and sustain one another. Wherever there is this
coherence there is endurance. Order is not imposed from without but is made out
of the relations of harmonious interactions that energies bear to one another.7
“[N]‌ot mechanically and inertly,” as with drum machines. One might say: inert
or mechanical rhythm is not rhythm. Mere measured duration provides only the
blank canvas upon which rhythm can be created. Dewey’s equilibrium—a sense of
rhythmic balance and harmony—arises from tension and is resolved within a dy-
namic, or “moving” complex of interaction. Thus, when Garrison’s sudden change
in the bass rhythm (3:10–3:16) establishes tension—displacing the emphasis away
from the first beat of each measure—Jones layers intricate cymbal patterns on top,
acknowledging the ambiguity and subtly contributing to it, particularly at 3:13–
3:15. Yet he keeps the underlying rhythm intact, creating the effect of two rhythm
patterns bifurcating but still internally related, guaranteeing their reunion.
5 The sense of life awakens in listeners a corresponding interest in the history of the piece in question: un-
derstanding of a musical performance follows the structure of understanding a person, as I discuss in
Hagberg, “Jazz Improvisation.”
6 Dewey sees rhythm’s significance in anthropological more than biological terms: “Thus, sooner or later,
the anticipation of man in nature’s rhythms, a partnership much more intimate than is any observation of
them for purposes of knowledge, induced him to impose rhythm on changes where they did not appear. The
apportioned reed, the stretched string and taut skin rendered the measures of action conscious through song
and dance” (Art as Experience, 154).
The effect is like that of two trapeze artists separating within a context of rapid
movement, and then—as if in slow motion—reuniting where the one safely catches
the other (at 3:16), or where, as Dewey puts it, equilibrium comes about. As he
says, this is not mere flux and change; there is sense here. Parallel to Coltrane’s solo,
whose melodic motifs generate their own variations with a sense of logical entail-
ment, Jones and Garrison here follow out what their improvised patterns entail.
What we hear in this performance would not be possible with a drum machine in
place of Jones; nor by overdubbing in a studio. One could produce a fifteen-minute
recording, and it would have these players playing, but it would never sound like the
original, nor achieve its animate-creature sense—it would never be, as we say, live
music. Creating something like a living thing, the tensions, resolutions, and further
developments arise from within that interactive entity: “Order is not imposed from
without but is made out of the relations of harmonious interactions that energies
bear to one another.”8
Again, the illuminating connection is between (a) the live organism interacting
in a dynamic environment in a way that yields survival-enhancing regularities that
constitute forms or patterns of rhythm in nature, and (b) the parallel emergent
forms and patterns in aesthetic experience that constitute forms of art-work “life”:
For only when an organism shares in the ordered relations of its environment does
it secure the stability essential to living. And when the participation comes after a
phase of disruption and conflict, it bears within itself the germs of a consumma-
tion akin to the esthetic.9
Jazz improvisers create a sort of parallel world that both reflects and enacts the
tension-resolution relations, the rhythm-finding stabilizations, the separations,
the life-enhancing negotiated reunifications, and the preservation and continuity
of sense and coherence within a world of motion. Hence we hear life in music of
this kind, and respond to it as a kind of animated presence.10 Accomplished players
work hard to create a mimetic reenactment of the organism’s life of which Dewey
speaks:
Since the artist cares in a peculiar way for the phase of experience in which union
is achieved, he does not shun moments of resistance and tension. He rather
cultivates them . . .11
8 Dewey, Art as Experience, 14

10 It is telling that accomplished musicians and listeners with sufficiently trained ears will wince if a piece
such as Coltrane’s “Impressions” is unexpectedly switched off by someone not in the listening group; if power
suddenly goes out at an outstanding live performance; or (worse) a power plug is deliberately pulled. This re-
action does not take place when muzak is unplugged.
Fleetingly and powerfully, at 3:36–3:43 Garrison lifts his line out of its temporal
frame, which movement would be for Dewey a fleeting reminder of one cause of
the “death” of the “organism,” the falling apart of the performance. Jones’ snare
drum follows, and comments, as though he divides and reunifies.12 Just past three-
quarters into this performance, Jones continues to play with so much overlayering
of rhythmic commentary on the underlying pulse that one is not sure which is
primary, yet the experience remains coherent. The effect is powerfully amplified
by Garrison’s mix of bass pedals, syncopation, downbeat displacement, his moves
into very high registers, and integrated returns with the walking bass. As Dewey
writes,
All interactions that effect stability and order in the whirling flux of change are
rhythms. There is ebb and flow, systole and diastole; ordered change. The latter
moves within bounds.13
Dewey rightly asserts the indissoluble union of (a) human action within a
bounded creative structure, where that action incorporates all the elements
of tension, reunion, achieved enrichment, stabilization, destabilization, and
restabilization, (b) the embodied feeling of performing or comprehendingly
experiencing such performances, and (c) the deep, engaging human meaning of
such events:
Contrast of lack and fullness, of struggle and achievement, of adjustment after

consummated irregularity, form the drama in which action, feeling, and meaning
are one.14
2. Dewey, Rhythm, and Relational Perception
Dewey sees rhythm in the world, in our interaction with and experience of the
world, and as a foundational element in the arts, where worldly rhythms are
depicted, or enacted.15 But his account requires amplification. It is a central tenet of
American pragmatism, deriving from the work of William James and C. S. Peirce
and developed by Dewey, that an empiricist-based ontology gives relations between
12 Hagberg, “Dewey’s Pragmatic Aesthetics,” develops this point.

15 To comprehend Dewey’s vision of the pervasiveness of rhythmic patterns, one needs to recognize its
scope from the astronomical to the microscopic: “The existence of a multitude of illustrations of rhythm in
nature is a familiar fact. Oft cited are the ebb and flow of tides, the cycle of lunar changes, the pulses in the
flow of blood, the anabolism and catabolism of all living processes. [But] every uniformity and regularity of
change in nature is a rhythm . . . The very conceptions of molecule, atom, and electron arise out of the need of
formulating lesser and subtler rhythms that are discovered” (Art as Experience, 155).
things insufficient weight. Traditional empiricists hold that we perceive the stable
solid object first, and only subsequently place it in a relational configuration.
Pragmatists respond that this introduces a prismatic distortion in our perception
and thought about the world. Relationally situated perception is central to Dewey’s
understanding of rhythm, and of aesthetic experience:
The Empire State Building may be recognized by itself. But when it is seen pictori-
ally it is seen as a related part of a perceptually organized whole. Its values, its qual-
ities as seen, are modified by the other parts of the whole scene, and in turn these
modify the value, as perceived, of every other part of the whole. There is now form
in the artistic sense.16
The fact of rhythm requires this mode of relationally situated perception. Its percep-
tion is “relationally constituted”—a rhythmic pattern is not perceivable as single-
slice sonic events added together.17
To understand Dewey’s fundamental insight more fully, it is necessary to grasp
his conception of the live organism’s perception of form, as manifested in a visual
composition, a streetscape, a painting, a set of sculptures within a curated exhibi-
tion, or the environmental setting within which we as responsive and interacting
organisms act. For Dewey, this form is in essence a kind of rhythm. His “form in the
artistic sense” is thus intrinsically rhythmic. Rhythmic form is (1) in the arrange-
ment of the world; (2) in our perception or dynamic (each shifting and evolving
combination modifying every other part through our interactive perception) inter-
action with that world; (3) in the arrangement and compositional organization of
art; and (4) in our dynamic and interactive perception of that art.18 It moves toward
its own internally generated fulfillment:19
form is not found exclusively in objects labeled works of art. Wherever percep-
tion has not been blunted and perverted, there is an inevitable tendency to ar-
range events and objects with reference to the demands of complete and unified
perception.20

17 Simons, “The Ontology of Rhythm,” Ch. 3 in this book, discusses the need for recognizable repetition
with a process (Section 3), and “the dependent nature of rhythm,” where he rightly says, “There is no such
thing as a bare rhythm, on its own and subsisting independently of anything else. A rhythm is always the
rhythm of some complex of sounds in a relationship” (Section 10).
18 Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” (1943) is a work of visual art that houses, in its content and in its
titular significance, all four of these elements at once.
19 There are many examples of such internally generated fulfillment in jazz. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz,
describes Dizzy Gillespie’s comment on an Art Blakey press roll as “likening its suspension in time to the ef-
fect of stretching a huge rubber band . . . the soloist feels the increasing tension of the mesmerizing press roll,
until its eventual release rearticulates the piece’s rhythmic structure with so emphatic an accent” that—now in
Gillespie’s words—“the world knows that that’s where the beat is” (329).
3. Dewey’s “Cumulative Effect” and Wayne

Shorter’s Quartet
Dewey refers to “a progressive massing of values, a cumulative effect,” emphasizing

that this “cannot exist without conservation of the import of what has gone be-
fore.”21 This is evident in a live version of Wayne Shorter’s classic composition
“Footprints” performed by his “Footprints Quartet.”22 It begins with a compression
of the import of the piece. In 34 seconds at rapid tempo (faster and thus more com-
pressed than any standard performance) we are given the entire head of the piece.
Shorter’s compressed statement of the head is a restatement in fleeting microcosm
of the import of what has gone before. The meaning of this rhythmic compression
is a recapitulation, and for an experienced listener a re-minding of Shorter’s own
earlier performances, giving a sense of retrospection, reduced to maximal-density
essence.
Dewey’s position aptly characterizes a further feature: Shorter’s piece begins
with a four-measure solo soprano saxophone statement of the first section of the
composed melody, with the rhythm section coming in at bar five, at which point
Shorter improvises rapid melodic-rhythmic motifs until he states the full head
(from 0:16). So the whole piece is implied by its part without being entirely sounded
(this is musical synecdoche), but now we have “movement toward a consummating
close,” enabled by the “massing of values” that, as Dewey says, anticipates a resolu-
tion. Finishing the fragment-statement of the head, the quartet as an organic en-
tity seems to exhale fully (0:11–0:14), with up-tempo rhythmic definition suddenly
dropping out. They resume propulsion by 0:15, to powerful effect, thus creating ex-
treme suspense in Dewey’s sense, and an almost nervous anticipation of resolution.
Listeners may well wonder how a coherent resolution is even possible.
But then Dewey’s most fundamental point is that experience of rhythmic
meaning is relational, and not the product of adding isolated fragments. Our aes-
thetic attention is a long form of mutually interacting sinews. With the improvised
musical work as a metaphorical organism, accumulation is perceived also as prepa-
ration. At the early stage of this quartet’s performance, within the dense backward-
looking recapitulation, we hear motifs that anticipate what is to come. This is the
preserved coherence of which Dewey spoke: the ensemble maintains that delicate
integration at the precipice of what he called a ruinous “arrest” and “break.”
Just after the head, one hears what one assumes is the start of a piano solo, but the
expectation is bent to the point of breaking.23 Shorter enters with brief fragments,
21 Dewey, Art as Experience.

22 Shorter, “Footprints.” Hagberg, “The Ensemble as Plural Subject,” discusses more fully the special kind of
ensemble interaction taking place here.
23 Dewey observes that “breaking” in his sense can easily be falsely perceived in work that is new, highly
original, or groundbreaking, and that it can take the proper preparation of the perceiver to make the co-
herence audible. This happened when jazz as high art emerged from what was primarily dance music, and
drummers began using what they called “broken time”: “It takes time to discern whether the shock is caused
by inherent breaks in the organization of the object, or by lack of preparation in the perceiver” (Dewey, Art as
Experience, 175).
drawn from the composed melody, and from the pianist’s improvisation. They
propel forward—accumulation and preparation on the edge, with moments of rela-
tive consummation. Toward the end of the most animated rhythmic motifs between
saxophone and piano, a moment of repose (2:08–2:15) seems to return to the relaxed
tempo of the earlier recordings of the piece, and the bass instantly sounds the con-
ventional vamp underlying these performances (2:12–2:15). But bass and drums
fragment the vamp into parts to sequence them as semi-repeated rhythmic figures.
Then, at 2:48–2:53, drums establish a figure that inaugurates a new atmosphere,
to which all players respond. There is an anticipation of how they will find their
way out: a reminder of walking-bass jazz inserted (3:35–3:39)—resumed strongly
at 4:22–4:27—and a moment later (3:57) the bass and drum vamp resurfaces fully.
A two-chord vamp emerges (a ii-V followed by a ii-V a whole step down, from 4:49
to 6:38), which sounds almost too superficially pleasant.24 But complex intricacy
and improvised challenges supervene, and an “internal tension” prevents “a fluid
rush to a straightaway mark.”
On listening closely, one appreciates Dewey’s claim: “The existence of resistance
defines the place of intelligence in the production of a work of fine art.”25 Following a
gradual ritardando and decrescendo, the piece closes with a poetic reverie. To “bring
about the proper reciprocal adaptation of parts” here, a listener must realize that
this final passage is a final evolution of the ensemble texture of the performance.
The culminating two notes are in the bass—the same notes as the conventional bass
vamp introduction. Long preparation led to this culmination, which also suggests
a new beginning.
The perceiver, for Dewey, is indispensably making sense. And so, both player and
listener are indeed very much like the live organism interacting within its environ-
ment. That sense is, for Dewey, fundamentally rhythmic. Here he summarizes what
is indispensable in understanding rhythm’s power:
Because rhythm is a universal scheme of existence, underlying all realization of

order in change, it pervades all the arts, literary, musical, plastic and architectural,
as well as the dance . . . Underneath the rhythm of every art and of every work of
art there lies, as a substratum in the depths of the subconscious, the basic pattern
of the relations of the live creature to the environment.
It is not, therefore, just because of the systole and diastole in the coursing of
the blood, or alternate inspiration and exhalation in breathing, the swing of the
legs and arms in locomotion . . . that man delights in rhythmic portrayals and
presentations . . . ultimately the delight springs from the fact that such things
are instances of the relationships that determine the course of life, natural and
achieved. The supposition that the interest in rhythm which dominates the fine
24 Dewey writes: “The live creature demands order in his living but he also demands novelty. Confusion is
displeasing but so is ennui” (Art as Experience, 167).
arts can be explained simply on the basis of rhythmic processes in the living body
is but another case of the separation of organism from environment.26
Works Cited
Berliner, Paul F., Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago, 1994).
Clarke, Eric, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning
(Oxford, 2005).
Clarke, Eric, “Music Perception and Music Consciousness,” in David Clarke and Eric Clarke,
eds, Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives (Oxford,
2011), 193–213.
Coltrane, John, Impressions, audio recording (New York, 1963).
Hagberg, Garry L., “Jazz Improvisation and Ethical Interaction: A Sketch of the Connections,” in
Garry Hagberg, ed., Art and Ethical Criticism (Oxford, 2008), 259–85.
Hagberg, Garry L., “Dewey’s Pragmatic Aesthetics: The Contours of Experience,” in Alan
Malachowski, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism (Cambridge, 2013), 272–99.
Hagberg, Garry L., “The Ensemble as Plural Subject: Jazz Improvisation, Collective Intention, and
Group Agency,” in Eric F. Clarke and Mark Doffman, ed., Distributed Creativity: Collaboration
and Improvisation in Contemporary Music (Oxford, 2016), Chapter 13.
Mondrian, Piet, “Broadway Boogie- Woogie” (1943), oil painting, New York, Museum of
Modern Art.
Shorter, Wayne, “Footprints,” Track 6, Footprints Live!, audio recording (Universal City,
CA, 2002).
26 Dewey, Art as Experience. Dewey’s opposition to the theoretical separation of the organism from its envi-
ronment prefigures recent discussions of externalism in philosophy of mind. The embodied nature of rhythm
as experienced in music, along with our Deweyan direct perception of rhythm in nature, presents a case in
which the boundaries of selfhood as traditionally conceived are questioned: Clarke, “Music Perception.”
7
Rhythm, Preceding Its Abstraction
Deniz Peters
Discussions of musical rhythm often begin after an abstraction of its auditory, tac-
tile, and temporal feel has taken place. This common process of abstraction turns
rhythmic phenomena into a crystallized gestalt. Thus, thought on rhythm usually
begins where the phenomenon of rhythm itself ends—at the point where it turns
into a representation, at the fringes of its experience. Rhythm as the product of anal-
ysis is carved out by intellect and fixated into sequences of long and short durations
of material and their orderings and groupings. Likewise, notated durations as we
know them in Western classical compositional and interpretational practice are al-
ready congealed into symbols, frozen into images, broken up into units. Temporal
experience and its cohesion have at these stages become curiously attenuated,
obscured, and fragmented—at the periphery of where rhythm resides.
Chris Hasty’s finely worked- out distinction, in this book, between two
understandings of rhythm is driven, I think, by the same concern to avoid this hy-
postasis.1 What Hasty calls “an . . . order (of isochronous division or of fixed pat-
tern)” is what I refer to as the end product of an abstraction and intellectual carving
out. What, in turn, Hasty calls “flow . . . as . . . the active and characterful crea-
tion of things or events,” bringing the “subjective, idiosyncratic, and evanescent”
sense of rhythm, is one way of describing rhythm at the level of experience. What’s
more, Hasty’s call for a reversal of value to promote performance and to question the
power of form as timeless agents of perpetual identity, with his distinction between
fixed, abstract rhythm (R2), and its living origin, flow (R1), heads into the same
direction as my call for a revaluation of our experiential knowledge about rhythm.
In this chapter, I offer an alternative approach to the understanding of musical
rhythm, not dissimilar from Hasty’s, by beginning non-reductively where rhythm
centrally resides: in doings and happenings, in our bodies and between each other.
Andy Hamilton is one of the few authors to have done essential work in this re-
gard, along with the other authors cited in this chapter.2 I claim that rhythm is an
1 See Chapter 15, “Complexity and Passage: Experimenting with Poetic Rhythm.”

2 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” develops a projective account of rhythm, in which experiences of the
rhythmicity of human behavior are, on the one hand, present in musical performance, and, on the other,
imaginatively projected upon it. Hamilton qualifies his account as dynamic, with its essential recourse to
human movement, and how the rhythm literally moves (37–41), as an essentially embodied phenomenon;
and as humanistic, in contrast to abstracting accounts that treat rhythm as “essentially a pattern of possibly
unstressed sounds and silences” (36).
Rhythm, Preceding Its Abstraction 111
experiential phenomenon that is manifested when we attend to sound, movement,

and action felt or seen, or to other perceptions and self-perceptions, like feelings of
pain, or pleasure. Lived rhythm, unlike conceptualized rhythm, exists where em-
pathy unfolds as one makes or hears sounds made by someone else. Even silence
can brim with our continued attention. In it, we may find ourselves living through
the qualities of the sounds made in its vicinity.
The current chapter is motivated by experiences of playing with various
improvisers in duos and trios in recent years. Because the performances took
place within the framework of a research project, I consciously took note of these
experiences, which might otherwise have passed by as moments of superb cor-
respondence, or simply as musical curiosities. We achieved a noteworthy series
of improvisations in the sense of a shared, corporeal sense of time and temporal
composition, epitomized during my work with Berlin-based alto and baritone
saxophonist Simon Rose.3 In one of these pieces, the first track on the recording
(titled between, part 1), Rose and I approach a very slow shared pulse within the
events progressing from the initial material—a single, long-held six-note middle
register piano cluster, played mf, with an emphasis on the Bb, followed by a sus-
tained, internally varied multiphonic on Bb by Rose. The setting was exploratory
and unpremeditated, although we analyzed our experience and observations after
playing and before entering the next set of improvisations, which primed the sub-
sequent playing. After initially playing the sounds separately (piano cluster, sax
multiphonic, piano cluster), next came a combination of the two sounds, melting
into a single sustained unit, twenty-six seconds after the very first piano cluster. We
returned to the combined single action about twenty-three seconds onwards.
There is much to say about how we composed a piece of nearly seven minutes
out of these very sparse initial elements, adding only a handful of other elements
in due course. For the current purpose, however, it is the timespan of twenty-three
seconds that is particularly noteworthy. That span reappears throughout the piece—
immediately after the first instances, but also on various occasions throughout, even
in the final two sonic instances with which the piece ends. Although the piece is one
of unmetered, “floating” time—no counting is involved, no sections establishing
metric subdivisions—what is striking is that we spontaneously found a shared sense
of time at a level of very slow pulsation. The most likely explanation for this tem-
poral orientation is breathing. A slow exhalation (literally present as causing and
driving the sax multiphonic), followed by a correspondently quiet inhalation, plus
a phase of holding the breath, might take this long. A very slow body rotation, or
a combination of upper body retraction and extension could also take this dura-
tion. Here, any further rhythmic structure within the piece seems closely—and
organically—related to the shared pulse that seems equivalent in length to a deeply
relaxed breathing cycle. The piece, between, part 1, is a concrete example of how
3 Peters and Rose, Edith’s Problem.

musicians enter rhythm from bodily durations, prior to any intellectual or symbolic
abstraction from the psychological experience of those durations.
The line of thought I develop stems from a number of related observations con-
cerning how rhythm comes into being via interpersonal and self-attention, which
I summarize in the following seven propositions. (1) Duration can be something
we live through, creating it through our embodied existence, and it is therefore ex-
pressive; (2) in listening, we sense or imagine a “doing,” the presence of which forms
itself differently depending on the somatic or intellectual orientation and depth of
our interpretation that is part of active perception; (3) rhythmicity forms in direct
relation to interpersonal attention which shifts between self and other (embodied
or imagined), an attention that drifts loosely and gradually between the extremes
of utter concentration and complete detachment; (4) the qualitative experience of
rhythm, and the process in which it establishes itself or vanishes, also depends on
the kind of music making and listening engaged in (improvisation, composition,
rehearsal, performance, first or repeated listening); (5) there seems to be a striking
correlation between sonic togetherness—when two players’ individual temporal
senses fuse into one—and somatic togetherness, a jointly felt long-range pulsation;
(6) rhythmicity spreads over various levels of detail, order, and scopes, as we in-
dulge in feats of attention; (7) musical silence is not a void. I shall now analyze these
seven observations.
1. No body, no rhythm
Rhythm is not simply duration, it is duration made. Durations and proportions

can be abstracted into numerical values; but the result cuts out the sense of imme-
diacy with which rhythm is shared between one person and another, or between
a natural event and an observer, or between a musical event and a listener. With
the sense of immediacy being lost, common reflections on rhythm face the chal-
lenge of deducing rhythmic immediacy from an intellectual response to rhythmic
phenomena. Acknowledging that musical rhythm arises through our embodied ex-
istence in a space and on an instrument, it is instantly clear that durations are one
with their bodily making—including resonant bodies—and that relations between
durations are temporal and spatial relations between bodily acts and undergoings.
Connected to this, and also an aspect of rhythm, is the expressivity of duration.
A long-held note at the top of a climactic vocal gesture in a performance of Fado,4
for example, is not merely a long note. It is upheld, sustained by the fervor of an
emotional disclosure, of, for instance, despair, rebelliousness, or hope. Not only is
the note’s tone one of despair, for example, but its extent is too; were it shorter, it
would not be as despairing, rebellious, or hopeful (which is not to imply a direct
4 To give but one example: instances abound in a performance of “Alfama” by Carminho at Podium Mozaiek
in Amsterdam, 2011. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8YfA7FL05M.
relationship between length of tone and intensity of despair). Thus durational ex-
pressivity arises not only from one duration’s numeric difference to another, but
from a note’s realization by the body for this length.
As it is made bodily, duration can be adverbially expressive, to use Peter Goldie’s
felicitous concept.5 It is the despair, the rebelliousness, or the hopefulness with which
it is sung—in Goldie’s sense, colored in by an emotion from a different context—that
give the note its tone and its length. Again, this is not to be understood in the sense of
an isomorphic relation between duration and expressive content, but, when we do hear
rebelliousness in a note, we hear it, in part, in its duration. Duration bears emotional
expressivity despite the opacity of the intentional object of the singer’s emotion. By the
music alone, without text or dramatic context, we do not know the despair, rebellious-
ness, or hope. Due to this opacity, and since duration encompasses bodily resonances
that extend human instrumental actions, there is an additional aspect to the making of
duration involving the imagination, to which I turn next.
2. Perceptual enactment, attention, and

hermeneutical models
Just as duration is achieved through the body when making music, it is also enacted
in imagination as part of perception when listening to music—even when evoking it
in one’s “inner ear.” There are two complementary aspects of this enactment; neither
is necessarily conscious, but each can be focused on consciously and distinctly. One
aspect is that of cognitive attending, the other that of bodily attending. On listening
to a passage of minimalist music, for example, an accented note may come to my at-
tention, and I may notice that I am briefly turning my attention to it, catching myself
in the act of attending, sustained perhaps only for the duration of this very accented
note. This would be conscious cognitive attending. Or, as I hear the accented sound,
I may become aware of a short tensing around the stomach or a brief fluctuation in
the solar plexus area, a trace of a movement in the larynx. This is conscious bodily
attending. Such bodily attending can occur even with imagined music, as when
imagining an intense beginning of an emphatic gesture. In attending I might also
make a small or extended physical movement, involuntarily or intentionally, but
this is yet another matter.
Roland Barthes, in one of his inspired music-related essays, reveals his bodily
attending:
In Schumann’s Kreisleriana (Opus 16; 1838), I actually hear no note, no theme, no

contour, no grammar, no meaning . . . No, what I hear are blows: I hear what beats
in the body, what beats the body, or better: I hear this body that beats.6
5 Goldie, The Emotions,  133–4.

6 Barthes, “Rasch,” 299.
In stark contrast to the intellectuality of grammar or meaning, the “blows” Barthes

describes are somatically present to him as listener. With this, Barthes captures the
interpersonal goings-on in musical experience, since, clearly, someone is inflicting
these blows.
Who is this someone? Barthes refers to three beating bodies. One is Schumann’s:
Here is how I hear Schumann’s body (indeed, he had a body, and what a body! His
body was what he had most of all) . . .7
This is, of course, an imaginary body: Schumann’s body as imagined by Barthes

through his musical experience of its creative agency, and expressivity, located most
of all, for Barthes, at points of accent.8 Barthes points out that
The beat—corporal and musical—must never be the sign of a sign: the accent is not
expressive.9
This does not contradict the rhythmic expressivity I argued for in Section 1 (No
Body, No Rhythm), as Barthes refers to linguistic expressivity. His word for the so-
matic expressivity I refer to is enunciation:
What does the body do when it enunciates (musically)? And Schumann

answers: my body strikes, my body collects itself, it explodes, it divides, it pricks, . . .
it stretches out, it weaves . . .10
The second body Barthes considers is the performer’s:
The beats are played too timidly; the body which takes possession of them is al-
most always a mediocre body, trained, streamlined by years of Conservatory or
career, or more simply by the interpreter’s insignificance, his indifference.11
For Barthes, the interpretive tradition represses Schumann’s body as he envisages

it. He carefully gauges his emphasis on physicality: “the body must pound—not the
pianist.”12
Yet Barthes also refers to a third body that is indeed literal—the listener’s very
real body:
10 Barthes, “Rasch,” 305–6.
It is not a matter of beating fists against the door, in the presumed manner of fate.
What is required is that it beat inside the body, against the temple, in the sex, in the
belly, against the skin from the inside, at the level of . . . “the heart.”13
Barthes coalesces these three bodies in the unified experience of the

“Schumannian” body:
There is a site of the musical text where every distinction between composer, inter-
preter, and auditor is abolished.14
That bodily site—given through bodily attending—is thus marked by an interper-

sonal dynamic.
Barthes’ description of the somatic dimension of his listening experience shows
that the rhythmicity of musical events can be literally felt by a listener. At its somat-
ically most pronounced, then, rhythm can be felt as an event of the order of bodily
contact and presence. For this to eventuate, the listener would have to be encultured
to or else have acquired an openness to a bodily hermeneutic, as Barthes clearly has.
Not all hermeneutic stances are like this of course. For instance, Martha Nussbaum’s
exquisite, dreamlike evocation of musical experience is far removed from throbbing
or voluptuous bodily experience.15 Likewise, Eduard Hanslick’s hermeneutic of the
acousmatically moving forms of music, shifts, if taken to the extreme of many of his
interpreters, into a visual, touchless frame.16 Rhythm, if listened to under Barthes’
bodily hermeneutic, is a felt encounter with the world’s vitality, an encounter which
can be enjoyed or abhorred at this very level of bodily experience, and an encounter
which may have the gripping immediacy of a physical interpersonal encounter.
3. Mobility of attention
In the process of listening to music our attention isn’t fixed; it travels. We are not
fully in control of the way our attention moves, yet, since we may direct it, it is not
entirely involuntary either.17 As our attention lingers, shifts, or is suspended, we do
not simply follow or react to predetermined musical events that call for or compel
our attention; we also half create the musical events we perceive by anticipating
specific sonic qualities, or by finding them noteworthy. This partly bound, partly
free, changing, retaining, and retreating of attention marks the perceptual process.
As our attention zigzags across certain detail through the full spectral complexity
15 Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 265–71.
16 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful.
17 Our attention can either be drawn toward something, like a specifically articulated sound; or, in listening
out for something, we can turn our attention toward it, like a particular detail within a texture.
of the heard; as it narrows and widens, zooming in and out of textures; and as it
oscillates between following distinct gestalt features and drifting, it moves, falls
apart, reassembles.
One must also distinguish between widened attention, e.g., of a polyphonic tex-
ture in its entirety, and peripheral attention, e.g., vaguely perceiving some sonic oc-
currence, a particular melodic line, say, or a particular sonority within a texture,
though this is outside the main focus. The ability to distinguish individual strands
of events from other sonic events, involving the very ability to discern subtle co-
herence, depends on skill and on the chosen, or simply habitual, mode of listening.
Attention forms the entry to such discernment. I can attend to something unfath-
omable without discerning it, without relating it to its context and noticing its dis-
tinctness; but I cannot discern something without attending to it, since I cannot
notice anything specific about something I fail to notice per se.18
As attention travels between the voluntary, self-induced, and the involuntary,
other-induced, it travels toward and away from the other as manifest in the instru-
ment, the performing actions, and the personalities (real and imagined) unifying
those actions. The perceived “overall” rhythmicity which arises from these inter-
personal attentional meanderings is co-constituted. Performer and listener form
a duo,19 in which durations are lived, and out of which the listener’s sense of time
spontaneously ensues. A listener might at first not be aware of any regularity within
attentional movements between a convolution of lived durations. Musical time at
this point—remote from analyzed durational patterns—is fluid and flexible. The
way in which a rubato stretches and condenses time sequentially or even between
different textural parts evinces this primordial flexibility of temporal perception.
During the course of listening, and as our awareness of timbral and gestural coher-
ence grows, our sense of the agency and situatedness of durations as thing made
grows too, combining composed, performed and (somatically) imagined agencies,
substantially contributing to the rhythmicity we perceive. Time, in this view, is
generated from social interaction, paralleling Norbert Elias’ striking conception of
social time.20 A heard vitality in music thus bears witness to this dialogical enact-
ment of time which clings to the emergent rhythmicity of interpersonally marked
and created musical events. Some music can, however, counteract this vitality and
enforce a rigid sense of time or remove it altogether. Such music may, at the ex-
treme, be heard as “cold,” “dead,” or as transcending time, like Scriabin’s Prelude,
Op. 74, No. 2.
18 I discuss a special case of remembering and backtracking what one has formerly failed to notice below, in
Section 6.
19 Schütz, “Making Music Together,” 172.
20 Elias, Essay on Time, argues against a reified conceptualization of time (as found in naturalistic positions),
understanding time instead as a symbol for a “socially learned synthesis” (24). His “synthesis” signifies the
cognitive combination of various perceived processes, in which one (e.g. the ebb and swell of the tide or the
coming and going of sun and moon) forms a reference to the other. Timing, as referencing between “socially
standardised continua of changes” (39), is a socially acquired skill and actually orients and historically (and
culturally) alters, Elias argues, human experience of time. In the view I unfold in this chapter, joint rhythm-
making is an instance of the shared creation of timing in Elias’s sense.
4. Experiential variance
One can encounter rhythm from different stances or as part of distinct activities,
and rhythm appears differently from within these. As an improviser, my experience
of generating rhythm is unlike that of a listener, in that I am free to vary durations
as I live through them. It is also unlike that of a performer who is beginning to
encounter an unknown score. It can, however, be compared to the experience of
a performer who is performing an intimately familiar work, the interpretation of
which she has raised to an artistic level by synthesizing the individually notated
units back into a balanced and plastically shaped, refined, gripping and telling mu-
sical whole. In duo improvisation, rhythm has a different role, and experiential
character, than solo playing. And in listening to a performance more than once,
particularly when listening to a recording, rhythm reveals itself in various guises
and stages, as discussed in Section 3, on the continuum between liminal and utterly
distinct awareness.
5. Pulsation, togetherness, and super-individual fusion
Alfred Schütz, in his classic essay “Making Music Together,” proposes that musicking
is a paradigmatic case of social interaction, in which the “inner times” of composers,
performers, and listeners synchronize in a “mutual tuning-in.”21 Distinguishing
the measurable clock time of the “outer world” from a non-measurable, musically
constituted temporal sense, Schütz calls music “a meaningful arrangement of tones
in inner time.”22 This inner, musically given sense of time is, Schütz affirms, shared
by all participants related to a specific work, who thus enter a state of being in the
same temporal flow of events:
Although separated by hundreds of years, the [listener] participates with quasi si-
multaneity in the [composer’s] stream of consciousness by performing with him
step by step the ongoing articulation of his musical thought. The beholder, thus, is
united with the composer by a time dimension common to both.23
Schütz further notes that performers, in playing together, achieve a pinnacle of

shared consciousness and flow, which they actively establish by spontaneous ne-
gotiation and mutual anticipation, and hence share “in vivid present the Other’s
stream of consciousness in immediacy.”24
21 Schütz, “Making Music Together,” 170, 173. Although he refers to Bergson’s concept of durée in defining
his concept of inner time, he does not require this inner time be private, as the shared “stream of conscious-
ness” that composers, performers, and listeners “live through in simultaneity” to him is identical, i.e., without
the qualitative difference the idea of a truly private time would entail.
Schütz’s understanding of a musically given sense of time is remarkably

consequent:
The coperformers may have recourse to these devices [viz. counting, metronome,
the conductor’s baton] when for one reason or another the flux of inner time in
which the musical content unfolds has been interrupted.25
This confirms that he takes “the flux of inner time” to be constitutive for the produc-
tion of synchronized action, rather than a synchronization with an external time-
keeper, a separate time-keeping entity. This strikes me as a very attractive feature of
his view. Yet, on the downside, Schütz does not seem to be aware of temporal vari-
ance in the case of listening. His idea of the listener being a co-performer is that of a
precise re-creator of the composer’s temporal experience. But this is contrary to the
phenomenology of listening, and discounts the roles attention and the perceptual
making of duration play in the emergence of rhythmicity, for if one hears the same
work a number of times, its temporal perception sometimes changes. For example,
up-tempo works can start to feel slower upon closer acquaintance. This is often the
case with virtuosic literature, such as Rachmaninoff ’s Etudes-Tableaux.
There is not, therefore, a singular, fixed sense of time that necessarily emerges,
even in a single listener’s multiple listening instances. Contra Schütz, it is thus un-
likely that listeners are in the same stream of consciousness as the composer. Surely
enough, were this the case, there could not be different interpretations of a single
work. What is entirely possible, however, is an alignment of a listener’s temporal
sense with that of a current performance. Yet again, the emergence of a shared tem-
poral sense in the fullest, literally reciprocal sense, occurs between performers, if
anywhere. What is arguably most interesting about Schütz’s notion of mutual
tuning-in from an aesthetic point of view, is that its mutual, bidirectional, sym-
metrical, dialogical form might indeed take place between performers. Here, two
senses of time are genuinely being negotiated into a single shared sense of time;
or, alternatively, a single, shared sense of time really emerges interpersonally as the
activity of two beings, without two entirely separate senses of time being in place.
Thought on this subject is elaborated and refined in recent work on entrainment, to
which I turn next.
Schütz’s argument raises a familiar question: How do performers entrain? Does
entrainment presuppose an inner, biologically based and skilfully refined time-
keeper of measured time, a sort of mental clock capable of temporally guiding move-
ment so as to produce well-kept time in performance? Or could, alternatively, the
body be capable of producing precise regular movement on its own accord, without
any distinct inner timekeeper as a guide? Would, further, an inter-corporeal pro-
duction of such movement be conceivable? Differently put: that two performers
have to negotiate a shared sense of time, as Schütz elucidates, does not show that

they have individual senses already in place; the sense of time might emerge be-
tween them, in the very interaction. The negotiation only shows that if individual
senses are established and kept in place, they can also differ, which difference can be
upheld, and is audible to all participants.
Martin Clayton’s work shows that entrainment takes place despite differences
in individual senses of time, and even despite their intentional upkeeping.26 To
Clayton, every participant “knows that the process of sharing the temporal flow
may be a rewarding one,”27 which is, ultimately, what he appeals to when claiming
that “Musical rhythm is irreducibly social in nature . . . Musical rhythm originates in
both endogenous physiological rhythms and the dynamics of interaction between
individual human beings.”28
I shall complicate Clayton’s advanced understanding of togetherness by
recounting an intriguing phenomenon I encountered during duo and trio
improvisations, namely, a particularly long bodily pulsation. The bodily rush, vis-
ceral widening, briefly increased subcutaneous flow, almost an inner combustion
at times, can, when deliberately exaggerated, be externalized as a full body contrac-
tion and expansion, like a conductor’s full-body gesture of phrasal emphasis. It is
a feeling—like a throb of pain, aggravation, or lust is a feeling—and though some-
times accompanied by a conscious realization, it is not necessarily accompanied
by a thought. I can produce this feeling at will outside a musical context. Multiple
instances can be periodical, if I set my mind to it, with pauses (or bodily silences)
between the individual pulses being of two or more seconds in length. Those
pulsations can occur without metric subdivisions, yet they are rich with the feelings
of suspense, anticipation, impact, and retention. They seem to me to be of the
phrasal length observed by Nikki Moran,29 and by Clayton in his analysis of unin-
tentional periodicity between tanpura players.
Now, I can confirm these bodily pulsations can also occur unintentionally, when
improvising with others. Remarkably, as I experienced them arising in free im-
provisation, they are not cognitions that relate to an external timekeeper. None of
the musicians openly established a common metric structure. Yet I experienced
durationally extended pulsation; and the other players experienced them too,
at exactly the same time as myself, as turned out in numerous post-performance
discussions and listening analyses. This, as far as I can see, would be an impossible
thing in a free, non-metric duo improvisation, i.e., without a reference timekeeper,
unless we generated time together.
While this observation accords with Clayton and even Schütz, it changes the in-
terpretation of “inner time.” Given neither by external reference only, nor simply
by biological disposition, inner time arises within a mutually empathic act between
players. This shared, inner time allows even a small deviation from the temporal
26 Clayton, “Observing Entrainment.”
27 Clayton, “Entrainment and the Social,” this volume, 195.
28 Clayton, “Entrainment and the Social,” this volume, 196.
29 Cited in Clayton, “Observing Entrainment,” 29.

fusion to become audible, as an ever-so-slight disjointedness, a disagreement. This

is not a case of synchrony; there are not two clocks, but just one fused sense of time.
That sense of time is fused by way of musicking: anyone who has ever performed
unison passages30 will know that this cannot be achieved by counting, or by atten-
tion to meter alone. Such growing and flowing temporal fusions in an ensemble do
not feel as if they can be intended. Instead, they feel like they arrive, or arise, and
can be encouraged by preventing interference, i.e., by release rather than inhibi-
tion. Importantly, however, they are upheld by a sort of attention, as any distrac-
tion will risk their vanishing. Thus they are not inner in any “private” sense. Schütz
speaks of a “We” as the emergent form of social interaction.31 I claim that this “We”
exists, not as the sum of single individuals, but super-individually, in temporally
fused moments of musicking. Time, in these moments, is interpersonally found
and founded.
Despite the significant observation of the genuinely interpersonal genesis of such
shared temporal experiences, it is not foundational for rhythm per se, but rather
a point of epitomized rhythmic experience. Yet from the interpersonal side of the
constitution, the affectivity of rhythmic intricacy might plausibly be seen to take
root. This is recognized by Peter Nelson, who theorizes an “emotional and aesthetic
binding” inherent in rhythm.32 This binding is social in going beyond a simple, per-
ceptual binding into the realms of bodily interaction and interpersonal negotiation.
To Nelson, to “grasp a rhythm” is “to abandon conscious control . . . to the physical
engagement of the body with sound . . . which is always, inevitably engagement with
another body.”33 Nelson also refers to how durational space is distributed between
sound makers, e.g., between mother and infant, and in African polyrhythm.34
Nelson conceives out-of-timeness within a shared durational space as the me-
dium for expressivity in “the actual flow of the rhythmic narrative,” in his example,
mother–infant interaction, where “minute alterations can have huge significance.”35
While Nelson’s line of thought helps elucidate the social ontology of rhythmic
behavior, it only hints at potential causes of the affectivity of rhythm. He argues
that Colwyn Trevarthen’s findings on mother– infant interaction, Gaston
Bachelard’s thought on the significance of duration, and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory
of gift exchange all support the idea that the “temporal spaces between sounds or
actions . . . are pregnant with meaning”—a meaning derived from the social jux-
taposition of those involved in the exchange. Yet Nelson does explicitly analyze
the concrete link between such rhythmic meaning and affect; perhaps because he
adopts Trevarthen’s notion of pulse, whereby pulse is exteriorized, and expressed in
30 E.g. the first movement of Schubert’s Trio Op. 99 D 898; the second movement of his Trio Op. 100 D 929;
or the fourth movement of his String Quartet No. 14 D 810, Der Tod und das Mädchen.
32 Nelson, “Social Theory of Rhythm,” 151.
35 Nelson, “Social Theory of Rhythm,” 153–4. In taking temporal dissonance to be socially meaningful,
Nelson thus develops a point that recalls Adorno’s idea of expressive melodic and harmonic dissonance.
actions.36 Nelson treats pulse as “socially constructed ‘instants which stand out,’ ”37
and these instants remain, at least in his account, curiously disconnected from the
body, such that listeners “think [rather than feel] one at the same time as another
person.”38
When, however, one consistently understands rhythm as felt, such as in Andy
Hamilton’s humanistic conception, sources of affectivity abound. One can then
immediately spell out, for example, that the negotiation of temporal space and its
occupation is charged with issues of power, dominance, submission, struggle, in-
timacy, and rejection not only in intellectual, symbolical terms, but in terms of felt
experience. Towardness and union, or aversion and disjunction exist on a somatic
plane, and become psychologically active through it.
This reflection on jointly created pulsation shows how analyses of entrainment
might be even further connected to analyses of social and psychological meaning;
and, complementing Schütz’s and Clayton’s reasoning, and similar to Hamilton’s
idea of projection, how bodily imagination must be accounted for in attempting to
understand interpersonal rhythmicity.
6. Rhythmic events, gestural levels, and attentional habits
When rhythm enters one’s attention, it does so in constituting sonic events and
chains, linear, and layered. The consistency and cohesion of these events develops
and clarifies itself during the course of a piece, in listening as much as performing.
Something that from a standard score analytical point of view clearly is a mo-
tive might not appear so at its incipient sounding; its motivic identity forms as it
reappears, each time altering and enriching its durational expressivity, as relations
to other sonic events begin to be heard, and as proportions articulate. Further, some
events one initially or loosely hears as single may be made up of hundreds of tiny
actions, such as the whizzing and flickering textures and the densely clustered but
permanently transforming sonic fields in Friedrich Cerha’s Spiegel VI. Still, I go on
to hear them as singular events, with the event character being gestural and flowing,
from its appearance through to its disappearance. Whenever such gestural events
are layered and arise from the lower threshold of audibility, I may attend to them
only long after their inception. They can appear suddenly, when attention shifts
to them; and retention may bring their prior presence into consciousness.39 Some
gestures may consist of smoothly interwoven actions that are in themselves events
at a smaller scale, so attending to the subtleties of a texture may reveal intricate
36 Nelson, “Social Theory of Rhythm,” 152–3.

37 Nelson, “Social Theory of Rhythm,” 153, quoting Bachelard.
39 To listen out for moments of gestural appearance and disappearance can make for an exquisite experi-
ence. A listener so inclined may choose to savor the borders of musical material, drifting away from other cur-
rent sonic events if they are below a certain markedness. Here, the rhythmicity of the fuller sonic constellation
can remain underarticulated.
rhythmicity on various levels, intra-gestural and inter-gestural—a rhythmicity that

sometimes requires us to listen out for it. The striking motoric passages often found
in Stravinsky or Prokofiev, or, radically, the gradually accumulating, massive or-
chestral “stomping” in Friedrich Cerha’s Spiegel VI, are protruding, sonic events of
the “beating” sort, which might capture our focal attention initially, only to recede
as we attend and bodily interpret the sonic and affective space between them.
As listening progresses, especially during repeated listening, attentional habits
might form, and existing ones might be challenged and altered. All of this plays
into rhythmicity as it concretizes and recedes. On the aesthetic level, it might never
reach the crystalline structure a score analysis suggests. In other words, the dis-
creteness of abstracted rhythm is not thoroughly audible in the way pitch or timbre
are. As with other psychological phenomena, rhythm has a dimension in which it
is obscure, shrouded, submerged, only to emerge into consciousness at particular
points of attending.
7. The expressivity of silences
I return briefly to the affective space between instances of orchestral “stomps” in

Cerha’s Spiegel VI. Not only are these silences charged with the threatening char-
acter of an advancing large mass of marching bodies, congealing into a single, mas-
sive body, they also are convoluted around the edges, diffused by the imprecision
of a forming horde. Thomas Clifton is one of the few authors to have written with
subtlety about the experiential shades of the diverse ways in which silences are mu-
sically situated.40 Clifton distinguishes between temporal, spatial, and gestural si-
lence.41 He also distinguishes between the time of a musical work and “our bodily
time”; between silence “ridged by the perception of continuing pulses” and “pulse-
less silence”; and “gapping” silences and silences “in which melodic motion carries
itself right through.”42 His examples show a delicate sensibility to how dedicated,
attentive, active listening fills silences affectively. To this I add the experience of
riveting silences in improvisation, in mid-gesture, and particularly at the moment
where for a certain duration the decision over whether the piece ends now—or
whether pulsation demands its being carried on and through—hovers between two
or more players. These examples remind that silences, like sounds, have a lived du-
ration, are an equally important part of rhythmic experience, and that any sophis-
ticated concept of rhythm should not be deaf to their phenomenological nuances.
* * *
40 Losseff and Doctor (eds), Silence, Music, Silent Music, offers a few more examples of such rare work.
41 Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” 164.
42 Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” 165, 167, 174, 178.

These thoughts are preliminary and invite extensive unpacking.43 Additional

ground has been cleared in support of some specific revisionary approaches to
the idea of rhythm as named in this chapter. Rhythm, in these revisionary views is
clearly an interpersonal phenomenon. To this I add that rhythmicity comes to the
fore and to itself as attention negotiates the presence of others with and within our
own, in ways that can be both felt and cognized. While rhythmic durations as found
in scores, formal analyses, and abstract conceptualizations are thin, thick durations
are made durations and are experienced accordingly. Behind such made durations
stand identities that are expressed in the coherence of the durations’ very making,
i.e., the performer’s or composer’s identities, and the listener’s, plus—via instru-
mental and stylistic practices and instruments as cultural artifacts—collective
identities, identities worldly and imagined. The expressive counterpoint of those
rhythmically interwoven identities stands out at its most articulate in performances
that manage to find a shared rhythmicity, where the sharing extends to and includes
ensemble, and listener. Rhythmic resistances become intricately expressive where
a fundamental rhythmic correlation exists; without such a correlation individual
parts disengage (this disengagement may itself be generally expressive of aversion,
alienation, or disinterest). Rhythm, preceding its abstraction, then, is the experi-
ence of a felt, dialogical hermeneutic at work between people, environment, and
imagined agencies.44
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland, “Rasch,” in The Responsibility of Forms, tr. Richard Howard (Berkeley, 1991),
299–312.
Carminho [Maria do Carmo Carvalho Rebelo de Andrade], “Alfama,” at Podium Mozaiek in
Amsterdam, 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8YfA7FL05M.
Clayton, Martin, “Observing Entrainment in Music Performance: Video-Based Observational
Analysis of Indian Musicians’ Tanpura Playing and Beat Making,” Musicae Scientiae, 11.1
(2007),  27–59.
(Oxford, 2019), C12.
Clifton, Thomas, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” The Musical Quarterly, 62.2 (1976), 163–81.
Elias, Norbert, An Essay on Time ([1984]; Dublin, 2007).
Goldie, Peter, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford, 2000).
Problem,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 111.1 (2011), 25–41.
Hanslick, Eduard, On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics
of Music, tr. Geoffrey Payzant ([1854]; Indianapolis, 1986).
43 Foreseeably, questions of the nature of meter, accent, beat, and other aspects of rhythm might reconfigure
themselves from the newly gained view, rather than being elements out of which an understanding of rhythm
needs to be uncomfortably construed.
44 Research for this chapter was funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF: P25061-G15.
Hasty, Christopher, “Complexity and Passage: Experimenting with Poetic Rhythm,” in Peter
Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music,
Poetics (Oxford, 2019), C15.
Losseff, Nicky and Jenny Doctor, eds, Silence, Music, Silent Music (Aldershot, 2007).
Nelson, Peter, “Towards a Social Theory of Rhythm,” in Jean-Luc Leroy, ed., Topicality of Musical
Universals/Actualité des Universaux musicaux (Paris, 2013), 149–56.
Nussbaum, Martha, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001).
Peters, Deniz and Simon Rose, Edith’s Problem, CD LR 812, audio recording (Newton
Abbot, 2017).
Schütz, Alfred, “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship,” in Alfred Schütz,
Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague, 1976), 159–78.
8
Mozart’s “Dissonance” and the Dialectic
of Language and Thought in Classical Theories
of Rhythm
Michael Spitzer
1. Introduction
The notion of “formalism” has exercised philosophers for many years, following
Eduard Hanslick’s celebrated definition of music as “form moved in sounding
[tönend bewegte Form].” When philosophers critique “formalism,” they as-
sume that there is an alternative, perhaps more enlightened account of music.
On the other side of the disciplinary fence, however, it is arguably the case that
all musicologists are actually formalists. That is, scholars who engage profession-
ally with music studies are generally committed to the idea that musical meaning
is mediated through musical form; i.e., that there is no clear distinction between
musical structure and musical meaning or expression (or content, Inhalt). Lydia
Goehr, following Philip Alperson, calls this position “enhanced formalism.”1 An ex-
ample of pure (“non-enhanced”) formalism is to approach rhythm as an abstract
theoretical category, divorced from musical meaning. I suspect that many authors
in this book adopt that approach. This chapter takes the opposite line, arguing that
rhythm is saturated with expression (meaning, content, Inhalt).
To think of rhythm in this way leads me to challenge a conceptual opposition
mounted by Jerrold Levinson between two kinds of musical understanding. On the
one hand, he speaks of “musical expressiveness” as something “directly heard,” its
immediacy distinguished, on the other hand, from a kind of knowledge inferred
over time by the “properly backgrounded listener.”2 To my mind, an obvious ob-
jection to Levinson’s opposition between “directly heard” immediacy and “back-
ground” knowledge inferred over time is that hard-earned inferences can become
immediate habits of listening, that is, immediacy can be acquired. This is obvious
when one thinks about the hundreds or thousands of practice hours it takes to
learn to sight-read a piano score with deceptive ease. Exactly the same point can
1 Goehr, Quest for Voice, 19.

2 Levinson, Contemplating Art, 101.
be leveled at the institutionalization of musical knowledge climbing up the devel-

opmental ladder, from childhood through higher education all the way up to ad-
vanced scholarship. An advanced listener has learnt to “directly hear” aspects of the
music which might entirely elude a non-expert listener.
I shall illustrate this thesis with a piece by Mozart. Of all composers, Mozart
enjoys an unearned reputation for immediacy and transparency. His music seems
to have been effortlessly composed, and can afford a deceptively easy listening ex-
perience. This transparency is certainly intrinsic to Mozart’s musical style, and
I will not seek to dispute it. My points, rather, are (a) that listening to Mozart can
be enriched by music-theoretical “background” knowledge; and (b) that this back-
ground can become, over time, just as immediate and transparent as the experience
of the non-expert listener. The fact that immediacy has been acquired (often labori-
ously over many years) does not prevent it from being immediacy.
All this is by way of a grand apology for what comes next. The rump of this essay
looks rather unpromising, and—taken without apology or framing—might well
put off most non-expert readers. My starting-points are some dusty musicological
treatises which nobody reads today, save perhaps two dozen historians of music
theory scattered around the globe. One might well ask: Why would anybody trek
through the highways and byways of eighteenth-century compositional theory in
order to understand rhythm and Mozart? The answer: because this furnishes an
historical background which will enhance our appreciation of both the music, and
of the theoretical category we call “rhythm.”
To grasp what is at stake, let’s consider these two thought experiments. Figure 8.1
shows a Schlagfolge, an undifferentiated succession of drum beats, proposed by the
Swiss Enlightenment philosopher Johann Georg Sulzer to help us imagine the or-
igin of rhythm. He discusses it within his encyclopedia of the fine arts, Allgemeine
Theorie der schönen Künste. Sulzer calls his Schlagfolge “a model of the simplest
order of succession of things.”3 He wonders, “how can such a series of beats become
pleasant, or receive an ethical or affective character?” According to Sulzer, the first
step along the evolutionary path from the Schlagfolge to meter or rhythm proper
is to differentiate the drum beats into strong and weak beats, a pattern Sulzer calls
“simple [einfache]” rhythm. Differentiation creates a higher-level kind of regularity
that Sulzer terms “meter.” Metrical order enables a still superior pattern of regu-
larity, as bars and phrases are grouped with each other by analogy to beats in a bar.
The lesson to be drawn from Sulzer’s thought experiment is that late eighteenth-
century theories of rhythm were stamped by epistemology. Sulzer was a post-
Leibnizian philosopher, influenced by Wolff and respected by Kant. Whereas music
theorists traditionally modeled rhythm in terms of the human pulse or a ticking
clock, Sulzer deliberately creates an imaginary Schlagfolge because he believed
that our rhythmic sense was an interpretative act of Einbildungskraft, imagination.
Sulzer makes explicit analogies between the well-formedness of a metrical group
3 Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie, 527.

Mozart’s “Dissonance” and the Dialectic of Language 127
Figure 8.1 Sulzer’s Schlagfolge
and the integrity of a philosophical concept, the unity of both having a spatial or ge-
ometric aspect. According to Sulzer, a series of beats (or indeed, of any objects) can,
through a uniform pattern, be “united with a concept [mit einem Begriff zusammen
gefasst].” Through uniformity, an infinite succession of events can be surveyed at a
glance and held in the mind. Similarly, one need only grasp the rhythm of the first
measure of a piece in order to fix onto the rhythm of the piece as a whole. This is to
turn the time of music into space, so that it can be surveyed in the mind as a quasi-
spatial form. In other words, musical form, by definition, is grasped metaphorically
as “spatial,” and the importance of Sulzer’s philosophically inflected music theory
is that he conceives musical form on the basis of a cognitive model of meter. That
is, Sulzer’s model recognized the mind’s liking for symmetrical rhythmic patterns,
in practice, in binary groupings of beats (two, four, eight, etc.); and—building on
that—the mind’s predictive capacity: for example, given two beats, the musical
mind might expect the rhythmic group to be balanced by two more beats, making
a larger group of four. The other side of this coin was that, by the late eighteenth-
century, musical style (Haydn, Mozart, and their contemporaries) had evolved so
as to fit the propensities of the musical mind. Or rather, music and listener expec-
tations co-evolved, and Sulzer’s theory reflected that. Before Sulzer, non-cognitive
models of rhythm saw rhythmic impulses as externally authoritative, by analogy to
how the town clock, or the cycle of the seasons, marked time.
Sulzer’s thought experiment suggests that our sense of rhythm is generative.
Rhythm of the Schlagfolge isn’t inherent; it evolves gradually in our mind. What
begins as hazy, or indeterminate, slowly becomes clear. In this way, Sulzer mirrors
the generative aspect of Leibnizian epistemology, rising in stages from obscure
sense impressions to conceptual clarity.4 In Sulzer’s terms, rhythm’s generative pro-
cess rises from irregularity to regularity at ever-increasing levels, climaxing with
form and artistic expression.
The generative nature of Sulzer’s theory leads me to the second example, taken
from a composition treatise written slightly later than Sulzer, and much influenced
by him. The Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition (1782–93), by the North
German pedagogue Heinrich Christoph Koch, is the outstanding music-theoretical
text from this period and a key source for understanding classical style. Like
Enlightenment theories of mind and language, Koch’s course is a story of origins;
in formal terms, an “origin” is a small-scale work such as a dance or a song, usually
4 My Metaphor and Musical Thought gives the Leibnizian background of Sulzer’s musical aesthetics, and
a fuller account, with particular reference to Heinrich Koch, of eighteenth-century theories of rhythm and
language.
Figure 8.2 Koch’s Schlagreihe
no more than eight or sixteen bars in length. Hence the purpose of Koch’s reg-
imen is to lead the beginning composer gradually from miniature exercises, such
as dances and songs, to more accomplished, large-scale forms such as sonatas and
symphonies. Crucially, the kernel of Koch’s generative progression from small-
to-expanded form is a rhythmic idea. In other words, the evolution of rhythm
establishes the template, at a later point in the treatise, for the evolution of form. The
following model appears midway within his treatise, as an introduction to the sec-
tion on form, and part of a chapter, “On the Nature of Measure in General.”
Like Sulzer, Koch’s starting-point is a thought experiment based on the percep-
tion of a series of similar objects, in this case a string of pearls or a row of billiard
balls (Figure 8.2). Although these six dots are notated on a staff with crotchet tails,
they may as well represent objects in the world, such as pearls or balls, as musical
notes. Koch states that it is natural for the mind to separate them into groups, by
instituting “resting points of perception [Ruhepuncte der Vorstellung].”5 Koch
calls this series of beats a Schlagreihe rather than a Schlagfolge, but his derivation
from Sulzer is obvious. Expressed like this in the abstract, the series lacks rhythm or
meter. In performance, however, Koch states that we might attach the second note
to the first, thereby instituting what he calls a “resting point [Ruhepunct]” on the
third note.
Koch’s notion of Ruhepunct,6 is extremely suggestive, because it points in two op-
posite directions. From one standpoint, it operates as a musical punctuation mark,
an articulation of the stream of rhetoric. Analogies between the flow of rhetoric
and the flow of a river are long-standing, and they mapped easily onto conceptions
of musical discourse as a flow of directed tonal motion, from start to final cadence.
Johann Mattheson gives an influential diagram of a short musical dance annotated
with degrees of punctuation, from commas through semicolons and colons to
full stop, corresponding to gradations of tonal closure.7 Thus a comma represents
a light boundary, or caesura (Latin for “cut,” Einschnitt in German) between two
sub-phrases, and a full stop is a terminal perfect cadence. The crucial point is that
viewing musical articulation as punctuation is to survey music as goal-orientated.
Since streams of rhetoric push teleologically towards their close, punctuation
marks, in language as in music, are interruptive and end-directed. From an opposite
standpoint, however, a Ruhepunct functions as a metrical accent, a Taktteil, which
is to view music as head-orientated (i.e., orientated to the beginning of groupings):
5 Koch, Anleitung zur Composition, 278.

6 Koch borrows the term from Batteux, Les beaux arts.
7 Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister, 224.
Figure 8.3 Koch’s Schlagreihe with resting points (Ruhepuncten)
Figure 8.4 Model of the drift from rhythm to punctuation
If the imagination of someone who wants to sing or play these six notes
comprehends with the first of these notes only a second one so that a resting-point
of the imagination arises on the third note, they will perform the passage as the
following figure metrically illustrates.8
Koch notates a bar-line between the second and third notes, demonstrating that an
accent occurs on the first beat of the second bar (Figure 8.3). A little later, he adds
that “the resting-point of perception, and also the weight or expression through
which it is made understood through performance, falls on the first, third, and fifth
note.”9
Koch’s concept of articulation is ambiguous, because it has the potential to be
both head-and end-directed. If we hear a Ruhepunct as a punctuation mark, then it
points toward the end of a phrase, as an interruption of a rhetorical stream whose
sense is completed with the full stop. If we hear it as a metrical accent, then it is
orientated toward the head of a phrase, the strong beat which is completed by a sub-
ordinate weak beat. Koch can unite these opposite functions because, in his terms,
to mark a division simultaneously bestows a metrical emphasis on a note. And Koch
sees articulation, grouping, and metrical differentiation as arising interdependently.
The notes “become united under a single perspective, that is, the first of these notes
must comprise the Ruhepunct der Vorstellung or point of division.”10 The second
note (or, in triple meter, the second and third) is “grasped under the division point
of the first note, that is, they are united with the first under a single perspective.”11
This metrically stressed note constitutes the first “essential part [wesentlichen Teil]”
of the bar, the “gute Taktteile,” which is “intrinsically long [innerlich lang]”; the
second “essential part” (the arsis) is called the “schlechte Taktteile,” and is “intrinsi-
cally short [innerlich kurz].” In Figure 8.4, I represent this flip in orientation from
“rhythm” to “punctuation” in terms of notes alternately tensing away from a head

and relaxing towards an end-point.12 It is important to stress that this flip is not
captured either in Koch’s or Sulzer’s own models, nor indeed in the compositional
scores themselves. Rather, I argue that it is implicit within this ambiguous under-
standing of classical rhythm. The flip runs strikingly counter to canonic modern
conceptions of tonal structure. Heinrich Schenker, the preeminent tonal theorist
of the postwar era, saw direct tonal motion as moving in a single direction, ineluc-
tably towards its telos. This teleological vector is preserved in James Hepokoski and
Warren Darcy’s theory of classical form, the most influential recent model of clas-
sical music. I will draw out the further significance of this interpretation at the end
of this chapter.
For the present, there are multiple other lessons to be drawn from Koch’s thought
experiment. A rhythmic impulse is not to be understood as an abstract theoret-
ical construct, but in the context of musical form. As such, it is entangled within
musical form’s dialectic with time. A composition pushes on towards its final ca-
dence, just as, from an opposite standpoint, in a quasi-geometrical spatial sense,
the work’s hyper-metrical groupings are gathered together from the perspective of
its initial strong beat (hyper-meter means considering a bar as a “beat” at a higher
structural level, so that meter converges with form). Weak beats complete strong
beats (head orientation) just as cadences complete phrases and pieces (end orienta-
tion). This space–time dialectic is elaborated in Koch’s Anleitung zur Composition in
its alternating emphasis on its two core principles of “punctuation” (phrase-ending
formulas) and “rhythm” proper, by which Koch means formal time-span grouping
orientated toward heads.
A yet more radical lesson is implied by the title of this chapter, a dialectic between
language and thought. “Punctuation” is no idle analogy, but a trace of music’s lan-
guage character. Whilst the metaphor of “music as language” was prevalent in most
ages, it was particularly acute in the late eighteenth century. Laying to one side the
problematic issue of musical meaning, i.e., semantics, language’s syntactic side was
certainly mirrored in the highly conventionalized character of the classical style—
perhaps the most formulaic musical language ever to arise in the common-practice
era between Bach and twentieth-century modernism. Most eighteenth-century
writers talked of music in terms of an “oration,” as in Mattheson’s famous annotation
of a Marcello concerto using rhetorical figures.13 Koch calls the first half of a phrase
a “subject,” and the second half a “predicate,” by analogy to the speculations about
primitive grammar by contemporary linguists such as Karl Wilhelm Ramler.14
Thus, just as Ramler imagined that original word-order placed the noun at the be-
ginning of an utterance (akin to gesturing or pointing at an object in the world,
such as a snake), Koch saw the opening sub-phrase of a piece as akin to a gram-
matical subject. Musical “subject” = linguistic subject, pun intended. Similarly, the
12 I borrow the idea of tensing and relaxing branches from the Chomskian tree-structures in Lerdahl and
Jackendoff ’s generative model in Theory of Tonal Music.
13 Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric.
14 Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought,  231–2.
musical sub-phrase which completed the phrase as a whole—typically, balancing

a two-bar start with a two-bar conclusion—was imagined as a linguistic predicate,
such as a verb (e.g., “Snake, flee!,” or “Bread, give me!”). The crux of this metaphor,
however, is not that classical music’s language character is a steady state, but that
it interacts with its conceptual, formal, character in such a way that its element
of linguistic expression is associated with endings. Punctuation is end-directed,
as we have seen; and this end-orientation is to be understood, I will claim, by the
same token that classical form becomes more lyrical, song-like, or poetic, toward
its ending—typically in sonata-form second groups. There is a received view that
second subjects are more lyrical than first subjects, a truism borne out by many of
Mozart’s sonata-form first movements, such as his “Jupiter” Symphony. The first
group is a fanfare for full orchestra; the second subject is a much more individuated
melody for first violins. They “sing,” and one infers a metaphorical “voice,” with im-
plicit “language.” The music, then, becomes progressively more language-like to-
ward the end of the form. By the opposite token, classical form is more properly
“rhythmic,” geometric, or conceptual in its first half, just as Ruhepunct as metrical
accent is head-oriented.
A third kind of rhythmic impulse will find its way into my account, one which
is actually the most familiar of all, since it is the basis of the prototypical “just-so”
story of Enlightenment linguistics, whereby philosophers speculated on the or-
igin of language in indexical gestures. A gesture is a rhythmic impulse, but—unlike
musical rhythm—is also implicitly an act of semantic communication. Rhythmic
gestures are different from the two sides of Ruhepunct also because they are un-
structured singletons, free of metrical grouping. When they occur in classical
music, it is as agents of wild or primitive expression. We will see that the first move-
ment of Mozart’s “Dissonance” Quartet projects all three types of rhythmic impulse
at different sections. This concluding analysis will illustrate my thesis that rhythm
is best understood in rich compositional context rather than as an abstract theoret-
ical category. Although this is true of how rhythm operates in all musical eras, it is
particularly the case for late eighteenth-century music. Before we get to Mozart, we
need to dive into the detail of Koch’s Anleitung zur Composition, as its pedagogical,
generative, progression from small-scale to expanded form will mediate the leap
from thought experiment to musical practice.
2. Sonata Form as “Rhythm”
Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style is the most influential study of the music of
Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven of the modern era. Discursive and panoramic in its
scope, it nonetheless never loses sight of Rosen’s focal idea that the classical style is
fundamentally one of dramatic balance. The quintessential expression of this sensi-
bility for structural balance is the sonata. Every type and genre of classical music is
revealed by Rosen to be infused with the principles of sonata form. These principles
were quintessentially tonal rather than thematic. Against the received view that
form was mostly a matter of motives and themes, Rosen contended that it was really
projected by the tonal drama of tension and resolution. In a sonata form, tension
was raised through the exposition’s modulation from the tonic to the dominant,
and resolved by the return of the tonic in the recapitulation. The same drama was
unfolded within a short musical phrase. Typically, an opening sub-phrase would
end on a dominant half-close, and would be answered by a sub-phrase cadencing
on the tonic. The phrase thus encapsulates the tonal shape of the whole, suggesting
that the sonata evolved generatively from a small-scale model.
I want to suggest that this tonal drama of tension and resolution is a kind of
rhythm. It follows on from the rhythmic models theorized by Sulzer and Koch as the
kernel of late eighteenth-century musical language. Admittedly, tension and reso-
lution are features of all tonal music, including styles which don’t sound “rhythmic”
at all, such as Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Nevertheless, classical works do sound
rhythmic because they project rhythm’s qualities of symmetry and articulation
through the symmetry and articulation of their architecture at all levels.15 The pe-
riodicity of classical phrase structure expresses the regularity of the Schlagfolge.
The sharp articulation of the classical style through phrase-endings and cadences
shares the Schlagfolge’s phenomenal quality as a series of points. That is, classical
form concentrates its syntax in finely articulated points of tonal closure. But how
do we get from the literal rhythm of a Schlagfolge (or Schlagreihe) to the “metaphor-
ical” rhythm of a musical phrase, or indeed the expanded form of a full sonata? This
takes us back to the pedagogical journey of Koch’s treatise, whose purpose is to lead
us step-by-step from small-scale (literal) to large-scale (metaphorical) rhythm.
Figure 8.5 arrives toward the end of Koch’s pedagogical journey, after he has
taught the novice composer how to handle many varieties of small-scale forms such
as minuets and songs. Though only eight bars long, it is actually a miniature outline
of a hypothetical sonata-form exposition. The first thing to note about this model
is that it comprises four two-bar segments, and that it thus notionally outlines a
recursive expansion of the Schlagfolge: four beats become four bars become four
two-bar segments. The four phrases project different tonal functions, encapsulated
within the varying tonal orientations of their endings: a tonic-phrase (ending on
B); a dominant-phrase (ending on A); a phrase on the dominant of the dominant
(ending on A); and a dominant cadence (ending on D). Koch’s quadratic struc-
ture could be regarded, then, as a form of tonal rhythm—the four beats of a bar
expanded into four differentiated phrase endings. Such an interpretation predicates
a kind of non-continuous listening, since the four phrase endings fall at two-bar
intervals.
15 Talk of form as “rhythmic” was especially fashionable in the 1980s, in association with Schenkerian
reduction of structural levels. See, e.g., Schachter, “Durational Reduction”; Rothstein, Phrase Rhythm in
Tonal Music.
Figure 8.5 Koch’s schema of a sonata-form exposition
The second point to note is that the sub-phrases are defined as much by their
symmetrical proportion as by their endings. In Koch’s words, phrases and segments
are distinguished from one another as parts of the whole chiefly by two character-
istics: first, the type of their endings . . . second, the length of these parts along with
a certain symmetry or proportion.16
He terms the former principle “punctuation,” and the latter—somewhat confus-

ingly for modern readers—“rhythm” proper (confusing because we might call
this “meter”). Regarding punctuation, Koch uses a white square to indicate the
end of an inconclusive phrase and a white triangle to show the end of a segment.
Cadences, the most conclusive punctuation of all, do not require a symbol. Where
I have departed from Koch’s original is in bracketing and characterizing bars 2–4
as “rhythm,” and bars 5–8 “punctuation.” We hear the phrase endings at bars 2 and
4 as weak beats with respect to the strong beats at bars 1 and 3. The first half of the
piece is orientated towards the opening tonic; it is head-orientated. A switch occurs
midway through the period (the quaver rest at bar 4) from head-orientation toward
an end-directed hearing, as the phrase-endings now drive toward the final cadence.
Put simply, this miniature exposition divides into a first half, which extends the
opening tonic; and a second half, which is directed to the dominant close. Another
way of looking at this is that the tonic key is most firmly established at bar 1, and the
dominant key at bar 8.
Now, the term “half ” here is highly moot, cuts to the core of the metaphor-
ical nature of classical “rhythm,” and is illustrated by what happens when Koch
demonstrates how his eight-bar model can be expanded into a thirty-two bar
sonata-form exposition. That his exposition is thirty-two bars long might sug-
gest that its form is mechanically periodic, perhaps comprising four eight-bar
16 Quoted in Baker, Heinrich Koch,  2–3.

phrases: four beats of a bar expanded, successively, to four bars, eights bars, six-
teen bars, and thirty-two bars. In fact, Koch introduces his thematic interpolations
and subsidiary material in a highly differentiated fashion, so that the first “half ”
(corresponding to bars 1–4 of the model) is expanded to ten bars; and the second
“half ” (bars 5–8 in the model) is blown up much more massively into twenty-two
bars. Nevertheless, the disproportion between the first and second groups of the
exposition notwithstanding, its two “halves” are experienced as quasi-rhythmically
symmetrical—the tonic half answered and balanced by the dominant half, a sym-
metry which is the basis for the subsequent tonal drama in the development and
recapitulation.
That classical sonata form is experienced as being symmetrical is a mys-
tery which has never been properly treated in the history of music theory. Koch’s
achievement in his Anleitung was to refine Sulzer’s notion of symmetry, and apply it
systematically to late eighteenth-century musical style. Koch’s profoundest insight
was that symmetry was not determined by mechanical phrase length alone. Instead,
it depended also on the content of the phrase, by which he meant the rhythmic,
thematic, and tonal detail. Thus, in the right contexts, it was perfectly possible, for
example, for a four-bar antecedent phrase to be balanced by a five-bar consequent,
with no feeling of irregularity: witness the many five-, seven-, and nine-bar phrases
in Mozart. To explain this, Koch institutes a “material–formal” distinction: a five-
bar consequent can be heard as deviant “formally” (against the eight-bar grid), but
as regular “materially” (with respect to its content). Koch’s other major insight was
that new principles of symmetry and grouping emerge at higher levels. Hence, on
the intermediate level of the phrase, “rhythm” is constituted not by the beats of a bar
but by a grid of cadences, signs of closure. At this level, the issue of symmetry fades,
since the exact number of bars or the exact length of phrase becomes non-pertinent
to even the most self-conscious listener, and is replaced by a sensibility for comple-
mentary harmonic functions.
The 10/22 imbalance clarifies the sonata form’s dialectic between time and space,
language and thought. The relative brevity of the tonic group enables the listener
to grasp the half-close at bar 10 with respect to the tonic opening; namely, as a
head-orientated formal group—what Koch terms “rhythm.” Conversely, the phrase
extensions in bars 11–32 comprise a series of end-directed tonal punctuation
marks, a chain of cadential evasions pushing towards the close. How, then, does
Koch’s heuristic match actual compositional practice? Quite well, as it happens, es-
pecially regarding the sonata forms of Mozart. Mozart’s sonata form expositions
are typically articulated by what current sonata theory calls a “Medial Caesura,”17
a dramatic “cut” between the end of the tonic group and the start of the secondary
group. Haydn’s expositions tend to be more fluid, but Koch’s model certainly applies
well to Mozart’s greater penchant for architectonic symmetry. Secondly, Mozart’s
second groups are generally much longer than his primary groups, and also feature
17 Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory.

chains of interrupted cadences. Thirdly, his second groups are almost always more
lyrical than his primary groups, evincing an onset of a language character within
the expositions. This vocal quality was evident in the punctuation of Koch’s musical
material, but not in its content, which doesn’t seem particularly song-like.
Let’s now see rhythm and punctuation in action in a particular work by Mozart.
3. Mozart’s “Dissonance”
Mozart’s String Quartet in C major, K. 465, earned its soubriquet from its dissonant
Adagio, whose chromaticism was avant-garde for its time. It holds the key for the
narrative I shall tell about the sonata-form exposition it introduces. This exposition
moves through the two kinds of metaphorical rhythm Koch theorizes, and I shall
consider it first.
The exposition, the first four bars of which are shown in Figure 8.6, comprise a
22-bars tonic group (including the “first subject”), followed by a transition, a dom-
inant second group, and a coda—an order of events stereotypical of a sonata form.
The group demonstrates the recursively geometric periodicity of what Koch terms
“rhythm” proper. The 2 + 2 sub-phrases in Figure 8.6 answer each other, by analogy
to the four beats in a 4/4 metrical group. It does not take much imagination to hear
bars 23–6 as “metrical” (or hypermetrical) in this respect. These four bars are bal-
anced at a higher level at bars 27–30, which together constitute an eight-bar an-
tecedent phrase to a putative period. The expected eight-bar consequent phrase
Figure 8.6 Mozart, String Quartet in C major, K. 465, “Dissonance,” bars 23–6

to this antecedent is expanded to fourteen bars (bars 31–44), but this extension
does not disturb the perception of overriding symmetry. The cadence at bar 44
completes a large-scale rhythmic group established by the first beat of bar 1; the
group is head-orientated.
At twenty-and-a-half bars (including the half-bar upbeat at bar 71), the G-major
second group (bars 71–91) is more or less the same length as the tonic group, but
its phrase-structure is strikingly dissimilar (Figure 8.7). After a compressed eight-
bar period (bars 71–9), clearly articulated as 4 + 4, there follow three four-bar sub-
phrases, each punctuated with a perfect cadence. In short, the group comprises
four perfect cadences of escalating power, driving ever more forcefully toward the
end. The group is highly end-directed. Where the tonic group is symmetrically
“rhythmic,” the second group is divided up in chain form, as a series of tonal “punc-
tuation” marks of ever-increasing closure. Mozart’s practice, then, conforms nicely
Figure 8.7 Mozart, bars 67–97

Figure 8.8 Introduction, bars 1–4
to Koch’s theory of a shift from “rhythm” to “punctuation” across the two “halves” of
a sonata-form exposition.
But that is not the whole story, because the quartet begins with a twenty-two-
bar slow introduction (Figure 8.8). It’s typical of Mozart’s ear for balance to make
all three panels nearly the same length: introduction (22 bars), tonic group (22
bars) and dominant group (22 ½ bars). Its harmonic language could hardly have
afforded greater contrast to that of the diatonic clarity of the exposition. The
phrases unfold a sequence of interlocking interrupted cadences through outlandish
modulations: from C major through B♭ minor, F minor, E♭ major. Each harmonic
surprise creates a tonal shock whose gestural impact constitutes “rhythm” in a dif-
ferent, third, sense, to that presented in the exposition. Not rhythm as hypermetrical
periodicity; nor as rhetorical punctuation; but rhythm as seemingly disconnected
impulses. The “Dissonance” Quartet’s harmonic language sounds wild. The sudden
clarification of tonality and phrase-rhythm at bar 23 effects a kind of “sunrise”
of Enlightenment reason against the backdrop of this wildness. That is how con-
temporary listeners would have understood this tonal narrative, one rehearsed in
countless other works, most famously in Haydn’s Creation.18
Mozart’s wildness also reflects current accounts of “primitive” rhythm, most fa-
mously in Johann Forkel’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (1788). Like so many of
his contemporaries, Forkel was fascinated by evolutionary theories of language—
indeed, musical language. He hypothesized that the language of music originated
with a primitive phase of disconnected gestures, because, in his view, “primitive
nations are only capable of rhythmic music,” and seem to be drawn to percussive or
noisy instruments.19 Forkel believed that individual musical tones were unmedi-
ated cries of passion, hence “primitive man” communicated through “interjections
and simple words, with which he described external objects in his immediate sur-
roundings.”20 Forkel was not alone in his time in comparing such disconnected
18 The dramatic shift from “The Representation of Chaos” to the creation of light.
19 Forkel, Geschichte der Musik, 5.

gestures with “sentences that are formed merely from nouns.”21 Whereas many of
these ideas can be traced to Condillac and Rousseau, their best-known exponent in
the German-speaking lands was J. G. Herder. Echoing Herder, Forkel views histor-
ical progress as an evolution from a “language of feeling [Empfindungsprach]” to
a “language of ideas [Ideensprache].” Crucially for our discussion, Forkel sees this
progression as pivoting on repetition, i.e., meter:
Man, in his earliest state, quickly realized that all simple things can be maintained
through a certain kind of regular repetition. This regular repetition of simple
things, which in itself is capable of hardly any variety, we call in music ‘meter’, or, to
give it its original term, ‘rhythm.’22
If a single tone is a mere gesture, then Forkel compares a series of undifferentiated

beats to a phrase “which describes not only an object, but also its quality, and binds
the two together, as when I say not just ‘tree’ but ‘tall tree’, or ‘the tree is tall’, etc.”23
Just as primitive races are slow to achieve this level of linguistic sophistication, it
takes them a long time to “arrange a series of tones in such a way . . . that a melody,
akin to a spoken sentence, can arise.”24 A style capable of connecting notes into a
melody is thus, for Forkel, analogous to a “language of ideas.”
Mozart’s quartet exposition thus unfolds three kinds of “rhythm”: gestural, peri-
odic, and punctuational. The order by which these three types unfold is significant
in itself. Indeed, the evolution of Mozart’s language across the three junctures of
his exposition—introduction, first and second groups—parallels Herder’s ternary
historical model:
When language evolved from the primitive wild stage to a state befitting the newly
found orderliness of social and political organization, it became a poetic and sen-
sual medium, rich in the features that distinguish poetry from prose, these features
including fresh inversions and simplicity in the use of connecting particles.25
The periodic phrasing and clear articulation of the first subject evinces a “newly
found orderliness.” On the basis of this civilized syntax, the second subject at bar 71
can relax into “a poetic and sensual medium.” Mozart’s theme is a pastoral musette,
imitating the bagpipe’s base drone and augmented-4th skirl. A musical represen-
tation of Nature, the theme is a musical version of the natural word-order which
Herder and others identified with poetic expression as those “fresh inversions” that
“distinguish poetry from prose.” The boldest inversion is the C# on the down-beat
of measure 72, a signal instance of the gestural head-positions of primitive syntax.
24 Forkel, Geschichte der Musik.
25 Quoted in Scaglione, German Word Order, 74.

The appoggiatura has been displaced (“inverted”) from its normative position as a
syntactic phrase-ending, i.e., a tonal cue.
Placing the appoggiatura in front liberates the expressive, material dimension
which civilized syntax brackets out. Nevertheless, the musette is by no means as
irregular as the “wild” opening of the quartet, since its sonorities are disciplined by
metrical phrasing. As a hybrid between form and formlessness, Mozart’s second
subject corresponds to the median position of modern German in Herder’s eyes, a
language that can “still combine the advantages of the poetic stage with those of the
philosophical, a high degree of order as well as freedom.”26 Mozart’s is also a lan-
guage both of the head and the heart, of civilization and nature. One is reminded of
Mozart’s description to his father of his concertos K. 413–15 as “a happy medium
between what is too easy and too difficult”: they are “pleasing to the ear, and natural,
without being vapid.”27
In conclusion, I hope that my foray into the thickets of historical music theory
has supported my claim that rhythm has an intrinsically expressive dimension, in
line with the “enhanced formalism” of the musical experience. “Rhythm” has al-
ways been as much an ideational category in intellectual history as a specifically
musical parameter—just as “harmony” shaded into “Universal Harmony,” and
“melody” has its own metaphorical penumbra. I have elsewhere sketched the gene-
alogy of these three metaphors: rhythm, melody, and harmony.28 Rhythm, which
became the dominant structural metaphor during the Classical era, is particularly
fascinating because it intersects with notions of gesture and language. Twentieth-
and early twenty-first-century approaches to rhythm (and meter) have shorn away
its ideational, metaphorical dimensions and, in the process, impoverished its ca-
pacity to represent aspects of musical meaning not captured by traditional ana-
lytic techniques. Otherwise put, they have perpetuated a false dichotomy between
musical structure and musical expression, or “form” and “content.” By contrast,
I have sought in this chapter to show how rhythm is inextricably bound up with
music’s rational and linguistic qualities; and to suggest that a trajectory from reason
to language is wired into the normative course of musical processes. Although my
entry-point into this sphere has been through recherché historical manuscripts,
I maintain that the truths they illuminate are immanent to the music and available
to listeners today.
Works Cited
Baker, Nancy, Heinrich Koch: Introductory Essay on Composition (New Haven, 1983).
Batteux, Charles, Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe (Paris, 1746).
Bonds, Mark Evan, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (Cambridge,
MA, 1991).
26 Scaglione, German Word Order, 75.
27 Mozart, Letters, 2: 833.
28 Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought.

Forkel, Johann Nicolaus, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1788).

Goehr, Lydia, The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy (Oxford, 2002).
Hepokoski, James and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations
in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (Oxford, 2006).
Koch, Heinrich, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, 3 vols (Rudolstadt, 1782–93).
Lerdahl, Fred and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA, 1983).
Levinson, Jerrold, Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics (Oxford, 2006).
Mattheson, Johann, Der vollkommene Capellmeister [The Perfect Chapelmaster] (Hamburg, 1739).
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, The Letters of Mozart and his Family, 2 vols, ed. Emily Anderson
(London, 1966).
Rosen, Charles, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (London, 1971).
Rothstein, William, Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music (New York, 1989).
Scaglione, Aldo, The Theory of German Word Order from the Renaissance to the Presence
Schachter, Carl, “Rhythm and Linear Analysis: Durational Reduction,” Music Forum, 5 (1980),
197–232.
Sulzer, Johann Georg, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, Part 2, vol. 2 (Biel, 1777).
9
Rhythm and Popular Music
Alison Stone
1. Popular Music and a Question about Rhythm

and Value
In this chapter I explore some ways that rhythm affects us in popular music. This
raises straightaway the question of how “popular music” is to be understood: the
concept is notoriously problematic and while many attempts have been made to
define it, all are contentious. Different authors use the term differently, and overall
the term covers “a wide range of fundamentally different musics,” as Max Paddison
points out.1
Some authors take “popular music” to encompass traditional folk music; for
others, “popular” and “folk” oppose both one another and a third term, “art music.”
Within this tripartite popular–folk–art division, “folk” is supposedly the traditional
music of the people rather than the elite, stemming from rural and pre-modern
contexts, while “popular” music is also non-elite but this time aimed at the urban
masses in industrial, modern, commercial contexts. Since the nineteenth cen-
tury, the musical styles and practices of cabaret, music hall, minstrelsy, cabaret,
and “light” classical music popularized for dancing have all at times been counted
as “popular.”2 So have jazz, blues, country, Tin Pan Alley, and big band music;
rhythm-and-blues and rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s; and more recently the array of
genres that descend from rhythm-and-blues and rock ’n’ roll—including rock, pop,
soul, funk, electronic dance music (EDM), and rap. Clearly, then, “popular music”
encompasses a range of musical forms and styles. They are diverse not only in their
specifically musical features, but also in their social meanings and their levels of
compliance with or antagonism to the context of capitalist commodity production.
My focus in this chapter is on the field of popular music genres since rock ’n’
roll, which I call either “post-rock ’n’ roll music” or just “popular music” for short
(thus, unless otherwise indicated, from here on I use the term “popular music” in
1 Paddison, “Critical Reflections,” 197. Birrer, “Definitions and Research”; Jones and Rahn, “Definitions of
Popular Music”; Middleton, Studying Popular Music, esp. Ch. 1; Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise, esp. Ch. 1, and
“The Aesthetics of Popular Music”; Leach, “Popular Music”; and Tagg, “Analysing Popular Music,” address the
problems of defining popular music.
2 Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, discusses the evolution of the category of “popular” music.
this restricted sense). These post-rock ’n’ roll genres still differ enormously, but they
share the following cluster of features:
(1) extensive recording and technological mediation, prioritizing recording over

performance.
(2) four layers of texture: (i) melody (vocal or not), (ii) harmony, (iii) functional
bass, and (iv) “explicit beat,” i.e., indefinitely pitched percussion (“unpitched”
for short). Allan Moore explains:
The vast field that is popular music . . . exhibits a strong tendency to display
four functional layers. Not all will be present in every example, not all will re-
main unchanging throughout . . . However, while one layer may be absent, or
changes in these layers may occur in the course of a track, they do so against the
background assumption of their presence. It is the principal norm of popular
music.3
Although the musicians who provide the bass and explicit beat layers are
often said to work as a unit to form a band’s “rhythm section,” these are two
theoretically distinct layers of texture with distinct roles. The role of bass, in
particular, is to mediate between the pitched elements (melody and harmony)
and the unpitched percussion, playing notes that define the chords and un-
derlie the melody, but stating a definite, usually repeated rhythm that locks in
with the percussion.
(3) Particular instruments realize these layers according to a historical pattern—
respectively: (i) vocals, electric guitar, or synthesizer; (ii) electric guitar or
synthesizer, again, for the chords; (iii) bass guitar or synthesized bass; and (iv)
drums, drum-machines and other percussion media. But instruments can
swap roles: for instance, in rap the vocals are sometimes entirely unpitched,
and so function rhythmically and not melodically.
(4) A common approach treats chords “vertically” rather than “horizontally.”4
(5) Songs tend to be constructed repetitively, with small units of musical material
presented at each layer of sound, and these units repeated in temporal align-
ment with one another, e.g., with phrases of melody repeated in time with
repeated chord sequences. These combined blocks of repeated materials are
then repeated, with variations, to yield whole songs organized in verse/chorus
or similar formal patterns.5
3 Moore, Song Means,  20–1.

4 Moore, Song Means, 71.
5 Covach, “Form in Rock Music,” discusses verse/chorus, AABA, and other forms in popular music. On fea-
ture (1), see Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise; on (2) and (3), Moore, Song Means, 20–1; on (4), Moore, Song Means,
71; and on (5), Middleton, Studying Popular Music. A cluster-based account places a song in the popular
(post-rock-’n’-roll) field if it exemplifies, to a sufficient degree, enough standard features of this field.
Rhythm and Popular Music 143
In this chapter I focus on another feature commonly found in post-rock ’n’ roll
music: a strong rhythmic dimension.6 It is because of this emphasis on rhythm that
music in many popular genres solicits us to dance and move; songs can energize,
elate, enrage, depress our spirits, or wind us down. These affective reactions have
somatic roots, bound up with changes in bodily energy. Art music has somatic
effects too, but popular music genres such as rock ’n’ roll, disco and EDM are most
notable in this regard.
Leading into my exploration of this rhythmic dimension, I want to begin with a
question about value. Theorists such as Robert Grossberg recognize rock ’n’ roll’s
(and related genres’) rhythmic dimension and bodily appeal, and for Grossberg
these features are sources of positive value, as
the power of the music lies not in what it says but in what it does, in how it makes
one move and feel. . . . Rock and roll is corporeal and ‘invasive’ . . . [and] without
the mediation of meaning, [its] volume and repetitive rhythms produce a real ma-
terial pleasure . . .7
Rock’s effects, Grossberg continues, “do not necessarily involve the transmis-
sion, production, structuration, or even deconstruction of meaning.” Likewise for
Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson, some popular music—EDM—acts directly on
our bodies by prompting us to dance.8
However, while Adorno agrees that some music compels physical movement
and certain affective and energetic reactions, he views this negatively. His criticisms
of 1930s commercial dance-band music also apply to rock ’n’ roll and successive
pop genres, to find that compulsion a negative rather than positive value. He claims
that the rhythmic and corporeal force of dance-band music is problematic be-
cause its unvarying “basic beat” dominates listeners. For him, this form of music
compels while short-circuiting our intellects, preventing critical reflection on these
processes.9 Adorno alerts us to an area of concern in rock ’n’ roll and its successors
because, to reiterate, music in these genres typically includes a layer of “explicit
beat” provided by percussion instruments and repeated throughout, though with
variation. Apart from jazz hybrid genres (jazz-funk, jazz-rock, etc.), it is rare for
improvisations to complicate matters. Normally each song maintains a constant
percussion pattern throughout. An illustrative example of constant percussion
maintained throughout a pop song is the drum layer in Michael Jackson’s “Billie
Jean” (the 1983 single version as subsequently included on Jackson, Number Ones).
The drum pattern here is standard in popular music (Figure 9.1). The snare drum
6 Shuker, Understanding Popular Music, 7, comments of popular music that its “only common element” is “a
strong rhythmical component, and generally, but not exclusively, . . . electronic amplification.” That said, the
rhythmic component is stronger in some genres, such as disco, than others.
7 Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out, 113.
8 Gilbert and Pearson, Discographies.
9 E.g. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 29.
Figure 9.1 Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean,” cabasa, drums, bass guitar, and synthesizer,
timing c.00:20–00:24
sounds on the even divisions of the 4/4 beat (i.e., beats two and four), the bass drum
on the odd divisions (beats one and three). The drums thus spell out the 4/4 metre
to which “Billie Jean,” like the majority of popular songs, is set. By counting to the
recurring drum pattern listeners can identify how the music is organized. Drums
are present from the start, and bass guitar, bass synthesizer, and cabasa appear on
measure three. Staccato chords, played on another synthesizer, enter on the elev-
enth measure. Thus, the drums establish the metric framework into which the other
instruments fall.
If explicit beat spells out meter, meter also regulates the repetitions of musical
elements. Metric constraints govern the length of each element (e.g., the bass line
in “Billie Jean”) and the points in time when each element begins and ends, thereby
coordinating the elements presented at each layer of sound. Higher-level groupings
determine the length of each song section and the points at which instrumental
patterns change between sections. For example, the chorus section of a typical pop-
ular song might be constructed out of (a) four repetitions of a four-chord sequence,
within which each chord is presented for one measure; these align with (b) four
phrases of melody, each four measures long; (c) eight repetitions of a two-measure
bass line; and (d) sixteen repetitions of a one-measure percussion pattern. These
repetitions can be coordinated due to the presupposed uniform metrical grid,
against which the durations of all iterated units are measured.
The worry suggested by Adorno, then, is that repetitive organization in pop-
ular music dominates individual musical materials with a quasi-mathematical
grid. Explicit beat spells out the regulating role of this grid. Further, in its struc-
tured repetition, popular music is organized by “measured time.”10 This is abstract,
mathematized time, an artifact of modern science, abstracted from the irregular,
qualitatively varying, lived time of human experience, and from the uneven tem-
poral processes of nature. To control natural processes, time is reduced to successive
units of identical duration, a series of infinitely divisible “nows” that we can reckon
10 Abel, Groove.
and calculate with to intervene into nature. The musical result is meter, where a
measure is the basic temporal unit, each of these units can be divided (e.g., into four
quarter-notes), and those divisions can be subdivided again ad infinitum. In the
other direction, measures can be added endlessly to build up compositions of any
length; this time is divided into identical units. Further, from Adorno’s perspective,
clock-time is an integral factor in industrial society and the factory system, enabling
productive tasks to be broken down into their components and those components
to be timed, apportioned to different individuals, and coordinated. Thus popular
music’s repetitive organization renders it potentially complicit with capitalism and
its domination over the material world—both the materiality of human bodies and
of natural things.
I’ll argue, though, that in its typical approach to meter and rhythm, popular
music challenges rather than reinforces the domination of clock time over the
lived, bodily world. Crucially, popular music typically has a layer of explicit per-
cussive rhythm (see Section 2). The rhythms of the other sound layers either re-
inforce or pull against the percussion rhythm, and so come to form a dynamic of
partly conflicting, partly intertwining energies (Section 3). In virtue of these com-
plex rhythmic pulls-and-pushes, popular songs solicit us to move our bodies in
time with them (Section 4). But songs do not exert compulsive force on our bodies
as Adorno feared. Rather, we make sense of songs’ conflicting energies at a bodily
level. In moving to music we are effectively thinking through its rhythms with the
tacit, practical intelligence of our bodies, modeling movements of our body parts
on shifts of emphasis and timing in the music. In turn, we apprehend the music
as energetic just because it invites bodily participation. The measured time that
enables this rhythmic dimension to crystallize within popular music is a formal
construct that elicits the intelligent activity of our bodies. Precisely these formal
and conceptual qualities enable the music to take on an energetic character and en-
able our bodies to exercise intelligent agency in response. So, against Adorno, our
bodies are empowered. Contrary to Grossberg, however, they are empowered as
intelligent agencies and not as brute material objects.
2. Explicit Beat and the Backbeat
Explicit beat or explicit rhythm is one of the four typical layers of sonic texture in
popular music.11 It is “explicit” in several respects:
(1) Whether they are real or synthetic, the standardly used drums of popular
music (snare drum, bass drum, toms, hi-hat, and cymbals) are unpitched,
with most of the other percussion commonly used in pop songs—hand-claps,
floor-stomps, tambourines, maracas, etc. Being unpitched, these instruments
11 Moore, Song Means, 20–1; Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise.

or media provide only rhythm without also contributing to melody and har-
mony. Because not all these percussive media are drums, I talk throughout of
“percussion” rather than “drums” regarding this layer of the texture, except in
specific reference to drums.
(2) Typically the percussion layer is present throughout a song. Some percussion
patterns are episodic: cymbal splashes or drum fills marking transitions be-
tween sections, or drum solos. But generally those episodes are part of the
percussion layer present throughout a song. Popular songs without unpitched
percussion do exist—such as the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”—but are rare.
(3) The percussion layer normally presents a short rhythmic pattern or cell that is
repeated either for the whole song or a whole section. As in “Billie Jean,” it is
common for a percussion pattern to last for one measure and so be repeated
once per measure. Multiple repetitions of these patterns are then assembled
to make up the entire percussion layer of a track. Usually these patterns are
repeated with variations, or with additional episodes such as drum fills.
(4) Popular music tends to emphasize the backbeat, i.e., beats two and four in
each measure in 4/4 time. This is usually done by sounding the snare drum
on beats two and four, and the bass drum on one and three. Because the snare
drum is smaller than the bass drum its sounds have higher frequencies (al-
though no precise pitch) and therefore stand out more, so that the snare’s
whip-crack sound cuts through the texture more audibly than the duller thud
of the bass drum. The prominence of the snare drum can be increased further
by other means, such as its being struck more forcibly, mixed louder, treated
electronically, recorded with echo, or a combination of these. For example,
Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” emphasizes the snare-drum beats so
heavily that they sound like explosions.
This bass-and-snare-drum combination is pervasive in popular music. Measures

of 4/4 time can be subdivided into eight parts, with additional drum sounds placed
on some of these—generating, for example, a double back-beat (Figure 9.2).
By subdividing the 4/4 beat further, additional possibilities for variation can be
produced. Each quarter-note beat can be divided into three parts (so that the meter
is effectively 12/8), or the beat can be subdivided into sixteen parts, generating the
very busy and complicated rhythms heard in funk. Changing which percussion
instruments or parts of the drum set are used, for instance using only tom-toms,
yields further variations, as does use of time signatures other than 4/4—most often
3/4 and 6/8—although 4/4 remains overwhelmingly common. And, albeit rarely,
Figure 9.2 The double backbeat

songs can include changes in meter, or measures or parts of measures can be unex-
pectedly dropped or added.
We can identify further sources of variation from Charles Keil’s picture of
“groove,”12 i.e., variations over time on a repeated rhythmic pattern. For Keil,
groove arises when some instruments sound out a steady beat—say, four beats to
the measure on the bass drum—while other instruments sound slightly ahead of
or behind that same beat—say, the snare drum sounds slightly before or behind
beat two in each measure—thus “leaning” forwards or backwards, however infin-
itesimally.13 The “timing discrepancies” that interest Keil are minute—as when a
forward-leaning snare drum regularly sounds on, say, what is effectively point 1.9
in the measure or even 1.85. Timing nuances arise, then, when one instrument
presupposes a finer-grained subdivision of the measure to the one that the track
explicitly spells out. By introducing such nuances, the standard popular music beat
(i.e., the bass-and-snare, odd-and-even, combination) can be greatly varied.
Dick Bradley’s account shows why these variations matter. He rightly treats rock
’n’ roll as derived from rhythm-and-blues, where
The setting up of a regular, more or less homogeneous rhythmic ‘background’ and a

partly or wholly improvised foreground of one or more instruments and/or voices,
set against the background, offers . . . an image . . . of ‘individual’ actions in the
context of the shared experience of externalized, alienating time. By ‘externalized
time’ I refer to . . . the mediation of the clock . . . [as] a precondition for the eco-
nomic system of capitalism . . .14
Thus, for Bradley, constant rhythmic patterns upheld by the rhythm section of a
rhythm-and-blues band enact measured time, a concomitant of capitalism. Yet,
Against a stretched-out, unyielding temporal background—the beat—the singer,

guitarist, horn-player or whoever, uses . . . anticipations of the beat, delays,
accelerations . . . , melodic improvisation . . . and . . . freely varied timbre/sound
production, to detach his or her . . . sound from the beat, cutting across or against
the beat . . .15
That strategy continues in rock ’n’ roll, for Bradley, so that what he calls “the beat”—
the constant, explicit rhythm in the background—ceases to be alienating and is
made into a resource against which individuals can realize themselves freely and
creatively.16 The contributions of vocalists, lead guitarists, etc., musically and sym-
bolically enact the freedom of the individual from oppressive clock-time.17
12 Keil and Feld, Music Grooves.
13 Keil and Feld, Music Grooves, 61–2; see also Roholt, Groove.
14 Bradley, Understanding Rock ’n’ Roll, 48.

For Bradley, that freedom is symbolized by the rhythmic, melodic, and other var-
iations that vocalists or “lead” instrumentalists effect against the explicit beat. But
we can also apply Bradley’s argument to the explicit beat layer itself. Yes, we might
say, the snare and bass drums (or other percussion instruments) present a standard
beat that encapsulates clock time, but that beat is subjected to countless variations.
These variations on what each percussion instrument is doing, and how and when
it does it, embody the freedom of individuals to modify and inflect the standard
bass-and-snare  beat.
Moreover, there is a stronger sense in which popular music’s standard bass-
and-snare beat establishes an alternative to clock time and its attendant power
relations—not only in the endless variations under which it appears, but in its
standard 4/4 bass-and-snare shape. We turn here to Ted Gracyk’s account of explicit
rhythm, which follows jazz historian Gunther Schuller in describing the backbeat,
descending from early jazz, as a “democratized beat.”18 To explain this, I need to
clarify how I understand rhythm, meter, and beat.
The definition of musical rhythm is contested, but we may take it that a rhythm
arises when within a series of connected sounds some stand out over others as
“stronger” than others. Several factors, not just relative volume, make for strength
or weakness.19 A rhythm, then, is a pattern of stressed and unstressed sounds.
Meter is “bonded rhythm”:20 a system for organizing and imposing regularity on
rhythmic patterns so that the strong and weak points regularly fall in certain places
relative to one another. Not all music is metric (many songs that follow the varying
emphases of speech are non-metric, save for the cadence of speech) and different
metric systems exist in different cultures. My concern, however, is with meter in its
Western form as it has crystallized from 1600 onwards, since this kind of meter is
what popular music generally presupposes. In this system, pulses in the flow of time
are evenly placed and used to demarcate the music into measures, each containing
a given number of pulses. The first pulse—or beat—in each measure is strongest.21
This is because it marks the boundary between measures, and is thus the point to
begin counting out the time. While the first beat in each measure is thus accented,
musicians may or may not physically stress it (subtly or conspicuously).
Beats, then, are points or pulses in time that mark out the divisions of the measure
to which a song is set, and in this sense need not be sounded. On the other hand, in
popular music, because there is normally an “explicit beat” layer, it is normal that at
least some pulses are sounded. Standardly, when the metre is 4/4, the bass and snare
18 Schuller, Early Jazz; Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise.

19 “Rhythm may be defined as the way in which one or more unaccented beats are grouped in relation to an
accented one” and “such factors as duration, intensity, melodic contour, regularity . . . play a part in creating an
impression of accent” (Cooper and Meyer, Rhythmic Structure of Music,  6–7).
20 Sachs, quoted in Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 136.
21 “Meter is the measurement of the number of pulses between more or less regularly recurring accents.
Therefore, in order for meter to exist, some of the pulses in a series must be accented—marked for
consciousness—relative to others. When pulses are thus counted within a metric context, they are referred to
as beats. Beats which are accented are called ‘strong’; those which are unaccented are called ‘weak’ ” (Cooper
and Meyer, Rhythmic Structure of Music, 4).
drums distribute between them the task of sounding out the four pulses that divide
each measure. Thus implicit pulse becomes explicit beat.
Meter establishes a hierarchy between the beats in each 4/4 measure, with beat
one on top, beat three behind it, then two, then four.22 Because it stresses the back-
beat, popular music’s basic beat rejects that metric hierarchy, re-emphasizing the
beats that are marked metrically as weak. Implicitly, then, popular music’s typ-
ical stress on the backbeat subverts the hierarchy bound up with meter and, by
extension, can be said to reject the broader set of power relations bound up with
measured time.
However, the word “democratization” is potentially confusing, as the formerly
weak beats seem simply to be raised to dominant position.23 Popular music, it may
be argued, stresses the backbeat but still presupposes an accent on beat one. In that
case beats one (and three) would be privileged metrically while beats two (and four)
are privileged in actual practice—resulting in rough overall equality. But does pop-
ular music presuppose that the downbeat is accented? Joel Rudinow argues other-
wise, stressing African influences:
Western musicology has been given to theorizing the back beat as a ‘displacement’
of accent from presumed normal expectations . . . and thus as an instance of ‘synco-
pation’, which is in turn understood to be basically a matter of upsetting rhythmic
expectations . . . however, the presumption as to which expectations are ‘normal’
is objectionable from the point of view of ethnomusicology . . . unlike European
and European-derived musical traditions, African-derived rhythmic organization
does not always accent the reference beat (the one) . . . [which] need not even be
enunciated. . . . it would be a misleading . . . to theorize the back beat as . . . a ‘depar-
ture from normal rhythmic expectations.’24
Perhaps post-rock ’n’ roll music simply operates with a norm on which beats two
(and four) rather than one (and three) are accented.
But this view is incorrect. Contrary to Rudinow, popular music works with
inherited Western meter as well as African-rhythmic practices, and continues to
accent the downbeat, while instituting a new norm of stressing the backbeat. The
two forces—metric and rhythmic, structural and practical—are pitted against one
another to generate conflicting energies.
22 “Fundamental to the idea of meter is the notion of periodic alternation of strong and weak beats . . . For
beats to be strong or weak there must exist a metrical hierarchy—two or more levels of beats” (Lerdahl and
Jackendoff, Theory of Tonal Music, 19). For them, if we ascend a level—in 4/4, from quarter-notes to minims—
the “strong” beats at 4/4 level (one and three) are the ones that remain present at the minim level; hence their
strength.
23 Abel, Groove,  49–50.
24 Rudinow, Soul Music,  121–2.
3. Sources of Rhythmic Tension
To see how metric accent is presupposed in popular music, we must look beyond ex-
plicit beat to other layers of sound. In popular music, each layer of sound is typically
made up of repetitions of small elements, each with a rhythm that is reiterated—
unchanged or varied—when the element recurs. These rhythmic qualities tend to
be pronounced in popular music, partly because instruments are often played quite
percussively, and also because of the role of repetition, so that rhythmic patterns
recur and build up momentum.
Most importantly, the rhythmic qualities of these elements are enhanced by their
relations with the songs’ explicit beat layer, through which they acquire rhythmic
functions either as pulling against or with emphases presented by the percussion.
Given the norm that drums stress the beats sounded by the snare drum, recipro-
cally it is normal for at least some other layers to pull against the snare drum and
with the bass drum. Because the bass drum typically sounds on beat one of each
measure, the instruments that reinforce the bass drum pull the emphasis towards
beats that are metrically accented.
In measures 11–12 of “Billie Jean,” the snare drum stresses the backbeat. But all
other instruments pull, to some degree, with the bass drum. First, the bass guitar: a
slightly greater stress occurs on the notes occurring on beats one and five, in time
with the bass-drum beats. The first bass note in each measure, on beat one, stands
out further, being on the tonic pitch F♯ and reinforced by the first stabbing syn-
thesizer chord in each measure. The backbeat remains most emphasized, but
bass guitar and synthesizer chords effect a significant pull of energy back towards
beat one.
Moreover, bass guitar and synthesizer parts indicate that metric accent is
presupposed, for each cycle through their repeated elements begins on beat one.
The synthesizer signals this with quaver-length tonic chords on the first beat of each
measure, cementing the tonic and confirming the metric accent. Likewise, each it-
eration of the bass line begins on beat one: the bass line starts from the tonic at this
point. In popular music more broadly, chord cycles generally begin on beat one of
a measure and chord changes generally occur at that point too; placement of vocal
phrases also reflects metric accent, with vocal lines generally starting around beat
one of a given measure. Thus meter is central to the cyclical and repetitive mode of
organization of popular songs.
“Billie Jean” illustrates something else. Synthesizer and bass guitar lines rein-
force the bass drum, but also stress the second “half ” of each second beat, a point
in time not enunciated by either the bass or snare drums. The bass line puts a
slight emphasis at this point by returning to the tonic pitch here, while the second
synthesizer chord likewise sounds here, whereas we might have expected it to
sound on beat three. Thus bass line and synthesizer chords “lean” slightly ahead
of the bass drum, creating a sense of tension and adding to the song’s qualities of
anxiety, nervousness, and agitation. The track has a “forward-leaning” groove with
reversed connotations to “backward-leaning” grooves, which are typically relaxed
and laid-back.
This is not the sort of minute timing nuance considered earlier with regard to
Keil, yet something interesting is going on. In binary terms:
(a) Bass/snare-drums: 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0

(b) Keyboard: 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0
(c) Bass guitar: 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0
Returning to the idea that the popular music beat is “democratized,” the unex-
pected placements of sounds in (b) and (c) introduce a further type of democratiza-
tion. Any 4/4 measure can be subdivided indefinitely, but initially into eight equal
parts. Thus
1 2 3 4
becomes
1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and
Each eighth-note pair (1-and) adds up to a quarter-note beat (1) at the higher level,
where each quarter-note beat begins on the first of each eighth-note pair, giving
it priority. This norm filters down from the higher-level prioritization of beat one
as marking the start of each measure. Here is another hierarchy implied in meter,
which can be subverted by beginning a sound on the second half of any quarter-
note beat (whether or not the sound runs on into the next beat). The same kind of
subversion or syncopation (a “timing displacement”) can be accomplished at any
subdivision of the beat: the finer-grained the subdivision, the more possibilities for
subversion.
This kind of syncopation presupposes measured time and metric hierarchy just
as the stressed backbeat does: the norm must be presupposed to be subverted. Thus,
popular music presupposes metric hierarchy by using that hierarchy, playing it off
against the stress on the backbeat and against timing displacements to create a dy-
namic pull of energies between different beats—those that are metrically accented
and those that are rhythmically stressed or sound in unexpected places. Metric ac-
cent is mobilized into a resource for producing dynamic pulls and counter-pulls of
energy within a song.
Central to this process is the presence of an explicit beat layer to which every
layer of sound becomes related. Songs become fields of energy, containing
forces pulling and pushing with and against one another. We apprehend the
music in this way insofar as we come to enact its tensions with our bodies and
so experience the music’s rhythmic tensions as being energetic in turn—as
sharing in the character of the bodily energies and impulses that they invite. Or
so I now argue.
4. Rhythm and Bodily Agency
Critics and proponents of popular music agree that it acts on our bodies through
its explicit rhythmic dimension. But what is the nature of this action? One might
assume that it is causal, affecting our bodies much as one billiard ball knocks an-
other into motion. However, this cannot be correct; our bodies are not mere causal
mechanisms. We are bodily agents. As de Beauvoir writes, the body is “our grasp on
the world and the outline of our projects.”25 She does not mean that I use my body
as an external vehicle for executing my plans, as I use a car or bicycle for traveling
to work, picking up and putting it down as required. Rather I, as body, decide what
projects to pursue just in deciding how to do something physically by forming an
initial bodily sketch or outline of the action, which I then execute. But if my body is
thus the primary location of my agency and not a mere mechanism, efficient causa-
tion cannot be the route along which musical rhythms affect us somatically. To con-
sider how these effects occur, we look at the nature of our bodily agency as explored
by de Beauvoir and other phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty.
Their view is that my projects are inherently bodily, involving I-as-body nav-
igation. I-as-body make sense of surrounding space from the perspective of
my possibilities of movement. This is a tacit process; I act actions, adjusting my
movements, and forming habits, such as the postures by which I keep a bicycle
balanced. For Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, this is primarily how I experience my
body—as identical with me to the extent that I am an everyday, practical agent going
about my daily activities. I exercise intelligence tacitly, identical with the practical
operations of my body.
There is a secondary perspective that we each take on our bodies: I regard my body
from the outside, as an object. For Merleau-Ponty, I adopt this perspective when
breakdowns occur in my habitual, practical, routines: if something malfunctions,
say if I become ill, I turn and look at the body with which, from the primary first-
person perspective, I was simply identical.26 In this perspective I “have,” rather than
“am,” my body. The secondary perspective makes possible a tertiary, scientific one—
in which, having adopted the standpoint of viewing our bodies and their processes
as objects, we scrutinize and analyze them in abstract, scientific terms. We use ex-
plicit intelligence to make calculations regarding the body, and experience this kind
of intelligence as set over against the body.
My bodily agency can be interpreted in several ways. For early Sartre, I freely en-
visage possible actions, and in the light of them, confer meaning on the world.27 If
I choose to take an uphill walk, the hill becomes an opportunity or challenge, not
an obstacle or indifferent natural feature, as when I want to travel quickly to the
25 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 66, translation emended.
26 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 157.

27 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 628.
hill’s other side. Plausibly, though, the relation between environment and activities
is more reciprocal than Sartre has it. Environments, situations, and objects are not
formless until we frame possibilities; rather, any environment presents us with de-
terminate possibilities. A steep hill does not offer a casual, effortless stroll. Objects
and situations afford us definite possibilities of action. What these possibilities are
depends on objects’ physical properties, although the possibilities do not reduce to
this physical base, but arise in the relation between objects and agents.28
From this perspective, music affords us various possibilities of action. In the case
of popular music these include singing or singing-along; imitating performers’
gestures and behaviors; playing along, if one has the skills; moving in time; dancing;
exercising; and regulating one’s emotions by listening to certain songs to cultivate a
given mood. Bodily movement is central to all these activities. Playing, performing,
and singing-along involve repeated bodily movements, and uses of popular music
in exercise depend on its propensity to energize us. Emotional regulation, too, has a
bodily component, with music raising or decreasing our levels of energy.
The movements that popular music encourages do not reduce to dancing. There
is an immense variety of ways of moving to popular music, with dance practices
themselves ranging from the anarchic to highly structured, rule-governed dance
routines (such as the Macarena); from individual to collective behaviors; and from
the restrained and decorous to the ecstatic and euphoric. Ways of moving can fall
short of dancing proper: bobbing one’s head, tapping one’s fingers or feet, jiggling
slightly while performing tasks around the house, or making gestures such as
punching the air or leaping.
Focusing on bodily movement, rather than dance more narrowly, how does pop-
ular music afford possibilities for movement? Bill Haley remarked that
I felt that if I could take, say, a Dixieland tune and drop the first and third beats,
and accentuate the second and fourth, and add a beat the listeners could clap to as
well as dance, this would be what they were after.29
Haley’s remark pertains to the norms for different layers of sound both to empha-
size different beats and also to put sounds and silences in unexpected places relative
to the beat that other layers of sound spell out. These differences invite listeners
to align movements and gestures of their different body parts with these different
points of emphasis or timing in the music, for example by clapping hands on beats
two and four (with the snare drum) while separating the hands on beats one and
three (with the bass drum). Someone might do this while, say, first centering their
pelvis on beats one and two then thrusting out their hip on beat three and four.
Schematically, we align different body movements with different divisions of the
28 My understanding of the concept of affordance comes from Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. See also
DeNora, Music in Everyday Life, 45.
29 Gillett, Sound of the City, 24.
beat and make each movement when the emphasis falls in a given place. As we
move, we exert energy. We feel the energy in our bodies shift from one place to an-
other, as different body parts are tensed and relaxed in moving them.
Mostly we do not consciously plan these gestures, although someone can prac-
tice a particular routine in the mirror. Generally, moving to music is carried out at
a directly bodily level without reflective control. Moreover, there is no set way in
which particular rhythmic patterns must become mapped by bodily movements.
Here the intelligent body devises endless ways to map rhythmic shifts corporeally
(usually incorporating social and cultural mediations, so that dance styles carry so-
cial connotations). Thus, when the music offers us possibilities of movement, we
gain a possibility of bodily self-realization instead of passively accepting the effects
of compulsive force. Our bodies exercise practical agency by generating mean-
ingful patterns of movement. In addition, they exercise latent intelligence, making
sense of music’s rhythms by generating these patterns. We do not make explicit
calculations regarding the music and how to move to it—e.g., “this song has a bpm
(beats-per-minute) of 130 so I should move my legs at this speed.” Rather, there is
a trial-and-error process by which we attempt certain movements to a given track
and adjust them until they “fit” the music. DJs and studio practitioners may calcu-
late that songs with a certain bpm arouse people to dance. But here they assume an
already existing practice in which we respond to music at a tacit, bodily level.
By virtue of its pronounced rhythmic qualities, then, popular music appeals to
our bodies as perceptive agencies. Our response is intelligent and creative in finding
individual and endlessly variable patterns of movement that map those rhythms.
This is a positive value of popular music; it invites us to participate in its rhythms,
exercising our latent bodily intelligence.
To return to our problem of value, the rhythms of popular songs do presuppose
measured time: popular music is constructed repetitively with homogeneous time
serving to measure out and coordinate its repetitions. But the repeated elements
have their own rhythms in relation to the explicit beat—supporting it, pulling
against it, or oscillating. Thus, measured time enables the rhythms of each layer of
sound to stand in a dynamic relation. The pull of stressed backbeat against metric
accent presupposes meter; the tensions produced by unexpected placements of
sounds or silences rely on the metric subdivision of the beat. Thus, measured time
is used in popular music to intensify its rhythmic quality and its consequent invi-
tation to movement. Measured time is used to further the realization of the intelli-
gence and creativity of our bodies. This way of employing measured time subverts
the power relations embedded in the clock time that organizes scientific inquiry
and industrial social life. Whereas ordinarily clock-time is an instrument by which
nature and materiality are analyzed, controlled, and dominated, in popular music
measured time becomes a resource for creating fields of energy that empower
embodied human agents.
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Keynes, 1992).
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Musical Analysis (Oxford, 2005), 65–76.
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(London, 1999).
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(2008): https://www.iep.utm.edu/music-po/.
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Culture (London, 1992).
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10
Rhythms, Resemblance, and
Musical Expressiveness
Ted Gracyk
For no melody has the power to awaken a true sensation or a real feeling in
us if the rhythmic does not order all movement of the tone-feet in a way that
produces some pleasing relationship together and against each other.
Johann Mattheson, The Perfect Chapelmaster (1739)
Contemporary philosophers have had much to say about the expressive power
of music. However, the current volume excepted, they seldom discuss musical
rhythm.1 Given the empirical evidence that almost everyone who listens to music is
aware of its rhythms,2 philosophy of music betrays a surprising neglect of rhythm’s
potential relevance to our perception of musical expressiveness. I argue rhythm
plays an indispensable role in establishing a relevant resemblance between mu-
sical expressiveness and human expression of emotion. Standard objections to re-
semblance accounts of musical expressiveness disappear when we recognize that
entrainable rhythms play a role in music’s expressiveness. Finally, while arousalism
does not supply a general account of musical expression, entrainment’s role in ex-
pressiveness bridges the divide between “resemblance” and “contagion” accounts of
music’s expressiveness.3
Objects and events that lack mental states cannot express emotions. Yet there is a
standard use of “express” that recognizes that non-sentient objects can be used as
vehicles to express emotions. Why is music among these things? The underlying
1 Notable exceptions include Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 119–52, and Scruton “Thoughts on Rhythm.”
2 Drake et al., “Tapping in Time,” 1–23.
3 Davies, “Infectious Music,” defends a complementary explanation of contagion. Features of my argu-
ment are suggested by Davies, “Artistic Expression”, and Cochrane, “Theory of Musical Expressivity”; neither
assigns a central role to entrainment.
Rhythms, Resemblance, and Musical Expressiveness 157
problem is how and why we successfully map the language of emotional expression
onto music.4
I employ the neutral phrase “expressive qualities” as a generic label for any
features of a public display that indicate which emotion is being expressed. A dis-
play of expressive qualities expresses an emotion when it reveals an occurrent emo-
tion.5 Such qualities may also be displayed when no such emotion is present, as
when there is either insincerity or there is mere expressiveness. Thus one feigns sur-
prise for the surprise birthday party that was not actually a surprise. Composers
and musicians frequently build expressive qualities into their music without
thereby expressing their own emotions. It is thus possible that very few musical
compositions express the emotions of their composers. A composer wracked with
grief is unlikely to have composed Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. The same point holds
for Janet Baker’s performances of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Baker’s expressiveness
is like Natalie Wood’s tears in the film West Side Story (1961)—it is likely that she
performed sadness.6 However, while it is obvious that the ability to shed tears on
cue is a good way to feign sadness, why does singing a specific melody, orchestrated
in a certain way, convey the depths of grief? The expressive quality of “Wenn dein
Mütterlein” is independent of the libretto, for the music conveys grief even if one
does not understand German. The core problem is that knowledgeable listeners dis-
play considerable agreement about which expressive qualities are present in instru-
mental music—for example, that the ending of Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 6
is perceived as resignation.
Some contend that these recognitions of grief and resignation are cases of meta-
phorical thinking.7 However, there is no reason why we must consciously apply the
concept of sadness to the music in order to perceive its sadness. Yet that would have
to be the case if we were to hold that we employ a metaphor when we say that music
has a particular expressive quality. At the same time, our intersubjective agreement
does not require literal usage. Thus Todd contends that any talk of musical tempo
involves reference to “a fictitious variable since it cannot be measured directly.”8 He
might be right, but reference to a fictitious variable does not disrupt the meaning-
fulness of conversations about tempo, such as the suitability of Beethoven’s very
precise tempo indications for his symphonies.
Finally, music’s expressiveness is not explained by regarding music as a universal
language of the emotions. For example, Raga Yaman is a flowing, soothing me-
lodic framework, generally performed as a flute piece. Knowledgeable Hindustani
listeners regard it as expressing romantic yearning (sringâra). In its cultural
4 I set aside any position that says that the correlations between musical properties and emotive predicates
are arbitrary and conventional.
5 This distinction derives from Tormey, The Concept of Expression.
6 Appeal to an expressive persona is promoted by Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness” (1996), and
Robinson, Deeper than Reason; criticisms are found in Davies, “Contra the Hypothetical Persona”, and Kivy,
Antithetical Arts.
7 Trivedi, “Music and Imagination,” 116–17. Vermazen, “Expression as Expression,” 206, criticizes the met-
aphor account.
8 Todd, “Kinematics of Musical Expression,” 1941.
tradition, its performance can be understood to express longing, most often the ro-
mantic longing of separated lovers.9 It can also express religious longing. However,
listeners unfamiliar with the Hindustani tradition do not perceive its intended ex-
pressivity. Playing it for American students, I have asked them to select its rasa or
“taste” from the standard rasa list—the majority identify the mood as sorrowful
(nearer to karuna, compassion). These results correspond with those of a more
systematic study, where American students perceive expressive qualities, but do
not strongly agree on their identification.10 At the same time, the majority of my
students identify the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as sringâra (longing)
rather than karuna (compassion, or sorrow). Despite their ignorance of Mahler’s
music generally and the Adagietto specifically, their familiarity with the basic
structures of Western classical music guides and justifies a fine-grained response.
Such experiments confirm that many musical indicators of expression are culturally
specific and learned, and therefore the test of expression must be the consensus of
culturally immersed or knowledgeable listeners.11 As Meyer writes, “the languages
and dialects of music are many.”12 This point extends to rhythm, too, and so also to
the latter’s expressive contribution.
II
A piece of music has a particular expressive quality if that quality is a percep-

tible feature. I endorse a variation of the resemblance account of musical expres-
sion. Some musical properties sufficiently resemble human expressive qualities to
allow us to perceive the music as possessing expressive qualities. This is appearance
emotionalism, the position that the crucial resemblance “is that between music’s
temporally unfolding dynamic structure and configurations of human behavior
associated with the expression of emotion.”13 As Stephen Davies writes, “music is
expressive in recalling the gait, attitude, carriage, posture, and comportment of the
human body.”14 However, I am interested only in pursuing the limited idea that our
perception of rhythm is essential to perceiving some of the requisite resemblance.
On the account that I defend, connections between rhythms and the gait and com-
portment of the human body are often sufficient to establish the resemblances.15
Appearance emotionalism faces serious criticisms. First, the resemblance
involves cross-categorical perception. However, it is unclear how sound patterns
resemble non-audible aspects of human bodies. Second, to the degree that there
is a resemblance between auditory motion and movements of human bodies,
9 Sharma, Music Aesthetics, 120.
10 Chordia and Rae, “Understanding Emotion in Raag.”
11 Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness,” 107.
12 Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music, 62.
13 Davies, “Artistic Expression,” 181.
15 Lidov, “Emotive Gesture in Music,” proposes a resemblance theory in which posture is equally important.
there are equally strong resemblances between sound patterns and other things
we encounter. It is not sufficient to argue—as in Jenny Judge’s contribution to this
volume—that there is movement-related content present in our perception of
rhythm.16 Appearance emotionalism owes us an account of why we perceive mu-
sical patterns as human in appearance. Why doesn’t the slowness of a Mahler adagio
make us think of a turtle’s motion, instead of a human motion?17 Third, there is
no independent way to specify what counts as a “sad musical appearance,” inde-
pendent of the judgment that the music appears sad. Apart from such specifica-
tion, we cannot even say which degree of resemblance will be sufficient to count
as musical expressiveness. However, if we cannot offer a “translation rule” that ties
the human appearances to the musical appearances, then reference to resemblance
is an explanation without substance.18 The first two of these three objections are
disarmed by my proposal about entrainable rhythms, and the third is answered by
the fact that my proposal recognizes that empirical inquiry should offer us greater
clarity about our “translation” rules.
III
Concerning rhythm, the account I propose applies to all music with a recognizable
meter—a discernible, entrainable beat. According to a standard textbook,
rhythm refers to the entire time aspect of music and, more specifically, . . . a rhythm
refers to the particular arrangements of long and short notes in a musical pas-
sage. . . . Meter is background; rhythm is foreground.19
Any given meter can support an infinite variety of rhythmic manifestations; for ex-
ample, contrast variation thirteen of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations (Op. 120) with
Anton Diabelli’s original waltz. Beethoven’s thirteenth variation preserves Diabelli’s
waltz meter, the Vivace tempo, and the key of C major. However, Beethoven employs
spaced chords and dramatic stretches of silence to transform Diabelli’s straightfor-
wardly sunny oom-pah-pah into an exercise in vacillation. As William Kinderman
emphasizes,
Here the sheer strength of Beethoven’s rhythmic conception makes a mockery

of Diabelli’s theme . . . The humor of the variation consists in its expressive use
of silence: our expectations are alternately strained by the forceful gesture of the
chords and then dissipated into nothing.20
16 See Chapter 4, “ ‘Feeling the Beat’: Multimodal Perception and the Experience of Musical Movement.”
17 Trivedi, “Resemblance Theories,” 227.
18 Levinson, “Hearability-as-Expression,” 192–204,  196–8.

19 Kerman and Tomlinson, Listen, 9.
20 Kinderman, Beethoven, 215.
The two Presto variations preserve the original key and meter. Where variation ten
frolics gleefully, the nineteenth charges forward with determination. The expressive
differences among these waltzes are largely due to differences in tempo and, where
there is a shared tempo, to rhythmic differentiation.
As Justin London writes, “Meter is a perceptually emergent property [of music]”;
we frequently impose rhythmic organization even when no perceptible accents
are present.21 More importantly, the experience of meter requires entrainment—
attentional and bodily anticipation of a periodically regular accent, of invariance
within variance. An extended rhythmic sequence can typically be heard in any
number of metric frameworks, a point of some importance to my subsequent ar-
gument. Because rhythm and meter are intertwined, any attempt to treat one as
logically prior to the other is ultimately specious. Crucially, there cannot be a
perception of metric regularity within rhythmic diversity unless there is entrain-
ment: “Musical meter is the anticipatory schema that is the result of our inherent
abilities to entrain to periodic stimuli in our environment.”22 However, this antici-
pation involves something more than mere attentive expectation. A listener’s antic-
ipatory schema is a mental representation of sensory-guided action involving their
own musculoskeletal system.23 Perception of a beat and a tempo requires motor
planning of bodily action.
Foot tapping is the paradigm demonstration of entrainment. A basic referent
tempo is established by the length of time between these strong accents, with longer
lengths providing slower music. Thirty beats per minute is the slowest that we re-
spond to as an entrainable beat; it is experienced as crawling, barely moving. Metric
perception also involves awareness of subdivisions heard within the baseline beat.
Listeners who foreground twelve tonal events within the “space” of two downbeats
hear that musical line as moving more rapidly than do listeners who focus on four
tonal events within the hierarchy of events in that same stretch of music. Metric
entrainment is more than just a means of counting notes and gauging musical
tempo. It also involves an awareness of our bodily deportment and movement that
synchronizes us with the occurrent music. To have a sense of tempo is, in part, to
have a sense of our own velocity, either of the whole body or of a limb.24 Even if we
do not move to music, we do not feel its beat unless we engage in “beat induction”
by constructing a “motor representation of the musculoskeletal system,” that is, we
do not locate the beat unless we perceive how we ourselves would move—and what
at what speed—in synchronizing our movements to the regular strong accent.25
This correspondence between bodily motion and musical understanding is rou-
tinely exploited so that music can be used to lock a group into a measured pace, or

23 Todd, “Kinematics of Musical Expression.”
24 Todd, “Kinematics of Musical Expression.”
25 Todd, “Sensory-Motor Theory of Rhythm,” 26; see also Todd, “The Kinematics of Musical Expression,”
and London, “Musical Rhythm.”
so that work songs can be used to synchronize workers. Synchronized dancing is

another adaptation of entrainment.
However, beats per minute do not tell the whole story. Rhythms coincide and
are hierarchically ordered. Music with a steady tempo becomes phenomenally
faster and slower as musical events are crowded within, or dispersed among, the
anticipated downbeats. Again, the point is illustrated by comparing Diabelli’s orig-
inal waltz with Beethoven’s thirteenth variation; or Bruce Springsteen’s standard
arrangement of his own song, “The River.” It opens with a harmonica and an inde-
terminate meter, settles into a plodding tempo, and then suddenly bursts into a rapid
rush of giddiness at the line: “But I remember us driving in my brother’s car.” Yet the
downbeats are as evenly spaced as before. The rapidity and the accompanying emo-
tional change are largely due to the way that the melodic line suddenly becomes
dense with notes. Because we regard the vocal melody as central to the musical ac-
tion, the music seems to speed up, even if, metronomically, it does not. Entraining
to the melodic motion, we recognize that keeping pace with it involves a sudden
increase in our own effort and velocity. Yet we have the same “beats” per minute as
before in the supporting instrumentation, where we find that tactus or primary beat
level. In contrast, when trills and similar musical figures are understood as orna-
mentation, their rapidity is not interpreted as speeding up the music.
IV
We now see how entrainment supplements appearance emotionalism. Peter Kivy’s

formulation of the resemblance theory of musical expressiveness identifies a sim-
ilarity between the tempo of music and the tempo of the movement of people
experiencing particular emotions:
The most obvious analogue to bodily movement is . . . rhythm . . . in all sorts of ways,
the rhythmic movement of the human body in all kinds of emotive expressions is
mirrored by and recognized in music. [Thus] funeral marches are slow and meas-
ured, as sadness slows and measures our expression of it.26
Kivy notes that a “jagged and halting rhythm” will also have a direct analogue in
human expressive behavior, but otherwise ignores the expressive potentiality of
rhythm. This neglect is not surprising. Outlining a contour model of expressive-
ness in which the experience of auditory contours permits recognition of analogous
human expressive behavior, Kivy emphasizes the music’s melodic line as expres-
sively more pertinent than its rhythms. The rising and falling of the melody is what
really matters. Tempo is relevant, for it must not be inappropriate to the expressive
contour.
26 Kivy, Sound Sentiment, 55.

However, tempo is not the whole story. Mari Riess Jones has shown that we “rely
heavily on rhythmic properties to differentiate melodies.” A melodic contour gen-
erally becomes unrecognizable “if its original rhythm changes, even when temporal
segmentations and statistical pitch properties are unchanged.”27 In short, the per-
ception of rhythmic detail is essential to the perception of melody, and therefore
rhythm is an important variable in the expressive differences presented by rhythmic
and thus melodic variations of a melodic contour.
Davies is more explicit about the resemblance between rhythm and the
appearances of expressive human gestures; though like Kivy, he focuses on move-
ment from low to high, with little explicit discussion of rhythm and tempo.28 His ac-
count is consistent with mine, for he says that the “resemblance that counts most for
musical expressiveness . . . is that between music’s temporally unfolding dynamic
structure and configurations of human behavior associated with the expression
of emotion.”29 These dynamic structures include “subtle nuances of timing.” Thus
“music is expressive in recalling the gait . . . and comportment of the human body.”30
And of course gait and comportment are influences on carriage and posture.
Our first challenge to the expressive centrality of resemblance was the issue of
cross-modal resemblance. How does the listener know which gait and comport-
ment of the human body is associated with a particular piece of music? Considerable
guidance arises from entrainment with the music’s primary beat level. Normally,
the primary beat establishes a tempo of beats per minute within a range that crawls
(at thirty beats per minute) to one that shudders in rapid spasms (at 240 beats per
minute, the upper range of our discrimination for downbeats).31 If I can entrain to
the music’s primary beat, which I must do if I am to grasp its tempo, then I know
how I will comport myself in time to it. I know if my gait is fast or slow, sluggish,
comfortable or frenetic.32 If the music establishes one tempo in its primary beat
level and another tempo at another level of the rhythmic hierarchy, I may entrain
to both, by sensing or simulating how different parts of the same body will move
at different speeds. Some tempos are conducive to whole-body resonance, as in a
swaying motion, while others encourage limb movement.33 (Contrast the bodily
motion of waltzing with the rigid body and arm stance that accompanies elaborate
footwork, as in some Irish dancing.) In order to perceive rhythm, the listener must
know how a human body—his or her own—will move in relation to that music. For
most people, the key resemblance between the movement of music and the gait and
comportment of the human body is not located in an imagined visual appearance.
We grasp the music’s gait in a preconceptual recognition process. Knowledgeable
27 Jones, “Music Perception,” 10.
28 Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression, 229–39.
32 London, Hearing in Time.
33 Todd, “The Kinematics of Musical Expression,” 1948.

listeners feel the beat. Even the listener who has internalized the rule of sitting per-
fectly still in the concert hall will entrain to the music.
The centrality of entrainment explains our near-universal propensity to inter-
pret music as human gait and comportment. A listener might deny engaging in any
conscious comparison of musical movement and human movement. But entrain-
ment explains why people perceive expressive movement without having to recog-
nize the resemblance. The second objection is now defused. We interpret an adagio
as a slow human movement because we judge the tempo in terms of the template it
provides for our own movement. Not knowing how a turtle controls its musculo-
skeletal system, I do not hear an adagio as a turtle’s motion, for I do not feel it that
way. Perhaps I could do so, if I consciously thought about a turtle while listening to
the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 10, but this would be a capricious
response to Mahler. Perception of rhythm is, by default, a representation of a pat-
tern of human movement. Once this is established, we can go on to interpret many
movements musically.
My strategy parallels Wollheim’s account of representational seeing, grounding
responses to two major objections— the cross-
modality and multiple resem-
blance problems—to animation-resemblance accounts of musical expression. Just
as Wollheim posits the capacity for seeing-in as logically prior to seeing pictures
in painted surfaces, an entrainment account of musical expression holds that the
ability to hear expressiveness in rhythmic sounds is logically prior to hearing some
musical patterns as expressive gestures. Another advantage of the appeal to en-
trainment is that it implies that our awareness of temporal patterns in music “is a
musically peculiar instance of a more general perceptual and cognitive ability.”34
Because these abilities are biologically rooted and biologically constrained, we are
limited in the range of basic meters that we can perceive. With visual represen-
tation, Wollheim holds that viewers can distinguish between the painted surface
and whatever they see “in” that surface. Nonetheless, the perception of the painted
surface is inseparable from the picture: there is one experience with two distinct
aspects.35 Similarly, listeners can distinguish between the sounds and their musical
properties.36 Furthermore, perception of the relevant motion is not an inference
from the rhythmic structure, and neither the perception of rhythm nor its resem-
blance to expressive human behavior requires thinking about it under any particular
description. Absent description and inference, expressiveness does not require the
deployment of metaphor or analogy. This account owes no further explanation of
why, from among all the things that music resembles, listeners “choose” to compare
the sad music to sad human gestures and movements rather than, say, to the droop
of the willow tree or the movement of turtles. We do not choose the comparison.37

35 Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 46.
36 E.g. Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 16–20, distinguishes sounds and tones.
37 My account is consistent with Nussbaum, The Musical Representation, 33, which explains musical repre-
sentation in terms of Gibsonian “affordances”—environmental invariants that perceiving organisms interpret
as affording possibilities of action.
This account is bolstered by the emerging consensus that, normally, we recognize

the emotional states of others by feeling them ourselves—by physically mimicking or
imaginatively simulating their bodily actions. This imaginative simulation prompts
simulated emotional response. To a large extent, an individual’s capacity to recog-
nize a particular emotion in another person depends on her capacity to mimic that
emotion.38 This mimicry is not necessarily conscious. As Giacomo Rizzolatti puts
it, the brain’s natural mirroring function “allow[s]‌us to grasp the minds of others
not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by
thinking.”39
Rhythmic entrainment is a special application of this general human capacity. We
are naturally disposed to entrain with other people. Without conscious effort, we
feel (and frequently synchronize with) any rhythmic motion of people we observe.
In turn, entraining the body normally simulates emotion. By extension, if a tempo
and rhythmic structure corresponds to movement patterns associated with a par-
ticular emotion, then competent listeners will tend to agree on the expressive char-
acter of the music, for they will become aware of its particular expressive qualities
by consulting the same mental process that is employed to determine the expressive
behavior of an actual person expressing occurrent emotion. And, again, there need
not be conscious recognition of the way that both musical movement and human
movement move us, spatially and thus emotionally (even if only as a simulation).
The process of identifying music’s rhythms allows listeners to identify the sadness of
a Mahler adagio by feeling, not thinking. This account of entrainment, movement,
and expression has the additional benefit of explaining why musical expressiveness
arouses emotions. It does so, in part, by engaging the same recognition-contagion
combination that ordinarily accompanies awareness of people in our immediate
environment.
Consequently, the entrainment theory of rhythm deflates the charge that ap-
pearance emotionalism lacks translation rules that correlate human appearances to
specifiable musical structures. Thus London explains how specific ranges of beats
per minute align with distinctive gaits as established by the number of steps taken
in locomotion.40 The difference between perceived andante and allegro correlates
with walking strides and running strides, respectively. Since these strides im-
pose numerous gait differences beyond mere steps per minute, the musculoskel-
etal system aligns to a musical andante differently than to an allegro. Entraining to
these tempos, we are aware of these musculoskeletal differences. If we move beyond
tempo to consider basic rhythmic variations within andante and allegro tempos,
we are likely to find that there is considerable intersubjective agreement in human
comportment when entraining to these variations. Thus, rhythms show promise in
38 Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 65–77, provides examples.
39 Rizzolatti, quoted in Blakeslee, “Cells That Read Minds.”
40 London, “Musical Rhythm,” and “Problem(s) of Rhythm Perception.”

providing some basic translation rules, though few listeners will be conscious that
they “know” them.
Finally, entrainment as a catalyst for emotional contagion addresses an issue
about musical expressiveness. It answers an objection to resemblance accounts by
Levinson, namely, that appeal to perceptual processes does not elucidate the con-
cept of musical expressiveness.41 True: it treats musical expressiveness as a special
case of a more general experiential phenomenon. The elucidation lies in appeal to
the mechanism by which we establish a central resemblance between perception
of music’s rhythms and perception of human movement. Beyond that, the analysis
rests on the concept of expressiveness as it applies to expressive behavior. These
behavioral patterns do not infallibly express emotion, either in persons or in other
situations. Yet the expressive character of grief, joy, and so on can be perceived
in any behavior or process that resembles behaviors that normally indicate grief.
Entrainment explains why we so readily perceive expressive qualities in familiar
kinds of music with entrainable rhythms: it is of a piece with our relatively effortless
ability to perceive the emotions in the people around us.
A new problem arises from the claim that entrainment and emotional contagion—
our “mirroring” of music’s perceptible expressive qualities—is non-inferential, nat-
ural, and typically unconscious. If true, why doesn’t everyone perceive the same
expressiveness in all music with entrainable rhythms? Why aren’t we moved emo-
tionally by any such rhythm? Earlier, I denied that music is a universal language,
noting that consensus about the expressive character of a particular piece of music
tends to be restricted to listeners familiar with its musical tradition. Against this, it
might appear that rhythms are universally accessible, and therefore entrainment
should ensure cross-cultural access to the basic expressive quality of entrainable
music. Thus, everyone should be moved in the same way by most music. Yet few
listeners are equally moved by all music. So the theory seems to make the wrong
predictions.
Three points defuse this problem. First, there are significant differences in how
rhythm is handled in different musical cultures and subcultures; being adept in one
does not make someone equally competent in all others. Entrainment should not
be considered a “passive” response: enculturation informs recognition of complex
rhythms. Second, rhythm is merely one of several factors responsible for musical
expressiveness. At the same time, different emotions can share similar movement
profiles (e.g., serenity and grief). But if melody and harmonization play anything
like the role assigned to them in standard accounts, it is no surprise that entrain-
ment is frequently countermanded or clarified by other musical cues. Neophytes
41 Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness,” 106.

and knowledgeable listeners respond differently. Third, it becomes more difficult

to simulate the emotion of another person when he or she is the object of one’s own
emotion; it is difficult to mirror the regret of someone with whom one is angry, or
to empathize with a friend’s joy while one envies them. Likewise, music is an occa-
sion and object of full-blown emotion, as when an unfamiliar style elicits boredom,
puzzlement, or irritation. Acquired associations and prejudices about a particular
style can generate strong negative emotions, overriding the rhythm’s contagion
effect. Someone who disdains religious music might be less likely to entrain to a
Bach cantata. My account emphasizes the importance of kinematic anticipation of
rhythm, not mere awareness of the tempo of the baseline beat. The former requires
far more engagement than the latter and so the requisite kinematic anticipation is
less likely to be grasped by anyone whose situation or musical tastes interfere with
engagement.
My account of the connection between an unconscious kinematic response and
musical expressiveness is necessarily sketchy. However, it suggests how we can
identify music’s expressive qualities in the absence of overt representation of con-
tent. It posits that our capacity for recognition of music’s resemblance to human
behavior is inherent in the perception of rhythm. Consequently, expressive quali-
ties are grasped in a natural sympathetic response. This account reconciles details
of the resemblance theory and the contagion theory, which are typically treated as
opposing strategies for explaining music’s expressive power.42
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Meyer, Leonard B., Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956).
Nussbaum, Charles O., The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology and Emotion (Cambridge,
MA, 2007).
Robinson, Jenefer, Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art
(Oxford, 2005).
Sharma, Manorama, Music Aesthetics (New Delhi, 2007).
Todd, Neil P. McAngus, “The Kinematics of Musical Expression,” The Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America, 97.3 (1995), 1940–9.
Todd, Neil P. McAngus, “Sensory- Motor Theory of Rhythm, Time Perception and Beat
Induction,” Journal of New Music Research, 28.1 (1999), 5–28.
Tormey, Alan, The Concept of Expression (Princeton, 1971).
Trivedi, Saam, “Music and Imagination,” in Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, eds, The
Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music (London, 2011), 113–22.
Trivedi, Saam, “Resemblance Theories,” in Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, eds, The
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Vermazen, Bruce, “Expression as Expression,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 67.3 (1986),
196–224.
Wollheim, Richard, Painting as an Art (Princeton, 1987).
PART III
ENT R A IN ME N T A ND T H E S O CIA L
DIME NSION
11
Metric Entrainment and the Problem(s)
of Perception
Justin London
1. Introduction
As Tim Crane writes in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the “problem of

perception” is that we may or may not be able “to reconcile some apparently ob-
vious truths about our experience of the world with the possibility of certain kinds
of perceptual error.”1 Current psychological research in rhythm perception shows
the existence of different kinds of error to those most discussed in the philosophical
literature, which has tended to focus on vision. Before discussing the ramifications
of this research for the problem of perception, however, we shall first rehearse the
problem in its more familiar, visual setting.
Two much-discussed problems of perception, which have broad epistemic
ramifications, are the problem of illusion and the problem of hallucination. In il-
lusion, what we often perceive is not what is actually there, but rather a distorted
version of the world; yet we are somehow able to accommodate this fact in our per-
ceptual judgments. In hallucination, we perceive (or believe we perceive) things that
are not actually present at all. This chapter will not consider the problem for per-
ception created by hallucinations, other than to say that the difficulties created by
illusions and other sensory distortions may well persist in the case of hallucinations,
insofar as the latter are grounded upon or otherwise primed by our perception and
sensation of real objects and events in the world.
The problem of illusion is, as those who work in psychophysics know quite well,
simply the problem of perception itself. A classic example of an “illusory” percept
is that of a rectangular white table. When we observe the table, we may see a rec-
tangular top with certain proportions, but if we view it from different perspectives,
its height-to-width ratio may change, and it may no longer appear as a rectangle at
all (i.e., it may appear trapezoidal). Similarly, depending upon lighting conditions,
the table may not appear white, but red, or brown, or blue. Since the object cannot
be both rectangular and trapezoidal, or both red and white, our perceptions seem
1 Crane, “Problem of Perception,” section 1.1.

(a)
(b)
Figure 11.1 Kanizsa triangle, organized array (left panel); disorganized array

(right panel)
incoherent—we see a red table which is really white, a trapezoidal table which is
really rectangular, and so on. These observations are advanced as a critique against
“direct” or “naive” realism—the claim that we have direct access to objects and
events in the world through our senses. The alternative proposal is that if we have
a coherent percept of a white table under these conditions, we can only do so via
some mental representation which mediates our incompatible sensory data.2
While an “ecological” approach to perception, most famously that of James
J. Gibson, is able to account for some aspects of the problem of illusion by shifting
the problem from that of illusory versus real objects to the pickup of invariant in-
formation in a dynamic perceptual array,3 research both old and new in perception
and psychophysics has shown that our perceptual systems themselves may generate
illusory or otherwise false perceptions. Consider Gaetano Kanizsa’s well-known
visual contour illusion.4
When the various shapes (visual “cues”) are arranged as in the left-hand panel
of Figure 11.1, we see an equilateral triangle with edges defined by an illusory
brightness and grayscale contrast. In the right-hand panel, with some of the cues
2 Here, “sensory data” is used in its psychological sense, that is, the output of our sensory organs, and not to
invoke “sense-datum” theories of perception.
3 Gibson, The Senses.
4 Kanizsa, “Subjective Contours.”
Metric Entrainment and the Problem(s) of Perception 173
repositioned, the triangle vanishes. Kanizsa’s illusion illustrates how our percep-
tual systems fill in missing information, as in the case of occluded visual objects,
or intermittently masked sound sources, and can thus generate complete percepts
from partial cues. The larger lesson is that our perceptual systems are not passive
filters or transmitters of information, but are actively engaged with the stimuli that
is presented to them. Similarly, treating our senses as perceptual systems (to para-
phrase Gibson) breaks down the distinctions between sensation, perception, and
cognition, as these systems are characterized by a dynamic flow between the per-
ceptual periphery, higher levels of the central nervous system, and everything in
between. The function of perception is not to register sensation, but to pick up in-
formation, and so rather than picking out individual features of a stimulus (its ap-
parent size, shape, color, etc.)—that is, all of John Locke’s individuated primary and
secondary qualities—the task of our perceptual systems is to make the most co-
herent sense of the changing stimulus array.
The perception of rhythm adds another set of problems to this task of recon-
ciliation. In the remainder of this chapter, I shall discuss some of the limits and
mechanisms of our perceptual faculties for auditory rhythm, along with their ep-
istemic ramifications. Specifically, we only have a direct perception of rhythms
within a limited temporal range. Our perception of rhythm seems to be inherently
cross-modal, and that rhythmic perception is often non-veridical, as we may add
subjective accents and grouping structure to otherwise undifferentiated stimuli.
I shall then conclude with some broader considerations of musical ontology as they
relate to this perceptual problem.
2. Problems in Rhythmic Perception
2.1 The Speed Limits of Rhythm
Consider a simple rhythm—a long note followed by two shorter notes in a 2:1:1
proportion. This L-S-S rhythm is a particular temporal “shape,” and we can readily
grasp it as the same even if it is sped up or slowed down; think of a repeated rhythm
or melodic motive that is subject to a ritardando or an accelerando. Thus rhythms
would seem to be relational structures, not dependent upon any particular, absolute
value for each element. Indeed, within most performances there is a considerable
amount of expressive variation to the exact timing of rhythmic sequences, and yet
we do not hear these as categorically different rhythms.5
If the L-S-S rhythm is played too quickly, however, we will lose our sense of three
distinct notes, as Karlheinz Stockhausen demonstrated,6 when continuously sped-
up rhythm becomes a pitch with a particular timbre. Likewise, if it is played too
5 Clarke, “Categorical Rhythmic Perception.”

6 Stockhausen, “Unity in Electronic Music.”
slowly, our sense of the three articulations forming a coherent temporal group is
lost. Thus while rhythmic shapes are relational in nature, their component elements
are subject to absolute limits: the shortest interval between event onsets cannot be
less than 100 milliseconds, and the longest cannot be more than about 2 seconds.
It is within this temporal range that we have a direct apprehension of temporal
patterns “as rhythms.” While the 100ms limit is both fairly crisp and uniform across
most listeners and listening contexts, the 2 second limit is somewhat “squishier,” as
it is more dependent upon both context and the individual listener. Nonetheless,
within this range we are able to (a) individuate the elements that make up a pat-
tern or sequence; (b) determine their number; and (c) determine their duration. So,
for example, in this range we are able to distinguish quadruplets from quintuplets,
and make categorical distinctions between long versus short notes.7 I take it as self-
evident that if one cannot make these sorts of discriminations and determinations,
one cannot tell one rhythm from another, and hence one cannot be aware of the
particular rhythm one is perceiving/has perceived.
Of course, all of our sensory modalities have their limits, such as the spectral
limits of vision, but rhythm differs in that we may have some awareness of the struc-
tural attributes of both faster and slower temporal patterns and events. We can, for
example, count a series of four very slow notes, and thus “hear” a very slow quadru-
plet, or we may recognize that the pitch and durational contour of a musical motive
which originally occurred within the 100ms–2 second range has been translated
beyond it through a process of rhythmic augmentation or diminution, and have
some sense of its proportional invariance. Thus we are often tempted to describe
our experience of smaller and (especially) larger patterns and events in the same
way we describe our experience of temporal sequences within the 100ms–2 second
range.8 What is perhaps the great enabler of such parlance is the presence of mu-
sical and analytic notations, which allows composers and musicians to grasp via
the visual modality temporal relationships which lie beyond what one may aurally
grasp, in some cases leading musicians to believe that they have direct aural grasp of
extremely large-scale structures.9
Aside from these “metaphorical” extensions of rhythmic and metric terms be-
yond the 100ms and 2 second speed limits, there is a more significant epistemic
problem for rhythm, as what is and is not a rhythm is mind-dependent. That is, due
to the limits in our sensory systems, much of which are pre-conscious, temporal
sequences “become rhythms” only when they occur within a particular temporal
range, and thus their ontological status as “rhythms” seems dependent upon contin-
gent aspects of human perceptual systems. That is, while we are able to grasp faster
versus slower versions of a melody within the 100ms–2 second range, if it should
cross one of those boundaries, it may cease to be a coherent rhythm or melody.
7 I survey relevant psychological research in “Rhythm,” and Hearing in Time.

8 e.g. Cooper and Meyer’s analyses, in Rhythmic Structure, of formal structures as rhythms writ large, or a
twenty-measure passage as an extended “upbeat” or anacrusis.
9 Salzer, Structural Hearing.
2.2 Rhythm Perception is Inherently Cross Modal
Given that we are creatures of a certain size and with certain capacities for move-
ment, our perceptual systems have evolved so that we attend to events and perform
actions at timescales that are relevant to the ways in which we can (and cannot) act
in our environment. The 100ms–2 second range is key for most human perception
and action, and so it is within this range that we are able to achieve sensorimotor
coordination with external temporal processes (both musical and non-musical),
most notably in terms of entrainment, but also for our coordination with other se-
rial patterns. Indeed, rhythmic perception and action is one of the best examples of
“embodied cognition,” as hearing rhythms involves covert or overt motor behavior
and the concomitant activation of motor areas of the brain.10
When we encounter a regular series of temporal events within the 100ms–2
second range, our sensorimotor system spontaneously entrains to it. Entrainment
may be defined as the phase-locking of a “driven” rhythm to a periodic “driving”
rhythm, such that for every n cycles of input there are m cycles of the driven
rhythm.11 Our rhythmic entrainment is a dynamic form of “resonance” between
our sensorimotor systems and rhythms in our environment.12 For when we listen
to music, we don’t merely register the pattern of durations or event onsets, but we
literally move with them. The hallmarks of entrainment are (a) that the listener
can adapt in period (tempo) and phase (coordination), should the driving rhythm
change; (b) that the listener can correct for errors of phase and period in his or her
own behavior to maintain coordination; and (c) that the listener’s rhythmic beha-
vior is self-sustaining, should the input be intermittently absent. As many studies
have shown, our rhythmic behaviors, ranging from tapping along to a metronome
to the performance of string quartets, display patterns of self-sustenance and ad-
aptation that are characteristic of an entrained system.13 Entrainment models can
very ably account for particular characteristics of human rhythmic behavior and
perception, in that:
• We tend to entrain within a certain range, and prefer particular rates of activity
with that range (viz., the optimal resonances of our sensorimotor system).
• We require some minimal inputs from the “driving rhythm”—the music we
are listening to—before we can begin to feel a sense of beat or pulse (the driven
rhythm that is our response to it).
• We can extract a beat or pulse even if the rhythmic input is only quasi-periodic.14
10 On embodied rhythmic cognition, see Eitan and Granot, “How Music Moves,” and Toiviainen et al.,
“Embodied Metre.” For the neurobiology of rhythm perception, see Chen et al., “Musical Rhythms”; Grahn,
“Neuroscientific Investigations”; and Grube and Griffiths, “Temporal Encoding.”
11 Glass and Mackey, Clocks to Chaos.
12 Chen et al., “Musical Rhythms.”
13 Repp, “Tapping Literature”; Repp and Su, “Recent Research”; Himberg, “Interaction”; and Wing et al.,
“String Quartet Synchronization.”
14 Rankin et al., “Fractal Structure.”
• Once established, our sense of beat can persist through rests, long notes, or
even against contrary stimuli, as in the case of syncopated passages.
• Our sense of accent need not derive from phenomenal aspects of music—i.e., it
is not simply read from the longest or loudest notes—but arises from the inter-
action between our perceptual systems and the phenomenal rhythmic “inputs”
which may or may not have a range of accentual cues.
More details (and examples) of these phenomena are given in Section 2.3. The
more immediate point to be made, however, is that if entrainment arises in our
sensory-motor system, and there is a large and growing body of evidence from neu-
roscience that it does, then that system plays a pivotal role in our perception of pe-
riodic auditory rhythms, which temporal sequences we would reflexively describe
as “rhythmic.” This in turn means that the perception of these rhythms is inher-
ently cross-modal. It is not simply that we extract information about the temporal
structure of an auditory signal, and thus can distinguish rhythm A from rhythm
B. Rather, our perception of temporal regularity in music—grounded in our per-
ception of a beat of pulse—is part of a broader, embodied response to that auditory
array, what is referred to as a perception-action loop. This embodied response is
active, not passive, as it causes the listener to interact with his or her auditory envi-
ronment in a certain way. In the course of that interaction, however, our perception
of the auditory signal often changes.
2.3 Entrainment Adds Rhythmic Differentiation

and Rhythmic Structure
Our capacity for entrainment in a broad range of contexts, both musical and non-
musical, is the basis of beat perception in music. First, however, it should be noted
that beat perception occurs within a sub-range of the 100ms–2 second range for
rhythmic perception. The fastest rate at which we can perceive a beat is an order of
magnitude slower than the rate to which we can synchronize, count, and reliably
make durational discriminations. Our fastest beat perceptions occur in the range
of 200–300ms (again, depending on context), and there a strong tendency to hear a
beat around 100–120 bpm (500–600ms) for most adult listeners, as that is the rate
at which we are most likely to spontaneously tap a regular beat.15 Note that most
metronomes, even electronic ones, do not go beyond 300 bpm (200ms inter-beat
interval), and typically are closer to 200 bpm (200ms inter-beat interval). Having a
faster metronome is of little use, as we cannot maintain 1:1 synchrony at more rapid
rates. We can, however, maintain 2:1 (and 3:1 and 4:1) synchrony up to a subdivi-
sion rate of about 100ms.16
15 McAuley et al., “Time of Our Lives,” gives a survey.
16 Repp, “Rate Limits.”

Figure 11.2 Beat interpolation in the opening theme of Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 in

E-minor,  Op. 98
As a result of the limits and preferences of beat perception, our perceptual

system makes distinctions amongst different rhythmic rates. Fast periodicities
with inter-onset intervals in the 100–300ms range are heard as subdivisions of a
slower beat, and when confronted with a pattern of multiple, nested periodicities,
we tend to hear a beat at whatever periodicity is closest to the range of 100–120 bpm
(500–600ms).
If there are regular cues, but at a much slower rate, we are likely to interpolate the
missing beats, and thus hear these “loud rests.”17 Consider the opening melody from
Brahms’ Fourth symphony, shown in Figure 11.2. The crotchet/quarter-notes are
too quick in most performances to be heard as beats, while the semibreve/whole-
notes are too slow. Yet even when we hear this without orchestra accompaniment,
we readily interpolate beats at the minim/half-note level (as per the cut time signa-
ture). This is again due to entrainment—for our entrainment to musical rhythms
can and usually does involve a nested set of periodicities. In Brahms’ melody these
periodicities are in 4:1, 2:1, and 1:1 relations, with the “1” (the crotchet/quarter
note) being only intermittently present in the melody.
As our rhythmic entrainment habitually involves more than just 1:1 periodic
relationships, this leads our sensorimotor systems to add layers of rhythmic struc-
ture even when there are no cues for those layers in the musical/rhythmic stimulus.
Thus when we listen to a metronome, we hear groups of 2, 3, or 4 ticks—the so-
called “tick-tock” phenomenon. Such “subjective rhythmization” has been known
to psychology since the nineteenth century,18 and its neurological correlates have
recently been shown.19
Figure 11.3 shows two interpretations of the “same” melody (composed by the
author). When played at a fairly rapid rate (8th notes faster than 140 beats per mi-
nute), and without any other cues (such as dynamics or articulation) this sequence
of isochronous pitches can be construed by listeners as in quadruplets (outlining
the G-major triad, as indicated by the circled notes), or in triplets (emphasizing
the notes of the G-major scale). The brackets indicate the recurrence of grouping
patterns in each instance. There are manifold effects of this subjective grouping: we
not only hear quadruplets versus triplets, but also (a) different tempos, as the
17 London, “Loud Rests”; Snyder and Large, “Gamma-Band Activity.”
18 James, Principles of Psychology.
19 Brochard et al., “ ‘Ticktock’ of our Internal Clock”; Large, “Resonating to Musical Rhythm.”
Figure 11.3 A “metrically malleable” melody notated in (a) 4/4, and (b) 9/8, showing

alternate listening construals
Figure 11.4 The “Standard Pattern” (or “Bell Pattern”) timeline found in many styles
and genres of African music. Upper system: construed as a three-(or six-) beat pattern.
Bottom system: construed as a four-beat pattern
subjective beats are at different periodicities, and (b), concomitant with the subjec-
tive grouping, different accentuation of the various notes in the melody. Subjective
rhythmization thus differentiates as well as organizes otherwise undifferentiated or
ambiguous rhythmic stimuli. While some aspects of subjective rhythmization are
probably innate (e.g., a bias for hearing things in twos rather than threes, based on
the way we most often engage our sensorimotor system as bipedal creatures), our
subjective rhythmization is also influenced by our musical enculturation.
Consider the “standard pattern” or timeline20 that is heard in many varieties of
North African music, as shown in Figure 11.4. The top system illustrates the way
most non-African listeners tend to hear the pattern (as well as the way in which
many beat-tracking algorithms will parse it): the first note is heard on the down-
beat, the third note on the second beat, and the third beat is interpolated into a series
of syncopated notes (see arrows). This is the simplest construal, with two of three
beats articulated by the pattern and the syncopation “contained” within the second
and third beats of the measure. The bottom staff, however, is the characteristic way
it is heard by enculturated listeners. It contains a greater and more complex amount
of syncopation, and the third beat (which is relatively accented according to the
metrical framework) is not articulated by the pattern at all. Indeed, as someone who
has learned to hear the pattern in both 3 and 4 (and who can switch his perception
20 Agawu, “West African Rhythm.”

of it at will, much like other figure–ground reversals), I note that what is striking is
that the “same” series of bell strikes seems to become a different rhythm altogether
when its subjective organization and accentuation changes.
Thus while our rhythmic perception is often wholly stimulus driven, in other
contexts our perception of beats, beat patterns, and rhythmic groups depends upon
the way our perceptual system structures the auditory stimulus. Like the filling in of
illusory contours in the Kanizsa triangle, our auditory system fills in missing beats
in an otherwise regular pattern of stimuli, adds grouping and accent to an undif-
ferentiated or ambiguous series of tones, and maintains an established pattern of
grouping and accent when subsequent events are undifferentiated, ambiguous, or
even contradictory, as in the case of syncopation. It is worth noting that this phe-
nomenon is not unique to rhythm perception, as our auditory system also fills in in-
formation in non-musical contexts, such as hearing speech in noisy environments,
where we nonetheless believe we actually hear the masked or absent sounds. This
makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, as our perception often occurs in
suboptimal conditions, with objects poorly lit, partially obscured, masked by other
stimuli, and so forth.
What is most interesting for discussions of epistemology of rhythm (and epis-
temology more generally) is that these “illusory” percepts are fundamentally un-
like the classic examples of perceptual illusions (e.g., the apparent rectangular
versus trapezoidal shapes of a table top viewed from different positions). While
from a Gibsonian perspective there is no problem of finding the “true shape” of an
object—as there is no “true shape,” but rather a set of invariant relationships based
on the structure of the perceptual array—in the case of entrainment, and subjective
accents and grouping, it is the perceptual system itself that generates the illusory
beats and groups. Moreover, it seems that we can learn to perceive such groups (as
in the case of the African standard pattern), and these perceptions may be subject
to some volitional control—as I can shift my sense of the organization of a rhythmic
pattern, and effectively change its rhythmic qualia. This would seem to raise more
fundamental problems of perception than those arising from simply ignoring the
effect of position and perspective when viewing a static visual array.
3. Erroneous Rhythms: Epistemic

and Ontological Upshots
While subjective rhythmization was identified by psychologists in the nineteenth

century and neuroscientists in the twenty-first, our rhythmic proclivities have long
been known to composers and musicians. Subjective rhythmization was known in
the seventeenth century under the rubric of quantitas intrinseca, the intrinsic or
“inner value” of the notes in a measure. Here is Wolfgang Caspar Printz, writing
in 1676:
Further, the position in the measure has a peculiar power and virtue which causes
notes that are equal to one another, according to their time signature, to seem longer
or shorter.21
In many discussions of quantitas intrinseca it is often clear that this sense of accent
is not due to dynamic intensity or articulation or other acoustic cues. Rather, the
“peculiar power and virtue” of a note’s metric position is just the way our subjective
rhythmization conveys different degrees of accent to the different positions in a subjec-
tive (metric) group.
If musicians are aware, however intuitively, of the ways in which our perceptual sys-
tems work, then this raises some interesting problems for rhythmic epistemology and
musical ontology. It is one thing to note that if we hear an undifferentiated series of
sounds—a ticking clock, say—and subjectively group them into twos or threes, then
we have an illusory percept. The auditory object (the series of ticks) is unstructured, yet
we perceive structure that is not there. But music isn’t just a periodic series of sounds
to which we can entrain. It is a cultural artifact produced for our specific interaction
with it—hence those “illusory” accents, groups, etc., may be intended to be heard by
the composer. A painter who wished someone to see a triangular shape could make use
of the Kanizsa illusion; a Chicago blues player can use the “stop-time” figure to create a
strong sense of meter even when two of four beats in a measure go unarticulated, as our
entrainment will fill in the missing beats.
Are those missing beats “part of the music?” They are obviously not part of the
acoustical signal, but if a piece of music is not just a series of sounds, but a series of
sounds designed to be heard by human listeners in certain ways, then perhaps one is
warranted in saying that those subjective beats are part of the music. For we would
not want to say that the stop-time figure, or Brahms’ melody given above, are only
intermittently in a duple meter—our sense of meter is continuous, as is our sense of
rhythmic continuity. Likewise, if syncopation is “part of the music,” then it too requires
the supplementation of our perceptual systems for it to emerge, as its characteristic
rhythmic quality depends upon a tension between an endogenous pulse and phenom-
enal articulations which do not coincide with it. In short, if we admit that music exists
not in the acoustical signal, but in the mind of the listener who hears that signal, then
those features of the music which are present in the listener’s mind as a result of the ap-
prehension of that signal are in fact part of the music.
In other musical styles, creating rhythms which afford multiple modes of per-
ceptual engagement may be a vital part of their musical aesthetic. In much West
African drumming the percussion ensemble collectively creates a rhythmic fabric
which can be heard in different meters (3 versus 4, as in the standard pattern given
above) and with the rhythm aligned to the beat and downbeat in different ways.
This metric malleability allows the listener to reconstrue the rhythmic pattern as it
21 Quoted in Houle, Meter in Music, 80.

is repeated multiple times—what David Locke has termed a “gestalt flip.”22 This es-
sential ambiguity depends upon our perceptual systems being able to add rhythmic
organization, that is, to selectively focus on some rhythmic cues while ignoring
others. There is no single “veridical” way to hear such a pattern—only multiple
modes of engagement.
To conclude, I hope to have shown that an examination of what is known about
our perception of rhythm raises some interesting issues for questions of perception
and epistemology more generally. While considering our senses as perceptual sys-
tems solves some problems of perception, it creates other, perhaps deeper ones. In
the case of musical rhythm, our rhythmic percepts are often non-veridical, as we
hear subjective groups, accents, and beats. Perhaps more than vision, a consider-
ation of auditory perception, and our auditory perception of rhythm in particular,
reminds us that the perceptual process is not a linear chain of information from the
external world to the mind, but an active interplay between mind and world.
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Experimental Psychology: General, 135.3 (2006), 348–67.
Rankin, Summer K., Philip W. Fink, and Edward W. Large, “Fractal Structure Enables Temporal
Prediction in Music,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 136.4 (2014): doi: 10.1121/
1.4890198.
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Sequences: The Synchronization Threshold and the Benefits and Costs of Interval Subdivision,”
Journal of Motor Behavior, 35.4 (2003), 355–70.
Repp, Bruno H., “Sensorimotor Synchronization: A Review of the Tapping Literature,”
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(2006–2012),” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20.3 (2013), 403–52.
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12
Entrainment and the Social Origin
of Musical Rhythm
Martin Clayton
But the sounds of nature alone do not follow any rhythmic pattern. Rhythm
is the product of social life. The individual by himself could not invent it.
Work songs, for example, arise from regular repetition of like motions
among cooperating workers. Were these motions rhythmic in themselves,
the songs would not provide the service expected of them. The song offers
a model to the cooperating workers; the rhythm flows from the song into
their movements. Hence it assumes a prior collective agreement . . . At a
very young age, we are familiarized with musical ‘beat’. But society, not na-
ture, has done this for us.
Maurice Halbwachs, “The Collective Memory of Musicians”
(1939),  171–2
1. On the social origin of musical rhythm
As Maurice Halbwachs’s essay confirms, the social origin of musical rhythm is not
a novel topic. For Halbwachs, work songs are a paradigm case: their rhythm may
be intimately linked to the bodily movements necessary for the job at hand, but it is
the song that bestows rhythmic organization on the “motions” (gestes) of work. The
song’s function is collectively to organize the movements of the group, and its exist-
ence “assumes a prior collective agreement.” In this chapter I take inspiration from
this fragment of Halbwachs’ argument to outline a new approach to this issue, and
in doing so, argue for a return to his concern with social interaction in theorizing
rhythm. The problem Halbwachs leaves unanswered is, if musical rhythm is so-
cial in origin, how does it come into being—how is his “prior collective agree-
ment” reached? Alfred Schütz, although casting Halbwachs as the straw man, did
not explicitly contest the latter’s point about the social origin of rhythm.1 Schütz’s
argument that all communication is made possible by what he called the “mutual
1 Schütz, “Making Music Together.”

tuning-in relationship,” in which individuals come to share their experience of

inner time, does however contradict Halbwachs. For Schütz, rhythmic coordina-
tion is prior to any collective (social) agreement. In this chapter I argue that rhythm
in fact emerges spontaneously both in individuals and, crucially, in interactions be-
tween them, and that it is therefore both natural (physiological) and social in origin.
Since Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff ’s seminal Generative Theory of Tonal
Music (1983), music theory has seen a decisive shift to explanations of rhythm in
terms of the cognitive capacities of the human individuals who perceive it. Rhythm,
for late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century theorists, is not an immanent
quality of a musical work or performance. Rather, it emerges in the individual’s en-
gagement with an auditory stimulus. Thus, for example, only rhythmic structures
perceptible by the human cognitive apparatus can be successfully deployed in
music. Most current theorists would accept Justin London’s premise, building on
psychologist Mari Riess Jones’ theory of attentional periodicity, that the perception
of musical meter depends on the entrainment of an individual’s attentional rhythms
to regularities in an auditory stimulus.2
This understanding of metrical perception—in Ed Large’s gloss, the entrain-
ment of neurological oscillators3—does not preclude looking at a range of issues
concerning the ways in which musical rhythm is actualized through interactions
between individuals engaged in music. Moreover, I will argue that although meter
can be explained through a perceptual and cognitive theory, further develop-
ment of such a theory must take into account recent perspectives on the insepara-
bility of perception and action—including the role of bodily movement in rhythm
production—and thus requires understanding human interaction as inherently
embodied and socially situated.4 Understanding rhythm as generated in such
situations offers a route to understanding the links between social situation, cul-
tural context, and rhythmic structure, an area which has suffered from being lim-
ited to simplistic homology theories.5
The position I will argue in this paper can be summarized as follows. First, mu-
sical rhythm is possible only thanks to inherently rhythmical, endogenous biolog-
ical processes taking place in each individual human’s body. These processes are
oscillatory, and tend to produce quasi-periodic patterns in action and perception.
Such rhythmical processes are, however, characteristic not of Homo sapiens per
se, but of life in general. Since most species do not make music, these processes
are a necessary but insufficient condition for the emergence of music. What
distinguishes Homo sapiens is, rather, a flexible capacity to coordinate individual
internal rhythms between members of a group. It is due to this capacity that rhyth-
mical structures emerge in the course of entrainment between the endogenous
rhythms of individuals. (By “entrainment” is meant the mutual influence of, and
2 Jones, “Attentional Rhythmicity”; London, Hearing in Time.
3 Large, “Neurodynamics of Music.”
4 Knoblich and Sebanz, “Social Nature of Perception,” “Evolving Intentions.”
5 Clayton, “Time of Music.”

Entrainment and the Social Origin of Musical Rhythm 185
potentially synchronization of, independent rhythms.6) In this sense, Halbwachs

was right to argue that musical rhythm is irreducibly social. My claim here is that
musical rhythm originates in, and is sustained by, interaction between individuals,
and thus cannot be reduced to individual psychological functions. Of course, it re-
mains possible to produce or to listen to music individually. There also exist forms
of music that superficially seem to exist independently of any social interaction,
e.g., music created through aleatoric (chance-dependent) or algorithmic processes.
While such cases are not my main focus, I nonetheless include them in my ar-
gument, since music made alone, enjoyed alone, or created through random or
simple rule-based systems nonetheless manipulates musical concepts, structures,
processes and/or materials whose origin remains social.
Music and its rhythms may (in evolutionary time) have emerged spontaneously
in social interaction. However, such emergent structure is only a small part of the
music-making of modern societies around the world. In practice, such emergent
structures are sedimented into specific patterns which are transmitted between
members of a given society. In some cases, but certainly not all, such structures are
reflected on and represented, and thus theorized, as rhythmical structure. In the
rest of this chapter I will expand on this argument, and reflect on Hindustani clas-
sical music as a case study in interpreting rhythmic structure as an index of histori-
cally sedimented human interactions.
2. The rhythmic individual: Endogenous rhythms
The living human body is replete with rhythmical processes: respiration, heart-
beat, locomotion (e.g., walking and running), circadian and menstrual cycles are
some of the more obvious examples. Various theories have linked musical rhythm
to those endogenous rhythms with periods in the range of a few seconds: respira-
tion, heart rate, and human locomotion. The tempo of music has often been linked
to the heartbeat, for instance, though Curt Sachs argued that the relationship to a
normal walking gait was a more pertinent comparator.7 A musical beat is not nor-
mally synchronized with walking, although most people can walk in time with
music if requested,8 and of course related movements are frequently synchronized
to music in dance. Hamish MacDougall and Steven Moore demonstrated a strong
preference for locomotive movement at around 2 Hz/120 bpm across a range of
subjects carrying out various everyday tasks, noting the apparent relationship to
spontaneous tempo (expressed in finger tapping) and to preferred musical tempi.9
It seems that Sachs’ intuition has been confirmed.10 Spontaneous motor tempo has
6 Clayton et al., “In Time.”
7 Sachs, Rhythm and Tempo, 32–3; discussed in Clayton, Time in Indian Music, 82.
8 Styns et al., “Walking on Music.”
9 MacDougall and Moore, “Marching to the Beat.”
10 Moelants, “Preferred Tempo Reconsidered.”

been well studied by psychologists. Devin McAuley et al., who took into account
the age of subjects, demonstrate that while spontaneous motor tempo tends to slow
down significantly over the life course, for most adults the preferred value nonethe-
less tends to be a period of about 500–600ms (1.67–2 Hz; 100–120 bpm).11 Plentiful
and consistent evidence, therefore, shows the existence of endogenous rhythms in
the human brain and body that tend to be expressed most commonly in this range.
What is less often remarked on, but is particularly evident in musical contexts, is
that individuals also tend to be able to switch between tempi, for instance between
150 bpm and 75 bpm (half as fast). Frederik Stynes et al. show that when asked to
walk in time with music, subjects who are able to do so (the majority) nonetheless
do so at different rates related to the nominal musical tempo. Given a piece of music
at 60 bpm, for example, the majority walk at this pace, but some walk at 120 bpm
and a few at 30 bpm.12 Will et al. hypothesize that the complex responses of listeners
asked to tap along to music without a clear beat can be explained partly through
such switches in mode.13 Accordingly, someone who can produce a spontaneous
tapping rate of 120 bpm can easily switch to half or double this rate, especially if
the faster or slower rhythm more closely matches a stimulus in their environment.
If Large’s model of rhythm perception as effected by banks of interconnected neu-
ronal oscillators is a reasonable approximation of the physiological structures un-
derlying rhythmic behavior, then this switching ability is exactly what one would
expect, since such oscillator networks tend to spontaneously generate hierarchical
patterns of beats (i.e., a network that produces a 2 Hz oscillation is likely to also pro-
duce activity at 1 Hz and 4 Hz).
Furthermore, in line with an overarching perspective in cognitive science that
sees action and perception as mutually implicated, brain structures capable of
generating rhythmic behavior at these time scales are also capable of entraining to
rhythmic stimuli at the same time scales. Thus, an individual capable of producing a
spontaneous 2 Hz tapping rhythm will normally be able to synchronize this under-
lying rhythm to a 2 Hz auditory signal; or to a 4 Hz signal; or to adjust this rhythm
to match an auditory signal at 1.9 or 2.1 Hz. Jones argued that such internal rhythms
control the deployment of attentional resources, and thus attentional energy is pe-
riodic and can be entrained to environmental stimuli. This idea underlies London’s
model of metrical perception, where internal rhythms entrain to features of the mu-
sical stimulus.14 The rhythmic structure of music is rarely as simple as a 2 Hz pulse,
of course. In practice, metrical patterns and their percepts are usually hierarchical
in nature. What London’s theory suggests is that hierarchical temporal patterns in
the brain can entrain to hierarchical patterns of an auditory stimulus.
Most of what I have presented in this section currently has the status of a domi-
nant view in music cognition and music theory. Individuals have internal rhythms
11 McAuley et al., “Time of our Lives.”
12 Styns et al., “Walking on Music.”
13 Will et al., “Pulse and Entrainment.”
14 London, Hearing in Time.

which can be studied through movement, or at the level of brainwaves; they are
hierarchical and cover a particular range of frequencies; and they can be tuned to
regularities in the environment, including the sounds of a musical performance.
This picture is convincing, as far as it goes. But it is not the whole story in deter-
mining the origin of musical rhythm. It is also important to consider what happens
when two or more individuals interact, and their individual rhythms influence and
entrain each other.
3. The rhythm of interaction: Entrainment, attention,

and emergence
As noted above, what appears to be unique to humans is the flexibility and precision
with which one individual can adapt to the rhythmic structures of another’s actions.
Numerous examples of inter-individual entrainment occur in other animal spe-
cies: synchronous flashing in fireflies, synchronous courtship in fiddler crabs, and
so on.15 Mostly, however, these seem to be automatic and invariable processes. Thus
fireflies, to be capable of flashing in synchrony, require simply the ability to both
generate a periodic flashing behavior and to perceive the light signals of others. If
the information about another individual’s activity can influence its own, the laws
of dynamical systems will see to it that a large group of animals synchronizes. In
fireflies, frogs, crabs, and crickets, interpersonal entrainment is not a flexible pro-
cess which can be deployed consciously in order to meet a specific goal. In Homo
sapiens it certainly is; most obviously in making music, and in some kinds of
sporting activity (e.g., the synchrony of a rowing team), but there seem to be no
parallels to this in the behavior of other primates. Aniruddh Patel hypothesized that
the ability to entrain to auditory signals is related to the development of a capacity
for vocal learning, and is thus more likely to be demonstrated not in other primates
but in birds (and some other animals).16 Patel et al.’s famous study of a sulphur-
crested cockatoo apparently entraining its movements (albeit intermittently) to re-
corded music supports such a theory,17 as does Adena Schachner et al.’s paper in the
same journal volume, which includes analysis of a large corpus of YouTube animal
videos. However, as Schachner et al. point out, “avian species do not entrain to au-
ditory beats in their natural behavioral repertoire.”18 In this respect, then, we can
continue to claim with some confidence that music is a uniquely human achieve-
ment, dependent crucially on the capacity for flexible interpersonal entrainment
of endogenous rhythms. This capacity is worth considering in more detail, then,
before considering its expression in music-making.
15 Buck and Buck, “Flashing of Fireflies”; Backwell et al., “Courtship in Fiddler Crabs”; Strogatz, Sync.
16 Patel, “Musical Rhythm.”
17 Patel et al., “Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal.”
18 Schachner et al., “Spontaneous Motor Entrainment,” 835.

The ubiquity of evidence in musical performance notwithstanding, interper-

sonal synchrony was first analyzed by William Condon in the 1960s.19 Studying
sound films of normal conversational interactions, annotating both phonetic pro-
duction in speech and the movement of body parts frame by frame, he claimed
to have identified both intrapersonal and interpersonal entrainment throughout
his corpus. Where such synchrony was lacking, he suggested, was in cases of pa-
thology: stroke, autism, and so on.20 Condon’s method was difficult to replicate,
and his results were treated with skepticism for some time, but more recent studies
have demonstrated that interpersonal synchrony in conversational interaction is, if
perhaps less pervasive than Condon claimed, nonetheless real. While the majority
of studies of the structure of conversation focus on its sequential structure—turn
taking, repair mechanisms, and so forth—the mutual entrainment of endogenous
rhythms seems to be a feature of conversation at least some of the time. While it may
still be a matter of disagreement whether such entrainment is a necessary condition
for communication, as Schütz argued,21 that it can and does happen is no longer se-
riously disputed. The conclusions of Adam Kendon—one of the most distinguished
scholars to have followed Condon in this endeavor—are still pertinent today:
interactional synchrony is best regarded as an achievement of the interactants that

is attained when the participants come to govern their behavior in relation to one
another in respect to a commonly shared frame or joint plan of action.22
Kendon’s position foreshadows more recent developments in psychology and re-

lated fields that are relevant to the argument of this chapter, including the ideas
of joint action and distributed cognition. These and related terms mark out a dis-
tinct research field. This field is concerned with processes of interaction through
which two or more individuals come to share a commitment to carry out a task
together, as a result of which thinking takes place between a group of individuals
in the context of a particular environment and set of tools.23 While this chapter is
not the place for a thorough review of these literatures, it is becoming increasingly
clear that occasions of joint commitment and action lend themselves to interper-
sonal entrainment (as Kendon suggested), and that they cannot be fully explained
by describing the actions of individuals. These actions are not summative: they need
to be studied in terms of the interactions themselves, and consideration needs to be
given to emergent patterns of action.
Interpersonal entrainment in contexts of joint action—including even a ca-
sual conversation—is often entirely spontaneous and unconscious. It is an emer-
gent property of the interaction, bound by the general properties of dynamical
19 Condon and Ogston, “Segmentation of Behavior.”
20 Condon, “Behavioral Organization.”
22 Kendon, Conducting Interaction, 115.
23 Gilbert, Living Together, provides a relevant philosophical theory of “joint commitment.”

systems, and its emergence is closely linked to mutual attention, especially visual
attention. Given similar verbal content, two people are more likely to mutually syn-
chronize their movements if they look at each other. Exactly the same findings are
replicated in studies of music-making: entrainment happens spontaneously, even
when individuals try to avoid it, and it happens more readily given mutual visual
attention.24
Interpersonal entrainment, I argue here, is where we should look for the genesis
and cultural evolution of musical rhythm, and for its relationship to rhythm in other
human behaviors. Individuals spontaneously generate rhythmic (periodic) actions,
and are able to entrain to periodicities in their environment, and to periodicities in
the actions of others. This interpersonal entrainment happens spontaneously, but
can also happen deliberately. That is, interactions that might at some point have
occurred spontaneously are deliberately re-enacted, and in their recreation may be
consciously moderated. Crucially, the patterns of interpersonal entrainment that
emerge in music-making are far more complex, flexible, and amenable to conscious
manipulation than the simple patterns of synchrony in fireflies or crabs. Amongst
other animal species, humans have a remarkably flexible capacity for interpersonal
entrainment. Within human behaviors, music-making tends often to foreground
the precision or flexibility with which we are able to coordinate our actions.
The patterns of coordination that emerge, and which can be reliably and stably
produced by groups of people, are far more varied than many accounts of dynam-
ical systems would seem to imply. The famous Haken–Kelso–Bunz (HKB) equa-
tion, for instance, models in simple mathematical form the interaction between
two oscillators. The equation tells us that such a system has two stable modes,
with the rhythms in phase or in an antiphase relationship, the former more stable
than the latter.25 Psychologists’ finger-tapping experiments confirm that such
simple behaviors conform with the predictions of HKB: people spontaneously and
stably tap in phase or anti-phase with each other. Even a cursory consideration
of musical performance, however—regardless of which musical culture is under
consideration—tells us not only that most musical actions are far more complex
than simple finger taps, but that they are coordinated in ways far more varied than
HKB’s two modes. Periodic rhythms of different speeds are coordinated, for in-
stance, in various hierarchical and/or polyrhythmic configurations, while many
more subtle phase relationships than 0º and 180º are widely exploited.
Musical rhythm, then, depends on both endogenous rhythms and their expres-
sion in periodic actions, but also on a uniquely flexible capacity humans share for
the mutual entrainment of such actions in joint action contexts. In other words,
rhythm is both natural and social in origin. If this argument is accepted, though,
what are the implications for our understanding and interpretation of musical
rhythm?
24 Clayton, “Observing Entrainment”; Lucas et al., “Inter-Group Entrainment.”
25 Kelso, Self-Organization of Brain.

4. Reading social interaction in musical rhythm
If musical rhythm is irreducibly social in origin, it is equally true that it varies cul-
turally. This is true on whichever scale we conceive “culture,” whether we use the
term to distinguish Europeans from Indians, or opera-goers from clubbers. Existing
accounts of that diversity leave a lot to be desired, as do theories of the relationship
between social factors and cultural variability. Early comparative musicology de-
veloped seemingly logical, if completely unfounded, theories explaining the evo-
lutionary progression from one-or two-note melodies to heptatonic modes, and
from unison to harmony. In talking about rhythm a greater confusion abounds, as
is evident in the summit of this phase of musical scholarship, Curt Sachs’ Rhythm
and Tempo.26 Sachs’ discussion of topics such as the role of bodily movement and
the relationship to language and poetry remains of interest, and he offers his own
version of the social-origin-of-rhythm thesis when he states that an “impulse in
man’s evolution towards a stricter rhythm appears to have come from choral ad-
aptation.”27 His account of the differences between primitive and advanced
civilizations, however, becomes confused and self-contradictory. Rhythm in “prim-
itive” culture is distinguished by its imprecision, he argues, drifting from one meter
to another to no meter at all. Nonetheless, the same author suggests that the sophis-
tication of African and Indian drumming is striking, demonstrating that we should
not confuse primitiveness with simplicity. Sachs’ own apparent confusion on this
point betrays the fact that the term “primitive” was itself becoming anachronistic, as
ethnomusicology abandoned the search for evolutionary narratives. In the case of
rhythm, no coherent story was ever proposed in the first place.
Since Sachs, the challenge for some writers has been to describe the complexity
and subtlety of various rhythmic systems. Arguments have raged over appropriate
modes of representation, whether or not a particular kind of music (especially
African traditions) had meter in the Western sense or not, whether it should or
should not be rendered in standard notation, and so forth.28 While African music
scholarship has tended to stress the importance of bodily movement from an early
stage, some studies of Indian and Indonesian music scholarship have attempted to
map rhythmical structures onto cosmological concepts. I have argued elsewhere
that these homology theories—e.g., that cyclic Indian musical metrical structures
reflect a Hindu worldview based on very long recurring world-cycles (yuga)—are
fundamentally flawed, and will not recapitulate that argument here.29 Rhythm was
one of the parameters addressed by Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics project.30 Although
this did not include metrical theory or analysis per se, Lomax was interested in the
26 Sachs, Rhythm and Tempo.
27 Sachs, Rhythm and Tempo, 39.
28 Agawu, Representing African Music.
29 Clayton, “Time of Music.”
30 Lomax, Folk Song Style.

cultural variability of what he called “rhythmic style.”31There has been relatively

little engagement with general or universal theories of rhythm and meter, despite
the richness of material in studies such as Simha Arom’s monumental African
Polyphony and Polyrhythm; or my own model of North Indian tala, which attempts
to locate this form of rhythmic organization in the context of a generalizable theory
of meter.32 Recent signs of a reversal of academic fashions include Michael Tenzer’s
“Cross-Cultural Topology of Musical Time,” which frames a collection of analytical
case studies in terms of a common set of descriptive terms.33
Western-focused theories of rhythm and meter since Lerdahl and Jackendoff
have at least gestured toward the idea of universal theories. The adoption of a
Chomskian “generative grammar” approach suggests that their model should in
principle be expandable to cover any form of metrical organization, as Chomsky’s is
for different languages, although in practice little attempt has been made to imple-
ment this. Similarly with London’s theory: since it is based on supposedly universal
human capacities, it ought to be possible to expand it, with modifications, to cover
any form of meter. Although London’s monograph itself does not stray far from the
Western tonal idiom, this possibility is beginning to be explored.34
It seems clear that just as evolutionary theory offered little, and homology theory
led us up a cul-de-sac, ongoing conversation between music theorists, music
psychologists, and ethnomusicologists is leading to a florescence of cross-cultural
theorization of rhythm and meter. For all the positive aspects of these developments,
however, the death of homology as a model, and Cantometrics as a method, leave
us with a vacuum where we might be looking for connections between cultural
specificity of rhythmic structures and ethnographic accounts of the meanings and
functions of particular musical styles.
There is no reason to believe that such an endeavor will be easy, that ways of
organizing rhythm musically can be easily and transparently related to some as-
pect of social relations, or to ideologies expressed in other cultural spheres. One
reason for this is that musical styles and repertories are historically constructed and
sedimented, so that as social relations and institutions change, modes of musical
performance are not created anew but adapted and recreated from what was pre-
viously practiced. If the rhythmic organization of a particular musical style reflects
anything, it is not the current form of the social institutions to which its performers
belong, but a long and incremental historical process of emergence, transforma-
tion, and adjustment in the face of social conditions that change either subtly or
dramatically.
Nonetheless, the work of unpicking some of these processes is potentially very
valuable when it comes to understanding the ways in which music reflects and
constructs social realities, and is implicated in layers of shared and differentiated
31 Lomax, “Variation of Rhythmic Style.”
32 Arom, African Polyphony; Clayton, Time in Indian Music.
33 Tenzer, “Cross-cultural Topology.”
34 Clayton, “Theory and practice.”

behaviors and intentions across humanity. Making no claim to finality, then, the last
part of this paper offers some thoughts on the rhythmic organization of Hindustani
classical music in the light of the proposals above.
5. Hindustani classical music and its rhythm
Before looking at some examples from actual performances, a brief summary of

Hindustani rhythmical concepts and terms may be useful (readers familiar with
the topic may safely skip the next two paragraphs). The various genres and styles of
Hindustani (North Indian) classical music are classified into metered and unmetered
sections. Performances usually begin with unmetered sections (alap, ranging in dura-
tion from a few seconds to an hour or more), which in their extended form gradually
develop from very slow and loosely structured, to faster music more clearly structured
around a simple pulse or beat. The metered forms that follow are organized according
to one of a small number of tala patterns. Talas are conceived as metrical units or cycles
comprising a fixed number of equal time intervals (matras); these matras are organ-
ized into two or more vibhags (sections/divisions). Thus a tala is a repeating hierar-
chical pattern comprising a sequence of nominally equal time units.
Melodic and rhythmic compositions and extemporization are performed within
the tala framework. The simplest way of demonstrating the relationship to the tala
is to conclude improvised episodes by returning to the mukhra, a part of a com-
position used as a refrain, or with a cadential figure ending on the first beat (sam).
A common form of cadential figure is the tihai, which comprises a motif (simple
or complex) repeated three times. The approach to the sam, especially at the end of
an improvised section, is termed aamad (arrival), and achieving this process in an
aesthetically pleasing manner is an important aim of the performers. The normal
mode for a performance (other than a drum solo) is for the singer or instrumentalist
to be designated as “main artist” and make all decisions about repertoire, tempo,
and so on, with a drummer designated as “accompanist”; in many performances,
nonetheless, drummers take opportunities to display their own ability to take the
musical lead.
If the most obvious question to ask about rhythm in Hindustani classical music is
“How does tala work?,” the less obvious question, on which I want to focus here, is
“What does tala do?” That is, “What does the rhythmic organization of Hindustani
classical music achieve for those performing and listening to it?”
First, it is clear that the general structuring principle outlined above—the transi-
tion from unmetered to metered—helps to organize the attention of everyone who
engages with it in specific ways. In particular, a solo instrument or voice performing
slow, unmetered music (alap) affords listeners a specific kind of attention, which
Jones and colleagues refer to as “analytic attending.”35 Since there is no regular beat
35 Drake et al., “Rhythmic Attending.”

structure, the music does not easily afford a motoric response or a forward-looking,
predictive (protensive) mode of listening. Although the performer may be planning
ahead, the listener is forced to pay attention to the sound in the present. In terms
of social relations, such a musical performance is likely to develop in a context in
which contemplation, introversion, and perhaps meditation, are valued, and within
which an ethos can be created that encourages such attention. In other words, it is
likely to develop in quite particular social settings, in which highly skilled specialist
musicians are afforded the patronage required to develop their art. Historically, alap
in the modern sense is not described in the earliest historical sources on Indian
music such as the Natyashastra (Science of Drama), where music is described as an
adjunct to dramatic presentation, but first appears in a ninth-century treatise called
Brihaddesi.36 It appears to have developed long after various metrical song forms
had been established.
The transition from unmetered to metered music is a significant one, which
many musicians conceive in terms of a shift from an inward to outward-facing at-
titude. Nayan Ghosh, uniquely placed as a highly regarded performer on both sitar
and tabla, explained the difference as follows:
Alap is a journey inward and the gat [metered] portion is a journey outward,
that’s where there’s a dialogue. The two people are musically conversing with each
other . . . A step further would be where the audience also becomes so much a part
of that whole conversation that you forget that there are three entities: the main
artist, the accompanist, and the audience.37
As Ghosh makes clear, the transition from alap to tala-bound sections marks a move
from an individual engagement with the musical materials to a social, dialogic en-
gagement.38 The livelier, more rhythmic music is played together with an accom-
panist, and makes most sense when listeners actively engage with the tala structure
(which they may show by means of specific hand gestures). In performance, rhythm
emerges from melody, and social engagement from contemplation—which, intri-
guingly, likely reverses the direction in which these forms emerged historically.
Metered music affords what Jones calls “future-oriented attending,”39 in which
the listener is attuned to a regular temporal structure and unpacks the music in real
time with reference to a protention of the temporal structure. The listener knows
roughly what the soloist is trying to achieve in aamad (the return to sam, the “one”),
and roughly when it must occur, hearing the music in relation to possibilities
she herself can imagine. This knowledge is possible due to a combination of two
36 Widdess, “Emergence of Dhrupad.”

37 Nayan Ghosh, Interview, Mumbai, May 23, 2005.
38 Alap can involve dialogue, for instance when two singers or instrumentalists alternate in its performance,
or when a singer is accompanied by a melodic instrument. The paradigm case is, however, strictly that of solo
performance.
39 Drake et al., “Rhythmic Attending.”
things: the regular beat which affords entrainment, and familiarity with the partic-
ular tala pattern, which provides a conscious knowledge of the number of beats in
a tala cycle. In other words, an enculturated, expert listener is not only entrained to
the musical beat, which is open even to a complete novice listener, but also actively
deploys culturally specific, shared knowledge.
In the metered sections, these learned metrical structures organize interactions
which in turn indicate social formations and relationships. As demonstrated by
Clayton,40 tala structures the interactions between soloist and accompanists, and
also between musicians and listeners, with the latter often being drawn into visibly
demonstrating the fact that they share the flow of the tala and therefore appreciate
the musicians’ achievement in creating transitions that are both consonant with this
framework and aesthetically pleasing (which may include “unexpected”). This pro-
cess can be understood as something like Schütz’s “mutual tuning-in relationship,”
in which participants share the temporal flux of inner time.41 Clearly, in this case, it
is shared, culturally specific knowledge that affords this mutual tuning-in.
Shared temporal flow is usually experienced as felicitous. Psychological studies
of much simpler experiences in which individuals share temporal structure in
analogous ways empirically demonstrate the link between interpersonal entrain-
ment and social effects, such as increased prosocial behavior, affinity, and feelings
of belonging to a group (entitativity).42 How much stronger might such effects be
in real-life situations, which may also be highly affective and meaningful in terms
of real social identities and relationships? No wonder that ethnomusicologists such
as John Blacking have argued for many years that musical performance leads to
heightened “fellow-feeling” and hence social bonding.43
The story is not so simple, however, since this sharing of inner time—to use
Schütz’s language—takes place within a hierarchical setting. It is socially shared,
but the individuals doing the sharing are placed in hierarchical relationships: main
artist to accompanist, expert to lay listener. Such hierarchies are both expressed
and understood, but may also be contested. What happens when an accompanist
doesn’t wish to be led? In practice such situations are familiar to musicians in this
tradition, and many moments of conflict can occur, though they are usually con-
cealed from audiences. Singer Ranjani Ramachandran spoke about her experience
as a young soloist having to manage more senior accompanists:
in one [concert a] senior tabla player was very mad at me. I was not getting the laya
[tempo] I wanted. I gave one laya, and he actually didn’t give the right laya; then
I changed it. So he got very mad! He just stopped and looked at me: I didn’t know
40 Clayton, “Khyāl Performance.”

42 Marsh et al., “Social Connection.”
43 Blacking, “Anthropology of the Body.” Emile Durkheim’s influence was strong on both Halbwachs and
Blacking.
how to react! I didn’t do anything; he then started. He was just trying to say: ‘You
cannot do this to me, you cannot tell me what laya I should play.’44
The shared knowledge of tala structures, then, affords a high degree of coordination
and common ground, in a felicitous sense of cooperative interaction and mutual
tuning-in. It also organizes specific relationships that are potentially or actually an-
tagonistic.45 Tala organizes a musical interaction in such a way that an individual
invites others present to share a temporal structure that he has chosen. Everyone
present knows that the process of sharing this temporal flow may be a rewarding
one. They also know that it may require them to adopt a submissive attitude to-
ward a leader. Is embodying such a position also felicitous? If not—if, for example,
it seems to imply subservience to a younger musician—then can this leadership be
contested without compromising the positive outcomes hoped for?
In many years’ involvement in this musical culture as listener, I have observed
some—but in truth very few—occasions where such tensions resulted in a break-
down of communication between musicians, and a consequent failure to achieve
even the most basic of performance aims. Rather more often, performance operates
in a less clearly defined mode in which individuals may or may not be engaged in
contest of some form. Is the tabla player deliberately playing slightly slower than
the main artist wants? Or is he struggling to understand what is required? Or is he
doing what was requested, but nonetheless being implicitly scolded by a main artist
who simply wants to make a statement of his own leadership? Are the musicians
really competing to see who can play fastest and most brilliantly? Or are they com-
plicit in presenting a staged performance of faked antagonism that does not in fact
reflect their real investment in the event? Such issues are often unclear, because
musicians tend to be complicit with each other at least in as much as any true an-
tagonism should be concealed from the audience. In any case—whether teamwork,
antagonism, or some state between—these interactions are framed by the shared
knowledge structure that is tala.
If the view outlined is to be productive, it requires more detailed ethnographic
and interpretive work on a range of musical genres. In the case of Hindustani
classical music, if the basic social function of tala is as described above, we might
ask if specific talas, and specific tempi, have particular, nuanced social functions,
or simply supply variety, and the option to fit given texts or melodic patterns in
different rhythmic configurations. Given that the organization of performing
ensembles varies, including in the extent to which they are strictly hierarchical or
tend to egalitarianism, how does this variety interact with the social affordances
of the tala system? Can both hierarchical and egalitarian groups be organized by
the same system, or does change in the former correlate in some way with change
in the latter? Does the rhythmical structure of music exert an influence on social
44 Ranjani Ramachandran, singer, Interview, Pune, February 19, 2010.
45 Clayton and Leante, “North Indian Classical Music.”

institutions, or vice versa? Possible questions are legion, and the more abstract they
become, the likelier they are to apply to other societies and other musical forms.
6. Conclusions
Musical rhythm is irreducibly social in nature. The social origin and functions of
rhythm have been proposed many times in the past—Halbwachs and Sachs are not
the only scholars to have made such a proposition—but recent work in music psy-
chology and ethnomusicology allows us to reframe the argument in a new way. In
this view, musical rhythm originates in both endogenous physiological rhythms
and the dynamics of interaction between individual human beings. These dynamics
lead to often complex forms of emergent structure, and thus musical rhythms are
not simply the sum of rhythms produced by individuals. If this point is conceded
then the social origin of rhythm is uncontestable, and we may turn our attention to
the ways in which cultural variety relates to interaction dynamics that are common
to all humans. Nonetheless, in this view the social and the cultural are not set against
the “natural,” since the endogenous rhythms of which musical rhythm is built are
biological processes, and the dynamics of their interactions follow the same rules as
interactions between mechanical systems such as pendulum clocks. The “social,” to
put it another way, emerges from the “natural.”
Human musical rhythm is remarkably flexible, complex, and diverse. Its diversity
suggests that local factors have an important role to play in shaping rhythmic sys-
tems. It is less clear how systematically these local factors can be linked to aspects
of social organization. Is it simply the case that given the nature of physiological
rhythmic systems, and the dynamics of interactions between dyads and larger
groups, a huge number of possibilities are inevitably generated, and distributed
more or less randomly around the globe? Or is there some identifiable process by
which the emergence, selection, and refinement of different approaches is driven by
(or drives) the development of social institutions and cultural norms? The paucity
of plausible theory in this area demonstrates that there are no easy answers.
Aside from the difficult issue of how different rhythmic structures and sys-
tems develop, a renewed focus on the social also points us to reconsider the so-
cial functions and efficacy of musical rhythm. Regardless of where rhythm comes
from, let alone what it may be taken to symbolize, what does it do? In what ways do
different kinds of meter, or non-metrical organization, afford particular kinds of
interaction and attentional focus between individuals? Why might these kinds of
interaction be found interesting, rewarding, or emotionally satisfying? What can
we do with musical rhythm to guide our interactions; what cannot be done without
it? The argument presented in these pages is intended, above all, to call for more at-
tention to be given to such questions.
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13
How Many Kinds of Rhythm Are There?
Michael Tenzer
The question “how many kinds of rhythm are there?” seems preposterous but the
response is still obvious: there are infinite kinds. Rhythm is movement or flow; it
is time’s doppelganger. It is a percept of the mind, and equally a product of it. If
a definition is intractable, we can at least attempt to inventory and sort. Langston
Hughes addressed the topic in an enchanting children’s book, by ruminating on
naïve categories: the rhythms of nature, music, words, athletics, machines, daily
life, furniture, unseen rhythms, and more.1 Musicologist Curt Sachs launched his
classic inquiry by asking, “What is rhythm? The answer, I am afraid, is, so far, just—
a word: a word without a generally accepted meaning.”2 But he went on to assert his
own, self-consciously provisional, categories.
Christopher Hasty says that “Everything the word ‘rhythm’ implies can be found
in music.”3 I would emend this as follows: everything the word “rhythm” implies can
be made musical, for the reach of the sign “music” in our time—owing equally to
the work of composers and the discoveries of ethnomusicology—has far exceeded
its earlier semantic capacities. The relationship between music and rhythm is par-
adoxical: rhythm’s provenance in nature makes it bigger than music, yet music’s
provenance is imagination, so it can replicate and enlarge nature’s reach.
Grasping the scope of musical rhythm now requires accounting for its encoding
into bacterial DNA, as in the composer-protagonist of Richard Powers’s 2014 novel
Orfeo; or the idea of a rhythmic event spanning dozens of human generations,
such as John Cage’s “Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible),” launched on the chapel
organ of the Burchardikirche in Halberstadt in 2001 with the final cadence sched-
uled for 2639;4 or sound events so tiny and “granular” that they are to entrainable
periodicities as nanocomputers are to PCs.5 Discrete meter is undermined by
Arapaho Wolf Dance singers, seemingly uncoordinated with their drum,6 or the
incrementally accelerating and unstable micropulses of Tunisian sṭambēlī.7 Human
1 Hughes, The Book of Rhythms.
2 Sachs, Rhythm and Tempo, 12.
4 See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7880793.stm and related internet videos.
5 Roads, Microsound.
6 Nettl and Levine, “Four American Indian Songs.”
7 Jankowsky, “Tunisian Sṭambēlī.”

sound production that those outside the culture would regard as music, might be
culturally defined as a shaman’s incantation, the muezzin’s call to prayer, or cattle
auctioneering.8 Conversely, humpback whales produce what we suspect must be
like music, if we could only decode it.
Though each may be seen as an outlier to the preponderance of human music,
we marginalize such cases at our peril. For while we do so, others are inventing or
discovering more extreme cases at the accelerating rate typical of our era. Whether
we speak of the rhythm of music or the music of rhythm, their extent is far richer
than the putative opposition between the regularities of metrical ground and the
liberty of rhythmic figure that until recently framed discussion.
Music is a layered social construction shaped by biological and historical
factors, but it is still possible to characterize it. This chapter considers several kinds
of frameworks for rhythm that offer complementary vantages. My perspective is
shaped through investigation of world music genres9 and developments in music
in the modern and digital eras. It takes features such as regular meter and perio-
dicity, predominant in Western scholarship, as one among many possibilities. Five
perspectives are presented: music and language, the anthropology of music, rhythm
as percept, rhythm as object, and the advancing technologies of music and time.
1. Are Language Rhythms Distinct

from Musical Rhythms?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau regards music as historically prior to language.10 J. G.

Herder makes speech prior,11 while for some recent writers they have a common
genesis.12 What differentiates their rhythms? Even now language and music are
not entirely separate systems. They partner in song, but more important are the
many language–music hybrids: tonal languages, heightened speech used for po-
etry, storytelling, and oratory, music-mnemonic systems (like do-re-mi solfège
and its Indian equivalent, sargam), and speech surrogates like the myriad African
talking drums capable of reciting histories and proverbs. Mesoamerican Chinantec
supports so many tonal and accentual distinctions—twenty-one: seven tonal levels
(or contours) with three accent types—that adepts can utter grammatically impec-
cable sentences in the form of whistling.13 To the outsider, a whistled Chinantec
sentence is a melodic sound stream poised between music and speech.
Musical rhythm is more varied than language rhythm. It has periodic and
nonperiodic variants, without constraints of lexicality, and with weaker forces of
8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea7gn8hhEFA portrays cattle auctioneering.

9 Tenzer, ed., Analytical Studies in World Music; Tenzer and Roeder, eds, Cross-Cultural Studies in
World Music.
10 Rousseau, “Origin of Languages.”
11 Herder, Origin of Language.
12 Brown, “ ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Evolution”; Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals.
13 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPuE0UMEMEs.
How Many Kinds of Rhythm Are There? 201
grammar and syntax. It thus ranges from the highly pulsed and repetitive to the
extraordinarily loose and smooth. Language, in contrast, is constrained by its
high standards of precision in communication. It features stress-or syllable-based
rhythms, meticulous grammar and syntax, and lexical meaning; it cannot tol-
erate much periodicity, music’s signature formation. Periodicity and repetition
in language tends to “musicalize it” for the perceiver’s ear, as Diana Deutsch has
shown14—a phenomenon that orators and preachers know and exploit. In his com-
parative survey of rhythm in language and music, Aniruddh Patel concludes that
language rhythm should be viewed as an aperiodic “system of organized timbral
contrasts.”15 Render music aperiodic, however, and it remains music.16
Conversely, though music may strive for meanings like language’s, it can cap-
ture only its rhythm; when a jazz performer “talks” through their instrument, we
catch no precise linguistic sense. Music’s imprecision grants it an ability to layer
rhythms polyphonically. Polyphony in language makes a din, which is why the no-
tion instead connotes temporal succession, or an atemporal colloquy—e.g., a “po-
lyphony of voices” in debate. Thus music’s realm of rhythm can penetrate farther
into language’s than vice versa. When language adopts the rhythms of music, we
feel that it has become musicalized. But when musical rhythm swallows language
rhythm its identity as music is enriched.
2. Rhythm Dispersed in Anthropological Categories
Twentieth-century ethnomusicology identified rhythmic structures previously un-

imaginable. Awareness of many kinds of music has gradually revealed the Western
concept of autonomous art to be parochial. Relinquishing this ethnocentric atti-
tude, dissolving the artist–artisan divide, allows music-makers everywhere to be
seen as producing rhythm appropriate to social needs. In contemporary globalized
life much of this production is classified as art or entertainment, but for much of
human history it was more likely to maintain the cohesion necessary for group
survival. Cross-cultural comparison is problematic, though. The more deeply one
knows the particulars of a cultural formation the more difficult it is to place in rela-
tion to others.
An anthropology of rhythm considers human rhythmic production in interac-
tion with the social order, the environment, and natural order, and the capacities of
the body and consciousness to synchronize and unite people in rhythm. In terms
of the social order, we might consider how music differs among hunter-gatherer,
pastoral/agricultural, monarchic/high culture, and modern state-based polities—
the four commonly posited broad stages of its evolution.17 We could ask, what is
14 Deutsch, Musical Illusions.
15 Patel, Music, Language, and the Brain, 51, 150.
16 Lerdahl and Jackendoff, Theory of Tonal Music, however, posits a more intricate and closer relationship
between music and language rhythm.
17 Wiora, The Four Ages of Music.
hunter-gatherer music like? And what are the rhythms of pastoralists? Our focus is
not, in this case, on what they sound like, but what they are used for. Alan Merriam
described music’s practical use as how it is “employed in human society”—to put
a baby to sleep, induce trance, cause troops to march in time, accompany a ritual,
dance, or others.18 He distinguished practical use from symbolic function, such
as “emotional expression,” and establishing “a sense of security vis-à-vis the uni-
verse.”19 Rhythms might be understood as types correlated by usage, with evidence
based on accumulating cultural case studies.
For some hunter-gatherer societies this is a productive line of research. Musical
uses in such cultures are often parsimoniously meted out among songs and
repertoires with little overlap; members of the society can easily correlate a piece
with a specific activity. Thus the Aka Pygmies of Central Africa have a large rep-
ertoire of songs, of which only seven are sung without instruments, although
handclaps can be used. These are respectively used for the birth of twins, the trap-
ping of an antelope, the telling of tales, the comforting of a child whose mother is
pregnant, a lullaby, children’s games, and calling back men from a hunt. Only one
song, that for singing over a corpse, may not be sung with either instruments or
handclaps. Other Aka repertoires featuring instruments in different combinations
all signify entirely different circumstances and activities.20 Related classifications
by activity, though only partly susceptible to correlation with the Aka, could be
gleaned from research on the Jul’hoansi in Namibia.21
In such isolated groups, one surmises that the inventory of musical items is pro-
portionately small and efficiently distributed among different uses. We could apply
this line of thinking in other similar societies, if we had data acquired by asking the
same questions and with similar research methods. And as we apply the rubric of
usage in latter-day, larger and more complex cultures, we find many other kinds
of music: music of worship, harvest songs, work songs, military music, anthems,
fanfares, and so on.
The natural environment generates another rubric for sorting rhythms. Certain
kinds of rhythm work in certain places, from thick forests to concert halls. Both
symbolic function and practical use evolve from ancient practices that are cultural
responses to environmental conditions, beliefs about them, and propensity for mi-
mesis. The floating unmeasured rhythms and extended song forms of many Central
Asian pastoralists reflect long periods of solitude in open spaces intrinsic to their
nomadic lives. It might make little sense to entrain a steady beat in such an expanse
and with little opportunity to coordinate with others. Tuvans value vocal imitation
of wind and water to engage in conversation with their spirit presences in nature,22
while Chukchi shamans in eastern Siberia placate animal spirits by imitating bear
18 Merriam, Anthropology of Music, 210, 209–28.
19 Merriam, Anthropology of Music, 219, 210.
20 Fürniss, “Aka Polyphony,” 166.
21 England, Music Among the Jul’hoansi.
22 Levin and Suzukei, Rivers and Mountains Sing.

and other animal sounds;23 neither of these suggest a role for equally spaced beats.
Aka Pygmies, hyperaware of the dangers of forest life, have an elaborate reper-
tory of rhythmically unpulsed and uncoordinated mimetic “sound signatures” in-
cluding whoops, yodels, and calls, evoking such things as animal cries, water, and
tree and brush noises.24 Combining them with gesture and movement, these are
enacted at the forest camp for their general community value and to educate ap-
prentice hunters, their multi-modality suggesting an original continuum between
speech and song.
In collectivist cultures of many sizes and kinds, the steady musical beat and strict
periodicities are powerful agents for social cohesion. The Aka have their repertoire
of pulsating, cyclically structured songs. The modern Balinese gamelan stress an
aggressive rhythm virtuosity in which twenty-five or more players switch instan-
taneously between radically different speeds, meters, and textures—the result of
many generations of agricultural and ritual communality, and an ingrained com-
petitive striving among the small island’s internal groups. In neighboring Java, the
similarly periodic but very different gamelan music enacts pulsating rhythm in a
much smoother, insinuating, and restrained way. The contrasts are partly explained
by the refining influence exerted by powerful Javanese courts into the late twen-
tieth century, as opposed to the recent more populist turn in Bali. In Japan, another
large ensemble, gagaku, is more spacious in its rhythm, in which control of the ever-
fluctuating pulsation is continually passed back and forth between players.25 Even
more than Javanese gamelan, gagaku reflects values of the emperor’s court, where it
has been in insular residence for more than a millennium.
Hasty direct correlations risk over-simplifying cultures. Javanese and Balinese
music comprise more than gamelan, and Japanese music is more than gagaku.
Balinese duck farmers and water buffalo herders amuse themselves with free-
rhythm bamboo flute melodies that a central Asian shepherd might relate to.
Individual gamelan and gagaku compositions may contain free-rhythm sections,
the result of long assimilation of indigenous and foreign socio-musical influences.
Tuvans have highly pulsed songs, and shepherds sometimes strum lutes. Cultures,
with genres, repertoires, and compositions, are multi-level constructions and
accretions reflecting complex pasts, reflected in rhythms.
Explanations in terms of society, geography, culture, environment, or climate
only partly make sense of the diversity, though at a general level, subdivision of
the world of rhythm along geographical or cultural lines makes practical sense.
Broad features of hunter-gatherer, pastoral, African, European, or Indian rhythms
are easily distinguishable. But high-level similarities obscure teeming diversity at
ground level.
23 Nattiez, “Throat Singing.”
24 Lewis, “As Well as Words,” 238.
25 Terauchi, “Japanese Court Music (Gagaku).”

3. Perception of Rhythm
We now turn to the distinction between rhythm in real time, and frozen as if out of
time, corresponding to J. M. E. McTaggart’s temporal A-series and B-series.26 The
A-series comprises past, present, and future. The perceiver experiences temporality
as durations unfolding with respect to the present, moving through time with the
advancing “now.” In the B-series time is rendered spatially as if on a canvas. With
respect to any given point there is only before and after, no transient experience of
passage. As an A-series percept rhythm events are susceptible to a phenomenolog-
ical description of active rhythmic experience. As B-series objects, a set of rhythms
is categorized by structural type, as we shall see in Section 4.
Can we compare different kinds of rhythm experience? We take into account
biological predispositions, such as limits on what the memory can retain in real
time, how fast or slow a pulsation can be latched onto, and how complex or scant
a rhythm structure can get before it becomes too difficult to parse. Insider cultural
perspectives often conflict with outsider ones around these issues too. For example,
outsiders often misperceive the orientation of pulsation in unfamiliar music, or are
unable to aurally disentangle the separate constituents of unfamiliar polyrhythmic
textures.
An A-series portrayal of rhythm in time should be an account of changing per-
ception of events, and how their accumulation alters rhythmic experience—how
the rhythm “feels” rather than what its properties and proportions are. In such an
account there are not kinds of rhythm, but kinds of rhythm sensation—though to be
communicated it must be recollected and objectified afterwards, softening the dis-
tinction from the B-series. In recent music theory, influenced by process-oriented
philosophers William James, Henri Bergson, A. N. Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze,
phenomenological approaches are prominent, especially in Hasty.27 Rhythm is
conceived as a dynamic interaction between events and awareness. Hasty’s motiva-
tion includes rejection of the tyranny of the score in Western art music, which can
be seen as overly regimenting what ought to be the fluid experience of listening and
performing.
Hasty’s elegant apparatus has only a choice few components, notably the notion
of a “projection” stemming from a beginning, in which we become aware of an event
with duration and imagine its outcome. A second event onset creates expectation
of a third one with an equal duration thereafter, due to our propensity to entrain
isochrony. When the third onset occurs it could anticipate, delay, deny, or confirm
this expectation. Events are “continuations” if felt to follow from a previous pro-
jection, or “anacruses” if retroactively felt to have anticipated a subsequent, more
26 McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time”; Gell, The Anthropology of Time, 151.
27 Hasty, Meter as Rhythm.

important onset. Rhythmic experiences comprise far more complexity than a mere
three onsets, and become extremely rich affairs.
In ethnomusicology, A-series ideas have often appeared, but usually to render
a cultural, not an individual, sensibility. It is difficult to depict how people in
other societies experience their rhythms. To focus too much on difference is to
essentialize; to focus overly on sameness is to undermine a culture’s genuine iden-
tity. This permanent tension is complicated further by rapid twenty-first-century
cultural change and mixture. To date, ethnomusicology’s fealty has been to the no-
tion of culture, hence to difference, downplaying biology.
As fieldworkers learn to perform others’ music and aspire to ever-more faithful
inside viewpoints, they have sometimes tried to explain how it feels to experience
the music in performance, or have given a platform to indigenous voices. Africa,
and black music generally, has been a major focus. John Chernoff describes the ex-
hilarating sensations of being unexpectedly thrust into a leadership role, drumming
with his teachers at a village festival in Ghana.28 Chernoff, having experienced ec-
static communion with Ghanaian drummers, argues for distinctively African aes-
thetic modes of attending and “being” in music, corroborated by his teachers’ own
reports.
Anne Danielsen, a Norwegian who performed in funk bands, learned the grooves
of ‘blackness’ in Oslo:
Being in a groove, feeling the right feeling, letting presence happen, from the in-
side, from a position within time, within the experiential now, this is probably
what funk is all about, and we should perhaps leave it at that, in all its meaningful
non-sense.29
More driving repetition in African musical rhythms may explain the contrast with
European rhythmic experience from an A-series view. Chernoff and Danielsen
argue that repetition in a highly pulsating and rhythmically layered groove
engenders participation, entrainment, embodiment, and pleasure. Western art
music of the past few centuries can groove, but is mostly more interested in change
than repetition. That people don’t dance to it much may be due more to cultural pro-
scription. European rhythms still offer a highly embodied experience that suffuses
listeners with pleasure. For Danielsen and Chernoff to grant blackness an exclu-
sive purchase on these qualities, may just be to other it, reiterating the historical
Afro–Euro–American entanglement between whiteness and blackness. But could
we not broaden the perspective? Don’t cultural actors in Asia and beyond have such
experiences? We need A-series reports of many other kinds of rhythmic experience
before we can talk about how many kinds there are.
28 Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility, 139.
29 Danielsen, Presence and Pleasure, 204.

4. The Rhythm Object
A-series rhythm is continuous; B-series rhythm has discrete parts, and can be
replicated from memory or fixed in notated and recorded representation. The B-
series rhythm object can be measured for density, grouping structures, rates of
change, variety of durations, attack and decay contours, frequency (pitch) range,
harmony, and form. Most consideration of musical rhythm is done under this ru-
bric, and we must consider its limitations.
In the history of musical rhythm, B-series thought postdated A-series thought,
and was required for the invention of music notation. Conscious awareness of
rhythm accelerated human rhythmic invention, resulting in the emergence of com-
plex, multi-part, or extended musical forms. Musicological and music-theoretical
awareness has mainly been the fruit of B-series concepts. In contrast with the mi-
mesis of nature that may have led to earlier rhythmic expressions noted above, the
division of time and rhythm into concatenated sections of a musical form probably
developed in conjunction with the tropes and narratives of storytelling conventions,
prescribed stages of ritual, or poetry. Consciousness of rhythm beyond direct expe-
rience led to the autonomous practice of musical composition.
In this “composer’s account,” B-series conceptions are hierarchic entities both
synchronically and diachronically, especially where (as in most music) there exist
musical forms of various kinds, and polyrhythm, understood in its simplest sense
as co-articulation of two or more rhythms. Moving through time, rhythms can be
small bits concatenating into a larger whole, or wholes divisible into many parts,
while at any given snapshot of a local span they may be embedded in streams or
layers. Layers have interrelated durational values involving either the division of
longer durations into shorter units, or the inverse; these relationships may be math-
ematically proportional or not. Thus in the gamelan music of Java and Bali, dia-
chronic rhythms often comprise cyclic groups of rhythmic events of various sizes
that repeat, for a few or many times, before possibly being supplanted by others of
similar or different dimensions. The rhythms are also synchronically stratified, that
is, moving on different instruments at different densities and durations.
Spatial analogies of “wholes,” “streams,” “spans,” and “strata” suit the B-series
stance; musical structures are envisioned as existing in space, viewable from var-
ious angles, shrunken or enlarged. Gamelan music often avails itself of this possi-
bility, presenting cycles in diminution, augmentation, and at different speeds. For
composer Witold Lutoslawski,
Form owes its existence to the ability of the listener to remember the music he has
heard and to integrate its individual sections while he listens so that . . . he is [ca-
pable] of perceiving it as an idea that, like a painting or a sculpture, exists outside
the limits of time . . . The composition . . . begins an independent existence of its own
in the consciousness of the listener due to the facilities of memory . . . Unrestricted

by time, the composition can be conceived in its entirety in one brief moment.30
With these features, the B-series provides opportunities for cross-cultural categori-
zation, using simple criteria of sound and structure. We may generate a typology of
rhythmic structures by considering:
(1) which kinds of changes in sound parameters are creating rhythm, individu-
ally or in combination—there are essentially three kinds: change of duration;
change of pitch or tone color; and change of envelope.31
(2) whether rhythms are distributed proportionally (measured by pulsation, ex-
plicit or implied), or if they are unmeasured or “free.”
(3) presence or absence of layers.
(4) use or absence of repetition and periodicity at different structural levels.32
Yet these structural concepts—pulsation, layers, repetition—present ontological

ambiguity in a musical context. Repetition is problematic because of its temporality,
and music’s multidimensionality. “Temporality” refers to the fact that repetition
always involves “change of context.” By virtue of its new position in a succession
of (precisely repeated) events, the repeated object acquires an altered identity.33
However, we can still recognize its original identity once abstracted from its tem-
poral flow—which is B-series objectification’s strong point.
A trickier puzzle is that of multidimensionality and layers. Rhythm has fused,
co-existing components—pitch, intensity, duration, timbre. Repetition in actual
music typically involves variation, where components are fixed while others shift,
presenting a combinatorial explosion of possibilities. One difficulty in B-series
analysis is that of identifying equivalence classes among a set of rhythm objects,
each of which may be different from another but assigned the same identity in
some cultural rubric. John Blacking coined the useful term “non-change” to de-
scribe the many variations that do not acquire a cultural status of true difference,
such that they can be interchanged within a performance, or among performances,
or evolve over historical time, without shifting identity.34 Nonetheless, by any out-
side standard, there usually is difference between two items said to be equivalent to
one another. The converse is often true as well: rhythms exactly the same are some-
times assigned culturally different identities. Certain identical patterns played in the
Shona mbira dzavadzimu tradition may belong to any of several repertoire items
classified as “pieces,” and outsiders cannot intuit the criteria used to sort patterns
30 Lutoslawski, in Stucky, Lutoslawski and His Music, 127.

31 For changes in pitch or tone color, even when durations repeat without change, there is still a strong
sense of movement. “Pitch and tone color” is meant to encompass harmony as well. The envelope of a sound
comprises its physical intensity, attack and decay contour, articulation, etc.
32 Tenzer, “Generalized Representations.”
33 Rahn, “Repetition,” 50.
34 Blacking, “Musical Change,” 17.
to pieces. In this music the ontological distinction between “variation,” “piece,” and
“repertoire” is fluid; there is a pool of pattern resources with overlapping distribu-
tion into different kinds of use.
Last, many vivid cases of ambiguity relate to perception of pulsation and meter.
An obvious typology divides rhythm into two broad realms, measured and unmeas-
ured. But the distinction is not simple: consider the rhythmically complex notated
music of composers like Elliott Carter or Brian Ferneyhough, both necessitating
intense control and synchronization by performers. Due to the great variety of
durations and complexity of their proportional interrelationships, this music often
sounds as though unregulated by pulsation. An objective B-series pulse for the per-
former can be obscure to the perceiver.
Timing of pulsation in clearly metered situations may also be ambiguous. Many
Western musical scores designate straightforward rhythms and meters selected by
the composer. These are often, but not inevitably, what the music transmits to the
experienced perceiver, a fact that Haydn often exploited to delightful effect. It is
twenty or thirty seconds into the first movement of his Symphony 80 before expe-
rienced listeners can determine, without seeing a conductor, how to beat a pulse.
Haydn’s rhythms are childlike, but do not sync as the acculturated ear expects.
Without consulting a score, one would never know that the opening rhythms of
Stravinsky’s Agon are notated to fall after the beat rather than on it. Most listeners
hear this fanfare-like passage as launching from a strong beat, but Stravinsky did
not want performers to hear it that way. For the joke to succeed, Haydn could rely
on an enculturation that Stravinsky could not expect, so one may ask: What effect
or sensation was he trying to produce? Nicholas Slonimsky wryly recounts how he
re-notated perplexing changing-meter passages in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 4/
4 time, to make it more comprehensible for conductor Serge Koussevitzky—to the
latter’s gratitude, apparently troubling neither composer nor audience.35
Related problems are apparent with orally transmitted musics, whose pulsation
can be misunderstood without cultural expertise. “Preference rules”36 putatively
accounting for how listeners parse sound streams to determine metric structure do
not obtain for some African music, where a participant’s internally referenced pul-
sation stream is not manifest in musical sound. To its makers, this is no problem: the
music is not just in the sound, but also in their collective mind. Despite ethnomu-
sicological discoveries, it is still important to transcribe world music, but notation
must be supplemented by explanation and ethnographic corroboration.
Interpreting notation requires cultural expertise. The discrete spatial increments
of any notational technology are imperfectly suited to the task of representing
music measured by a pulsation inherent in the music, or music in free rhythm
whose values can be measured only against a pulsating external source such as a
clock. Representations of rhythm cannot achieve objective accuracy.
35 Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch, 69.
36 E.g. Lerdahl and Jackendoff, Theory of Tonal Music.

Yet the belief that notation—a B series representation—”is” the music remains
an instructive myth. Rhythm is not an object: it involves collaboration between
acculturated perceiving mind and encountered sounds. A-series rhythm must be
communicated after the fact and can never fully portray subjective experience, while
B-series rhythm must be grounded in perception, which has psychological and
cultural dimensions. Every rhythm representation and analysis—even controlled
responses in laboratory stimulus experiments measuring rhythm cognition—
devolves to a set of judgments and approximations. Such approximations verge on
a limit of accuracy that may suffice depending on one’s purpose, but especially in
light of cross-cultural encounter, can never be assumed to do so. Representations of
rhythm, in whatever signifying form they take, are at best opportunities for inter-
subjective communication. The aim of the representation is to approach objectivity
through discourse.
5. Rhythm and Technology
Development of music, like that of language, probably spanned different eras

in which biologically and culturally selected features, including specialized
adaptations and spandrels, converged into what we at some point identified as
music. But musical capacities have never stopped evolving. Rhythm viewed in co-
evolution with technology can be seen to have been in a process of expansion since
humankind’s musical beginnings, along continua of increasing precision, com-
plexity, and range.
The vocabulary of rhythms has tracked the growth of technology, in tandem with
their signification. At music’s beginnings, vocalizations likely underwent a trans-
formation from loud calls that defined territory and expressed alarm, to intricate
patterns reinforcing social connections and increasing environmental mastery.37 In
a similar way, while in the very recent past electronically produced rhythms were
perceived as “alarmingly” bizarre, antisocial, dehumanizing, even dangerous, the
ubiquity of digital music synthesis has humanized their sound, as attested by pop-
ular electronic dance music cultures. For both early and modern humans, signs of
danger morphed into signs of control.
Consider again the exclusively corporeal technology of the first music, its limits
set by the body. Recent thinking on the question of universals in music characterizes
the prototype of all music as (1) vocal, (2) constructed on the degrees of a scale,
and (3) possessing a system of rhythmic organization.38 But the human voice has
rhythmic limits set by throat diameter, lung and breath capacity, and other phys-
iological factors. We can usually manage about two octaves in pitch range, while
the musculature of the jaw and tongue constrain the rapidity and precision with
37 Krause, Great Animal Orchestra, 115.
38 Molino and Nattiez, “Typologies et Universaux,” 357.

which sounds can be articulated. Add to this whoops, shrieks, grunts, whispers,
multiphonics (such as those produced by Tuvan throat singers), percussive clicks
and clucks, percussion played with the hands on the body, and rich possibilities for
timbral modulations—the body alone still has unsurpassed expressive power. But
as far as rhythmic production, there was much more to come.
The 103 recordings on Voices of the World, a three-CD set compiled by researchers
at the Musée de l’Homme, represent the global diversity of vocal capacity in tra-
ditional musics.39 Sixty countries or territories are represented, from all inhabited
continents, and fifty-six peoples/traditions. The focus on vocal traditions reflects
the centrality of voice and song to music everywhere. The collection’s producers
ordered the tracks according to kinds of vocal sounds and combinations, including
cries, breathing techniques, recitations and declamations, harmonies, and several
species of polyphony. There are rhythmic extremes, such as a tone sustained at high
amplitude for more than twenty seconds by a singer at a death rite in Paraguay, or
the cacophonous group vocalizations of Shuar women in Ecuador, which exhibit
maximal density of vocally produced rhythm.
Vocal music’s palette can be enhanced by using the mouth as a resonating
chamber, such as in the recording of a boy in New Guinea who has tied a beetle to
a stick and blown through its buzzing wings to amplify their sound (a rough pro-
totype of the harmonica, perhaps). Similarly resonated are the extended family of
mouth (Jew’s) harps, present worldwide, which are played either by pulling a string
attached to the instrument’s reed “tongue,” or by striking it with a small beater.40
The last two cases are rhythms unattainable by the body alone. No sound made
by a human body can oscillate as quickly or with quite the same timbre as a beetle’s
wing. Nor can body percussion produce a report as sharp as that of a hard baton
struck against a hard wooden or stone surface. Instrumental music has been de-
fined as “the use of the limbs or other body parts to produce structured, communi-
cative sound, possibly using additional objects.”41 Rhythms with a non-corporeal
vibrating medium extend the lexicon.
Although the B-series view of musical time depicts pulsations as discrete
instants, organology and choreology show that different media give rise to different
materialities of these instants. The rhythms of dance form a distinctive part of this
range of experiences. Lower limbs and torso cannot articulate time as quickly as
the mouth, throat, or hands, so dancers perform musical meter in terms of those
broader gestures. For Tellef Kvifte, “specific characteristics of body movement [in
dance] correspond to characteristics of meter in the associated music,” and meter
39 Zemp et al., eds, Voices of the World. The CDs are out of print but the entire collection can be streamed
at https://archives.crem-cnrs.fr/archives/collections/CNRSMH_E_1996_013_001/, with an excellent, down-
loadable booklet.
40 Zemp et al., eds, Voices of the World: CD 1, track 1; CD 3, track 2; CD 2, track 33; and CD 2, track 34,
respectively.
41 Fitch, “Biology and Evolution of Music,” 183.
may be regulated in part by a “common slow pulse” articulated by dance, as well as

grounded in an isochronous fast pulse.42
Percussion has great precision; drum skins, or the vibrating surfaces of idiophones
like clappers and bells, respond quickly. Early idiophones and membranophones
afforded the music-maker a range of production techniques the body could not
aspire to. This accelerated the invention of rhythm pattern types, their aggrega-
tion into polyrhythms, and the development of musical ensembles that combined
timbres and generated a clear regulative pulsation.
Aerophones mirror and amplify gestural patterns of breath flow and embou-
chure. Bowed chordophones, powered by the motion of the arms, introduced the
possibility of virtually unlimited sustain, transcending the durational contours
afforded by instruments with natural decay curves, like the breath or the resonance
of gongs or bells. Plucked chordophones such as lutes enabled cultivation of finger
dexterity, later developed by the invention of ergonomic keyboard instruments.
Each instrument generates characteristic profiles of attack, sustain, and decay that
contribute to rhythmic tactility.
Instrument construction and materials affect rhythm at all levels. Now that we
have tools to measure it, recent research has been devoted to microrhythm—the
subcutaneous world of rhythm faster than that of the main pulsation (tactus).
Microrhythmic formation is responsible for what is known variously as musical
groove, swing, or feel. Contrary to longstanding assumption that pulsations are
isochronous and (essentially) cross-culturally equivalent, we have learned that it
is distributed in a splendid variety of ways around the planet. There is plentiful tol-
erance for rhythmic irregularity in ostensibly regular contexts, and many systems
for combining or dividing regular durations into irregular ones. Drummers in Mali
divide their beats unevenly in at least three ways,43 and jazz improvisers develop
microrhythmic idiolects based on the genre’s style, their personal concept, and
rhythmic capacities of their instruments.44
In the early twentieth century, Western composers dreamed of total rhythmic
control through mechanical or electronic means: Varèse’s “liberation of sound.”
Conlon Nancarrow was meticulously punching his compositions on to player
piano rolls in Mexico City by the mid-1940s, creating an unprecedented oeuvre of
rhythm relationships that no human at the time could produce manually, including
polyrhythms in ratios of 14/15/16, or 2/√2. He invented the rhythms creative minds
dared to imagine thereafter. Emphasizing the power of the imagination to stimulate
the body to new capacities, by the 1990s several contemporary music ensembles
were confidently performing Nancarrow works that would have turned any past
musician who contemplated the idea a shade of pale white.
42 Kvifte, “Categories and Timing,” 77.
43 Polak and London, “Mande Drumming.”
44 Benadon, “Slicing the Beat.”

In the realm of electronic music, rhythms can be fine-tuned at the particle level
accessible through software interface systems like Pro Tools, using techniques
such as cut-and-paste and microsampling. The ability to manipulate rhythms dig-
itally, beyond the threshold of perceptible difference, is one of our era’s rhythmic
signatures and frontiers. These thresholds are of two kinds: that of merely dis-
cerning “at the same time” from “not at the same time,” and that of entrainment.
According to some experiments, only 2 milliseconds separation is required to dis-
cern the presence of two separate events—i.e., their non-simultaneity—whereas a
100-milliseconds separation is needed to entrain the two events in a metrical con-
text.45 The intentional shifting of a rhythmic event by some small amount ahead or
behind its expected arrival in relation to a regular pulsation may not be perceived
as change in beat or tempo; rather, it could fall within a region of tolerance. But the
combination of simultaneous rhythmic layers, juxtaposed and misaligned by dif-
ferent tiny margins, can create perceptual effects that human musicians could not
make—such as making a rapid-fire “stutter,” or making a beat feel “fat” or extended
in “presence” beyond an instantaneous duration. This effect, and others like it, are
an aesthetic goal in digital production of popular music. Brøvig-Hanssen describes
some of these effects in relation to electronica artist Danger Mouse’s Grey Album
and other works.46 The popularity of such music is evidence of how the body and
technology nourish one another, generating new appetites and kinds of rhythm.
If musical instrument technology has thus shaped rhythm, now consider
rhythm’s development through the lens of the technology of time. Rhythm evolves
in tandem with our awareness of time, its measurement, and changing concepts of
what it is. Our bodies are chronometers, a capacity we inherited from our forebears
all the way up the evolutionary line. John D. Palmer locates time awareness in the
very DNA of fruit flies, and periodic behaviors in some of the most primitive single-
celled creatures. The photosynthesizing protozoa Euglena obtusa, for example, a
species of algae, rise and fall with tidal movement even when kidnapped from their
riverbed abodes and cooped up in the dark in laboratory jars.47 Palmer suggests
that time measurement, hence rhythm, is inseparable from the replicating struc-
ture of subcellular life. It is present in all life, manifest in Euglena and Drosophila,
cockroach activity patterns, bear hibernations, bird migrations, and a million other
remarkable instances.48
Early humans measured time by environmental cues: day and night; tides; men-
struation and the moon’s phases; the seasons; patterns of food availability; the aging
body. These instinctive cues formed a crucible for the emergence of theories of
mind, in which people came to conceive time as an entity beyond the self, vaster
than what direct experience teaches. Cultural time is marked by group and indi-
vidual memories, generations, lineages, patrimonies, dynasties, myths, and history.
45 London, Hearing in Time,  27–8.
46 Brøvig-Hanssen, “Opaque Mediation.”
47 Palmer, The Living Clock, 4.
48 Palmer, The Living Clock,  38–44.

If the earliest vocal music, as suggested above, was a way of enhancing group cohe-
sion, cultural time measurement advanced cultural continuity and identity through
the recording of oral and written histories and the prescribing of calendrical and
life-cycle rituals.
The Dagbamba of northern Ghana measure historical time through the beating
of specific drum rhythms, archived and preserved by a guild of specialist musicians,
to narrate the lives of ancestors. Javanese and Balinese traditional calendars struc-
ture time in varying-length, nested and coordinated cycles of weeks that regulate
both practical realities (e.g., the frequency of market days) and propitiations to
unseen forces, thus integrating quotidian and supernatural conceptions of time.
Religious representations posited temporalities beyond human awareness, such as
the Hindu yuga (epochs), calibrated in cosmic spans by the speed of the beats of the
hourglass drum shown in the dancing Lord Shiva’s raised right hand.
Chronometry refined our idea of time flow independent of experience, based
on increasingly precise calculations. Though musicians have always needed a
while to figure out what to do with them, chronometric tools aid the development
of musical rhythm. Mechanical clocks led to metronomes, which naturalized cer-
tain parameters of rhythm and tempo, while the fine, latter-day resolution of dig-
ital clocks brought us microsampling. If time for us today is fully quantifiable and
imaginable at orders of magnitude from the Cesium-decay second to the parsec
of 3.3 light-years, from the most infinitesimal Big Bang “singularity” to the outer
reaches of the multiverse, it is because we have the technology to measure and con-
ceive it. The parsec and the Cesium second may not have insinuated themselves
into musical rhythms yet, but they probably will. They could appear at first in the
imagination of some intrepid composerly intelligence, leading subsequently to a
creative construction that, were we able to experience it—overcoming parochial
conceptions of rhythms—might be very different from anything we consider to be
music now.
6. Conclusion: Metarhythm
We began by paying homage to the vast realm of rhythm. From the start we ruled
out the likelihood of defining it. But persisting with the title question, we visited the
five sub-domains of language, anthropology, perception (the A-series), structural
analysis (the B-series), and technology, in each case seeking a way to characterize
rhythm. We found that rhythms of language and music are not so distinct as one
may think at first; that there are limits to how much one can associate particular
rhythms with cultural formations; that the perception and the objectification of
rhythms are highly imperfect enterprises; and that rhythmic variety is constantly
expanding as a function of technology. The results were not terribly promising for
anyone hoping to get a handle on how to slot rhythm into types and categories,
and to enumerate the extent of its manifestations. Others, with less need to find
rigorous order in nature or in human affairs, may celebrate rhythmic diversity for
its own sake.
We might consider that, cumulatively, the five topics discussed yield an emer-
gent phenomenon—call it metarhythm. What is metarhythm? It is the rhythm of
rhythm: the encompassing movement by which human conceptions of rhythm
evolve and interact. It is the eons-long process paralleling the expansion of human
consciousness, during which the rhythms of the natural world gradually entered
into explicit human awareness. There, in imagination, both individual and cultural,
they replicated, developed, are tinkered with and added to.
The canvas on which metarhythm unfolds is the same natural and temporal one
as that of rhythm itself. But metarhythm organizes rhythm into shifting planes of
concept and signification as the mind confers many dimensions of meaning upon
it. And at a certain moment the rhythms created by human imagination acquired a
potential even bigger than those of the natural world. Each metarhythmic config-
uration is a description of human rhythmic understanding and capacity for some
cross-section of the evolving composite process, and these understandings and
capacities are always on the move. This is not, in the end, anything like a definition
or a categorization of rhythm, but an assertion that its definitions and categories are
contingent and changing. The signifiers of rhythm and music remain what they are,
but what they signify does not.
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14
Temporal Processing and the Experience
of Rhythm
A Neuro-Psychological Approach
Udo Will
1. Introduction
Temporal experience is a central aspect of the life of humans and other spe-
cies because of ever-present changes in their world. These changes, at least at the
macroscopic level of actions and experiences, are not unstructured. There are
regularities, and detecting them enables organisms to adapt to a changing envi-
ronment. As constructs, time and rhythm are shaped by physiological and psy-
chological processes, and socio-cultural concepts.1 This chapter focuses on our
direct experience of time and rhythms, covering a range from sub-seconds to a few
minutes, as distinct from remembrance of time. The latter concerns temporal phe-
nomena beyond the minute range, and different cognitive processes. The chapter
focuses on auditory temporal and rhythmic processing. The term “rhythm”
is used to refer to qualities attributed to ordered successions of events and their
temporal relationships, without implying particular kinds of regularity or pattern
repetition—which are taken to characterize specific types of rhythm.
Experience of time and rhythm involves basic building-blocks: detection of
events, identification of duration, and temporal order— relational properties
of event sequences. I examine “timing” mechanisms as ways of relating aspects
of events to body- internal periodic processes, discussing movement- related
periodicities. I show that temporal and rhythmic processing are not unitary phe-
nomena and that rhythm cannot be understood as abstractly cognitive. Next it is
argued that recent reports about processing differences for vocal and instrumental
rhythms suggest that different temporal mechanisms are available for intra-modal
processing. An important part of these differences is explained by involvement of
different sensorimotor networks in processing rhythms. Finally, a discussion of
features of Australian Aboriginal music shows that different temporal features of
1 Will, “Cultural Factors.”

Temporal Processing and the Experience of Rhythm 217
vocal and instrumental rhythms are detectable. The chapter concludes by showing
implications for relations between speech, vocal, and instrumental rhythms and
their evolution.
2. Basic components of temporal experience
Basic constituents of our temporal experience include detection of simultaneity;

temporal order; perception and estimation of duration; temporal integration; per-
ception and production of intervals and interval sequences; and temporal align-
ment or synchronization of event sequences. These processes rely on our ability to
detect events, determine their relationships (durations and sequential order) and
“time” them with reference to some internal measure.
2.1 Event Detection
Perception is not a passive act; “you live through an event by coupling with it.”2 Three
types of changes can be distinguished: brief and rapid changes are experienced as
“point events”; changes over a prolonged period are perceived as continuous; change
that occurs at rates too slow to be perceived but can be reconstructed through
memory—however long one stares at a clock’s hour hand, it never seems to move,
though at some point one infers that it must have. Detection of events is generally
based on a multi-feature analysis. Simultaneous changes in several sound parameters
have been shown to facilitate identification and to render it more reliable.3
2.2 Duration
State-
changes are temporally extended phenomena, and the term “duration”
designates the length of a state change, demarcated by onset and offset. It also
designates the time between two successive (point) events. These two interval types
are also known as filled and empty intervals. Filled auditory intervals are perceived
more accurately, and as longer than, empty intervals.4 However, this effect does not
seem to generalize to interval sequences; accuracy for empty rhythms is consist-
ently better than for filled rhythms.5 Identification of temporal order (Section 2.3)
seems to improve if events are separated by silent intervals.6
2 Noë, “World in Time.”

3 Cheong and Will, “Empty and Filled Rhythms”; Klyn et al., “Differential Short-Term Memorization.”
4 Wearden et al., “Internal Clock Processes”; Nakajima, “Empty Duration Perception”; Rammsayer and
Skrandies, “Temporal Information Processing.”
5 Klyn et al., “Differential Short-Term Memorization.”
6 Warren and Obussek, “Temporal Order”; Thomas and Brown, “Time Perception.”
Studies indicate that perception of intervals shorter than 2–3 seconds are
perceived as qualitatively different from longer intervals, with shorter intervals
eliciting synchronization of body movements, while longer intervals are perceived
as having no effect on them.7 Temporal processing in the two time ranges also
involves different physiological processes.8
Our perception of duration is also influenced by our movements. Events are
perceived as longer when observed, and self-generated actions are congruent,
indicating an intimate link between temporal perception and our actions.9
Duration perception is an active, guiding component in an organism’s interaction
with its environment.
2.3 Temporal Order
The minimum interval needed to perceive auditory events as separate is c.2–3ms.

While this threshold is largely a peripheral phenomenon, perception of simul-
taneity rests on the fact that onset perception of events with extended duration
is influenced by their duration. The perceived onset of a stimulus is increasingly
delayed relative to the physical onset when the stimulus duration increases.10 The
perceived onset can be regarded as a function of the duration and the temporal en-
velope of the sound.11 Longer stimuli must start earlier than shorter ones, to achieve
perceptual synchrony.
The sequence of events can be determined only if they are separated by 30–50ms
(temporal-order threshold), the same for all sensory modalities—increasing to
100–300ms for sequences with more than three events, its size markedly affected by
the relatedness of the events. The existence of temporal-order thresholds indicates
discrete temporal processing units.12 Events within intervals not exceeding such
thresholds, though non-simultaneous, are not perceived as having a temporal order.
The temporal integration within these units provides functional moments of expe-
rienced co-temporality.13 Such integrative units seem to be central constituents of
temporal processing in both perception and action, and they have been identified
within the various modalities. In cross-modal tasks like the McGurk effect,14 and
in sensorimotor synchronization tasks, synchronized tapping to regular auditory
stimuli becomes impossible with intervals less than c.250ms.15
Temporal-order thresholds thus demarcate fundamental units of temporal per-
ception. Temporal processing appears to be discontinuous, performed in discrete
7 Nakajima et al., “Successive Sound Bursts.”
8 Lewis and Miall, “Brain Activation Patterns.”
9 Press et al., “Moving Time.”
10 Schimmel and Kohlrausch, “Interaural Differences.”
11 Schütte, “Subjektiv gleichmäßiger Rhythmus.”
12 Pöppel, “Temporal Perception,” “Lost in Time.”
13 Wittmann, “Moments in Time.”
14 “Try the McGurk Effect,” Horizon (online video).
15 See this volume, Chapter 11, London, “Metric Entrainment and the Problem(s) of Perception.”
units, and characterized by intra-and inter-modal binding and co-temporality.

Experience of temporal phenomena is then created through an experience of suc-
cession of such units. The contrasting view that our experience of time is limited to
perception of a “timeless” present cannot explain how we perceive motion, change,
and succession.16 Conversely, the notion of functional moments suggests that our
experience has inherent temporal properties. We experience not timeless slices but
temporally extended chunks, which are in turn integrated into larger units that
permit experience of change, motion, and rhythm.
2.4 Specious Present
These larger units fall into a time range that also marks the above transition be-
tween short and long durations. This specious present is organized in ways in
part suggested by the stimuli themselves, but also by integrative processes that in-
corporate context as well as implicit knowledge about the events.17 Paul Fraisse
distinguishes perception, and estimation of duration or remembrance of temporal
phenomena.18 Within the specious present we can directly perceive durations,
rhythms, and repeating patterns. Beyond that range they are not experienced as
temporal gestalts. Penelope Lewis and Chris Miall argue similarly that shorter
range timing is “automatic,” reflecting the engagement of processes associated with
the production of skilled movements, while longer range timing is “cognitive,” de-
pendent on neural systems associated with attention and memory.19
Integration limits of the subjective present can be overcome through the use of
additional cognitive means and strategies. While sensory memory plays a role in the
psychological present, it is working memory, supplemented by phonologic storage
and rehearsal systems, that extends our temporal horizon into the minute range,
with long-term memory estimating durations beyond that range. Additionally we
can employ strategies like counting and subdivision as important means to keep
track of periodicities in the multi-seconds range that extends beyond the psycho-
logical present, as done for rhythm and form cycles in Classical Indian music and
jazz, for example.
3. Movements and timing
Growing evidence suggests that action-and movement-related periodicities play

a role in some timing references. A dynamic, enactive perspective distinguishes
discrete actions like pointing or reaching, from continuous actions like walking,
16 Le Poidevin, The Images of Time.
17 Michon, Making of the Present.
18 Fraisse, “Rhythm and Tempo.”
19 Lewis and Miall, “Brain Activation Patterns.”

dancing, or music- making. Computational simulations suggest that periodic

movements are not just a concatenation of discrete movements, but that distinct
control mechanisms underwrite the two. Discrete movements are governed by
fixed-point dynamics. Their timing cannot originate from their own dynamics and
requires external timing control arising from neural structures not involved in the
realization of their dynamics. In contrast, continuous movements, if they are not
too slow, are governed by limit cycle dynamics. They are autonomous and their
timing emerges from the movement dynamics.20 Experimental support for distinct
mechanisms comes from an fMRI study that found partly overlapping but distinct
activation patterns for discrete and periodic wrist movements.21 It is likely that at
least part of the specific activations in the discrete condition reflect the necessary
“external” timing control, and that this control is realized not in a single neural
structure, but in a distributed network.
If timing of continuous, periodic movements autonomously emerges from their
movement dynamics they can in turn serve as timing references. For human loco-
motion, MacDougall and Moore have shown that power spectra of periodic activity
in everyday contexts (walking, running, cycling) exhibit a dominant peak at 2Hz.22
The peak frequency was not found to correlate with gender, age, height, weight, or
body mass index and can therefore be considered as a central, movement-related
resonant “frequency” or internal periodicity. It can function as a reference in tem-
poral judgments of event sequences mentioned earlier, and other perceptual and
motor tasks: various studies have shown corresponding peak frequencies in spon-
taneous tempi of finger tapping tasks, preferred metronome tempo, resonance in
perception of musical pulse and related brainwave synchronization.23 However,
not all periodic processes of our body have the same resonance frequencies—the
brainstem-controlled breathing cycle, related to voice production, has a period of
c.0.25Hz.
An important aspect of periodic movements is that, although their timing is an
autonomously emerging property, the controlling oscillatory circuits are neverthe-
less influenced by sensory inputs or volition, assuring that movements performed
are activity-appropriate. For example, periodic limb movements that are performed
spontaneously and in the absence of any external stimuli are executed with
frequencies corresponding to the internal periodicity. However, if external stimuli
are present, the internal periodicity and the ensuing “personal tempo” get modi-
fied and, in the case of regularly timed external stimuli, become entrained to the
external stimuli.24 The resulting periodicity is perceived as pulse because, whether
irregular or quasi-periodic, the sensory input affects both internal periodicity and
20 Huys et al., “Distinct Timing Mechanisms.”

21 Schaal et al., “Rhythmic Arm Movement.”
22 MacDougall and Moore, “Marching to the Beat.”
23 Fraisse, “Rhythm and Tempo”; Van Noorden and Moelants, “Perception of Musical Pulse”; Will and Berg,
“Brain Wave Synchronization.”
motor sequence, even if spinal pattern generators are not released and movements
are not performed, e.g., in passive listening to music.
The idea that motor adjustments to, and temporal judgments of, event sequences,
especially those of music, are made on the basis of a comparison of external and in-
ternal periodicities has been developed in entrainment theory. The idea is based on
the notion of attentional cycles that are synchronized with the internal periodicity,
and thus permit determining the degree of synchronization between external event
sequences and internal periodicity.25
While we are now obtaining a detailed picture about pulse (or beat) in temporal
processing, the role of meter is less clear. The concept of meter applied by most
researchers is that developed in Western music since the seventeenth century,
which is very different from the concept of meter in poetry and in non-Western
music (see Section 6).26 The modern Western concept is based on the idea of isoch-
ronous time units, and refers to a cyclical pattern of strong and weak units or beats.
It is considered to act as a framework for the actual (melodic) rhythms that may
or may not be congruent with the underlying meter. The implicit ambiguities of
this concept are largely ignored in experimental research, for example by only
selecting rhythmic stimuli congruent with the meter. Depending on the experi-
mental task, processing of meter seems to involve temporal as well as non-temporal
components. While temporal components, e.g., detection of repeating patterns,
are similar to those involved in rhythm processing, non-temporal components like
training experience, memory, and attention seem to be required.
4. Sensory timing mechanisms, vocal

and instrumental rhythms
To reiterate, a framework of intrinsic timing models suggests that the different

sensory modalities use specific temporal processing mechanisms.27 The iden-
tification of modality-
specific components poses a challenge for approaches
that regard rhythms as abstract, disembodied cognitive representations of tem-
poral relationships and assume that rhythm processing is an amodal process.28
Furthermore, even within one modality rhythm processing may differ with stimuli
and tasks. Tsun-Hui Hung showed that, for decision tasks on auditory rhythms,
there are significant behavioral (reaction time, accuracy) and brain activation
(fMRI) differences for vocal and instrumental rhythms.29 Differences between
these two rhythm types were also found in short-term memory tasks.30 In rhythm
25 Jones, “Time, Our Lost Dimension”; Large and Jones, “Dynamics of Attending”; Jones and McAuley,
“Time Judgments.”
26 Will, “Cultural Factors.”
27 Merchant et al., “Common Mechanism”; Shuler and Bear, “Reward Timing”; Bueti et al., “Sensory and
Association Cortex.”
28 Deutsch “Recognition of Durations”; Povel and Essens, “Perception of Temporal Patterns.”
29 Hung, “One Music? Two Musics?”
30 Klyn et al, “Differential Short-Term Memorization.”
reproduction tasks, memorization of vocal rhythms seems to recruit the partici-

pation of the articulatory loop, but memorization of instrumental rhythms does
not.31 This may explain why in many musical traditions instrumental rhythms are
learned in “speakable,” verbalized form. Verbal labels are better memorized than
the original instrumental sounds because they can be better maintained in working
memory.32
Klyn et al. discuss factors that contribute to differential processing of vocal and
instrumental rhythms.33 The first relates to extraction of temporal features for
rhythm detection. For instrumental sounds used in their study (clapsticks) the
task can be reduced to intensity peak or sound onset detection. Extraction of vocal
rhythm, conversely, requires simultaneous consideration of multiple features: iden-
tification of changes in dynamics, pitch, and spectra. Furthermore, the human
voice has a typical spectral energy distribution, and relative independence of fun-
damental frequency and resonance characteristics of the vocal tract, not present in
instrumental sounds.34
Another factor is that the human brain seems to possess specializations for pro-
cessing of human vocal sounds and vocal rhythms.35 These are understood as neu-
ronal and cognitive adaptations to the acoustic complexity and vital biological role
of vocal sounds in intra-species communication.36 For humans, quickly identifying
sounds as vocal, and processing them as speech sounds, can be crucial socially,
and it is something humans perform effortlessly and automatically. Specialization
and preference for vocal sounds may help explain faster reaction times for vocal
rhythms than instrumental ones.
Finally, research on sensory motor integration in the auditory system suggests
another contributing factor.37 Vocal and instrumental rhythms are produced via
different motor-effectors in the body: larynx, tongue, lips and jaws (mouth cavity)
for vocal, and upper (and sometimes lower) limbs for instrumental rhythms. The
larynx is innervated by the laryngeal branch of the vagus nerve; the tongue mainly
by the hypoglossus nerve plus a smaller projection from the vagus nerve; lips by the
facial nerve; while jaw movements and the shape of the mouth cavity are controlled
by the trigeminal nerve—all under supranuclear control from the ventral part of
the primary motor cortex. Limb movements, on the other hand, are performed
through activity of spinal motor neurons that in turn are controlled by the me-
dial and dorsal part of the primary motor cortex. Vocal and instrumental rhythms
clearly involve different neural networks. In addition, differences in response to
31 The articulatory loop is a working-memory mechanism that prevents pronounceable memory content
from decaying through repeated articulation.
32 Cheong and Will, “Empty and Filled Rhythms.”
33 Klyn et al., “Differential Short-Term Memorization.”
34 Fant, Acoustic Theory of Speech.
35 Belin et al., “Voice-Selective Areas”; Bent et al., “Cognitive Processing of Pitch”; Zatorre et al., “Auditory
Cortex”; Hung, “One Music? Two Musics?”
36 Wang, “Communication Sounds in Primates.”
37 Pa and Hickok, “Parietal-Temporal Sensory-Motor Integration”; Wang, “Communication Sounds in
Primates.”
decision and reproduction tasks provide a first hint at how encoding differences for
these rhythms may be linked to different sensory-motor activations.38
5. Contrasting vocal and instrumentAL rhythms
The existence of different sensory-motor networks for vocal and instrumental

rhythms explains why most instrumental rhythms, but not speech rhythms, are
organized along regular periodic intervals, even where melodies are irregular.39
Although syllable sequences in prose may show certain regularities, attempts at
explaining speech rhythms in terms of an underlying regular time interval grid
or pulse sequence have not been successful.40 In contrast, instrumental rhythms
are produced through periodic limb movements, characterized by a sharp reso-
nance frequency, modifiable intentionally or through sensory input. Constraining
periodicities for speech (breathing cycles or breath groups) are much more flexible,
and less directly determined by other bodily activities.41
However, the regularity of speech rhythms can be increased. First, temporal
regularities increase when there are phonological similarities, grammatically
matched constructions, or repetitions of syllable groups.42 Second, regularities also
increase when speech is aligned with periodic motor movements as in gesturing
and music-making, in chant, song, or rap. Speech is frequently aligned with body
movements, such as in gesturing and musicking, which aids communication.
Temporally regular utterances of a speaker permit a listener’s attentional perio-
dicity to become aligned to them.43
Temporal restructuring of heightened speech and poetry, resulting from use
of language-related factors like rhymes, formulaic expressions, and repetitions,
also facilitates memorization in both performers and listeners.44 A special form
of restructuring of heightened speech, which developed as an oral tradition and
enhances both temporal regularization and memorization, is organization of syl-
lable sequences on the basis of contrastive prosodic features. This “poetic meter”
arranges syllables in patterned sequences “measured” by distinct number of syllables
and the patterns created through length or, in tone languages, tone contrasts. Thus
in Vedic and some Australian Aboriginal poetry, where syllable length is a contras-
tive language feature, syllables are organized in patterns of short–long contrasts,
but without assignment of fixed durational proportions. Early Chinese poetry used
the contrasts of level and deflected tones, which also implied length contrast, and
38 Klyn et al., “Differential Short-Term Memorization” (experiments 2 and 3); Wang, “Communication
Sounds in Primates.”
40 Cummins, “Rhythm in Speech.”
41 Moore, “Rhythm in Speech: A Response,” argues from system dynamics for the relative independence of
spoken language from other bodily functions.
42 Cummins and Port, “Stress Timing.”
43 Dooling, “Sentence Perception.”
44 Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions.
later developed forms with fixed arrangements of tonal patterns.45 In all three cases
length contrasts are relative and flexible, not based on absolute, isochronic length
units (see Aboriginal examples, Section 6). Poetry in China and Australia, but also
in Africa, uses additional dynamic accents—not linked to fixed positions within
a meter—freely and creatively. Thus the temporal structure of heightened speech
and song poetry is distinct from that of accompanying instrumental music which
is based on internal periodicity of periodic movements (pulse-based) and whose
rhythms are created from quasi-isochronous unit intervals and/or subdivisions and
multiples thereof. In contrast to Western musical meter, there is no indication that
processing of poetic meter requires distinct timing processes, whereas employment
of memory-related processes seems indispensible.
With the foregoing characterization of differences between vocal and instru-
mental rhythms, we now examine how these differences are manifested in human
musical behavior outside the laboratory.
6. Australian aboriginal music
The following reviews analytical data from music performances of two Australian
Aboriginal groups, the Pitjantjatjara from Central Australia, and the Dyirbal from
Queensland, and temporal features of vocal and instrumental components. Their
traditional music consists of vocal melodies, sung solo or in unison, and rhythmic
accompaniment.
6.1 Vocal rhythms
Phonemes and phonotactics of everyday language seem to be generally preserved in

Aboriginal song language, but syllable durations are not. In Pitjantjatjara, a Central
Australian language with contrastive word-initial syllable length, long syllables are
approximately twice as long as short ones.46 In songs, however, long syllables are
up to four times longer than short ones, and there appear to be at least two length-
categories of short syllables.47 Variances of syllable duration indicates consistency
of song duration and word rhythm across performers and performances, and mean
syllable durations show phonetic-articulatory influences on the fine structure of
the word rhythms.48 For example, approximants seem to have a lengthening ef-
fect. Song words are organized in groups of fixed number of syllables (“text lines”),
which are often immediately repeated. “Small songs” may consist of different text
lines, each containing identical number of syllables with the same short–long
45 Level tones have a longer duration than deflected tones.
46 Tunstill, “Pitjantjatjara Song.”
47 Will, “Oral Memory in Australian Song.”
48 Ellis, Aboriginal Music; Will, “Oral Memory in Australian Song.”

pattern. As different text lines are made up of different words, the syllable timing in
performance, i.e., the actual rhythm may differ from line to line, though lines share
the same long–short syllable pattern. Different text lines within a small song can
have different numbers of syllables, e.g., the first having eight and the second seven
syllables, or vice versa.
For the Dyirbal of Queensland, song language also follows phonology and
grammar of everyday language, which, however, has no contrastive length; words
are, apart from some injections, two or multi-syllabic, with stress on the first syl-
lable of every root and the first of suffixes.49 The dominant form of text lines from
Dyirbal Gama songs (a type of corroboree song) has eleven syllables, grouped by a
fixed primary stress pattern into five, two, and four syllables.50 This description is
based on analyses of the spoken song texts, but a slightly different picture emerges if
we analyze song performances. The timing of syllables in Gama songs shows subdi-
vision of the eleven-syllable text lines into two groups of five and six syllables, with
a long syllable at the end of each group and a range of different subdivisions of the
second group. Although syllable length contrast is not used in everyday language,
it helps to organize timing of song language. Furthermore, stress patterns of spoken
text lines do not determine timing patterns of syllables in Gama songs. Though
primary stress syllables tend to be slightly shorter than secondary or non-stressed
syllables, the difference was not significant. The first and second, but not third, pri-
mary stress coincides with the main subgrouping of the text line. Due to the consid-
erable syllable duration variance (much larger than for Pitjantjatjara songs) there is
considerable variation in the actual text line rhythms, despite a common short/long
pattern.51
Compared to everyday language, Pitjantjatjara and Dyirbal song language is
constrained by factors that support memorization and performance, e.g., number
of syllables per text line and relative syllable length (short–long) pattern. These
memory aides are not necessarily based on features of everyday language, as indi-
cated by the length contrast in Dyirbal song language. Text lines that share the same
metrical pattern may not show the same vocal rhythms in performance; i.e., met-
rical organization of a text line does not determine durational structure or rhythm.
6.2 Instrumental rhythms
Many Aboriginal songs have percussive accompaniments consisting of slapping

thighs, hand claps, or beating sticks, boomerangs, bottles, tin cans, etc. Two types of
beating accompaniment can be discerned. One consists of clap intervals of approx-
imate equal length that correspond to an underlying motor pulse, with mean beat
49 Dixon, The Dyirbal Language.
50 Dixon and Koch, Dyirbal Song Poetry.

intervals ranging from 0.25 to 2.2 seconds. The other consists of clap pairs of une-
qual length; chronometric analysis suggests that it is formed by a subdivision of the
underlying basic motor pulse. Variance of the intervals is considerably larger than
for the first type and durations of the clap pairs cover a sub-range of the first type.52
Frequently songs show only one type of accompaniment. If both types occur within
one song they are often used in different sections.
Beating accompaniments are performed with remarkable regularity and sta-
bility across performances and performers. Accompaniment is an independent
time marker that does not vary with changes in other layers of a performance (vocal
rhythm and melody).53 The independence of the accompanying rhythms from the
vocal rhythms is evident from chronometric analyses.54 For instance, Dyirbal songs
generally show weak synchronization between vocal and instrumental rhythms.
Also, there was no indication that the primary stress pattern of Dyirbal Gama songs
leads to a temporal or dynamic 4-2-4 sub-grouping of the accompanying rhythm,
as suggested by Dixon and Koch. It can therefore be argued that the clap accompa-
niment shows no organization in terms of a Western musical meter as there are no
hierarchically related beat levels.
However, accompaniment patterns clearly structure the performance and there-
fore serve as additional performance memory aids. The “lines” of Dyirbal gamma
songs, for example, are generally accompanied by five (unequal) pairs of stick beats
(i.e., ten stick beats), but the vocal “text line” rhythms may not span the whole
length of the accompanying pattern. Nevertheless, whatever the performance du-
ration of the eleven-syllable text line, the repeat of a vocal line or the start of a next
line does not commence before the completion of the ten stick beats—even where
some syllables are missing in the middle of text lines. These are indications that text
lines are performed and organized along clapstick patterns or subgroups thereof.
The number of clapstick beats seems to serve as an orientation or reference frame
during performance, and performers appear to be aware of this function of the ac-
companiment as they sometimes explicitly acknowledge it.
In Pitjantjatjara and some other regional Aboriginal songs, instrumental accom-
paniment also has a synchronizing and entrainment effect on the vocal rhythm
layer. For Pitjantjatjara songs it was possible to demonstrate the synchronizing ef-
fect directly because some small songs are often performed twice in a performance,
once without and once with beating accompaniment. In the latter case durations
of syllables or syllable groups are adjusted so that some syllables become synchro-
nized with stick beats or claps, and variance of syllable duration is significantly
reduced.55 Synchronization of vocal and accompanying rhythms has a facilitating
effect on repetition and recall, an effect Havelock describes as a principle governing
poetic performances in oral cultures.56 However, entrainment between vocal and
52 Will, “Oral Memory in Australian Song”; Will, “Kognitiven Musikethnologie.”
53 Ellis, Aboriginal Music.
56 Havelock, Preface to Plato.

instrumental rhythms does not seem to be automatic. In Dyirbal songs synchro-

nization between the two rhythms was much weaker than in Pitjantjatjara songs.
Dyirbal social life is in transition, and the role of communal performances is in
decline. Changes in social life of this group may have eliminated factors favoring
entrained performances.57
7. Conclusions
For over thirty years, time research was dominated by the idea that temporal pro-
cessing is accomplished by a unitary, amodal process across various task domains.
Recently, alternative models have arisen that reject dedicated neural structures be-
cause temporal processing is inherent in neural dynamics. In these models, timing
functions are executed by multiple, overlapping neural systems, which may be flex-
ibly engaged depending on context; temporal processing is modality, task, and con-
text specific.
The reported processing differences for vocal and instrumental rhythms is com-
patible with such models, and poses a challenge for the idea of rhythm as an ab-
stract feature of event sequences. In the auditory domain rhythm processing has
discernable sensory components. The differences in temporal processing can be
explained by the ways sensory input changes as agents interact with the environ-
ment. From an enactive perspective, the distinction between vocal and instru-
mental rhythm appears to reflect their different origins in relation to the human
body—one produced actively inside the body, the other created through limb ac-
tion on external objects—as well as their different significance in human interac-
tion and communication.
This interpretation resonates with the analysis offered by W. Tecumseh Fitch’s
comparative research into the origins of music, which combines cross-cultural,
intra-specific and inter-specific perspectives.58 He emphasizes that “the music fac-
ulty” consists of various components with different evolutionary histories, which
talking about “music” as a unitary phenomenon obscures. In support of a multi-
component view of music that treats vocal and instrumental music as distinct, he
discusses lines of evidence from design features of music and language to the evolu-
tion of analogous and homologous behavioral traits. In addition, to reiterate, vocal
and instrumental rhythms differ also in temporal processing.
These different lines of research offer new perspectives on the relationship be-
tween speech and music. Thus it would be difficult to maintain that the rhythm
of speech is at the origin of vocal music, which in turn gives rise to instrumental
music.59 Although they all exhibit different temporal properties, speech and vocal
57 Clayton et al., “In Time with the Music”; see also this volume, Chapter 12, Clayton, “Entrainment and the
Social Origin of Musical Rhythm.”
58 Fitch, Biology and Evolution of Music.
59 Arom, African Polyphony; Agawu, African Rhythm.
music are both based on the voice, produced inside our body through engagement
of vocal folds, lungs, mouth cavity, etc. Instrumental sounds are produced through
interactions of our limbs with external objects, or with resonating parts of our
own body. Hence, vocal rhythms—in speech and vocal music—and instrumental
rhythms derive from different ways of interacting with our environment and are
controlled by different temporal mechanisms. Thus instrumental music should be
considered in parallel to vocal music, not as derived from it.
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PART IV
T IME A N D E X PE R I E NC E
Subjective and Objective Rhythm
15
Complexity and Passage
Experimenting with Poetic Rhythm
Christopher Hasty
The following exploration of poetic rhythm understands rhythm not as an already-

formed order (of isochronous division, or of fixed pattern), but as the ongoing
shaping of events and their succession. Succession is an order, of one-after-another;
but it need not be regarded as a fixed order of separate, externally related terms. If
we can admit internal relations into the terms of succession and say that no event
is without actual and potential involvement in others, then succession can be un-
derstood also as continuous. That is to say, if “one after another” can mean “one in-
formed by (or forming itself out of) another,” then there is no ultimate separation of
the terms “one” and “another,” and the continuous (“ongoing” and “shaping”) suc-
cession of rhythm can be admitted.
Questions of separate and together, discontinuity and continuity, multiplicity and
unity can find a favorable environment in the venerable idea of rhythm. Although
the word “rhythm” has come to imply the regularity of a repeated and separable
unit or pattern of units, it can also evoke the dynamic or temporal connotations of
flow—not as movement through a homogeneous substance (“time”), but as a con-
tinuous and at the same time articulated process, the active and characterful crea-
tion of things or events. This creation can be felt. The word “rhythm” is especially
valuable because it continues to speak of feeling/valuing/attending—as when we
speak of “the rhythmic” or characterize “rhythm” as, for example, sexy, engaging,
subtle, exact, erratic, confusing, primitive. As a shaping, rhythm is always a valuing
that involves emotional investment and choice (agency), the choice to attend or not,
and of how much to invest in attending. Such valuing operates in the realm of the
aesthetic, as feeling or sensing, and thus points to the aesthetic as a fully temporal
category.
Poetry is a rhythmic verbal art to the extent that it can intensify attending and
feeling. Taking poetry here as something actually made— read, said— means
resisting reduction to the structure of a fixed and timeless text. But to give text its
due as process, let’s understand poetry as an artifact (written or not) made to be
performed, said/heard again and again. Even if performance (in the case of a written
artifact) involves reading and a silent saying/hearing, it is a reading event that, like
saying/hearing aloud, takes time. Rhythm implies performance, at least if we under-
stand that there cannot be rhythm (as there cannot be sound) at an instant. Rhythm
takes time. To take performance seriously, think of the Late Latin performare, to fully,
completely form. What is not performed is not fully formed. (Think of performing
a service or a task.) And yet, “performance” has narrowed to mean making public to
entertain others (thus, even a “private performance” has an audience). Without at all
denying the importance of others, I would ask the reader to think of performance
more generally as the action of actually making—making poetry, making music,
making sense. Shifting perspective toward performance moves us toward a temporal
perspective, from which performance always results in something new.
“Experimenting” is understood as nearly synonymous with “performing”—
repeating, and thereby learning something new. Experimenting is more
specialized—a performance aimed at questioning, asking about, seeking. We per-
form experiments to test and to reflect, aiming to comprehend more. Practicing a
skill like singing music or reading poetry can have this character of experimentation.
II
Although “rhythm” and “poetry” are not focal concepts of process thought, “expe-
rience” is. The process-thought perspective I take affirms process as activity, on-
goingness, emergence, movement, growth, learning.1 Such thinking feels itself in
opposition to the thought of substance, stasis, mechanism, timeless transcendence,
and knowledge as a secure possession. There can be virtue in sharpening the op-
position, and in finding a balance, especially if both terms change in order to bal-
ance. With this latter virtue in mind, rather than dwell on the opposition of process
thought to, say, substance thought, I will attempt to exemplify and instantiate pro-
cess by experimenting with poetic rhythm, reading/hearing/saying a single stanza
from Keats’ Endymion, namely, the beginning of the “Hymn to Pan.” This excerpt
will serve as a laboratory for experimenting with problems of poetic rhythm.
Written poetry is an excellent vehicle for rhythmic experimentation, largely because
it can be returned to repeatedly, and because all readers have access. Experimenting
with written music is more difficult and restrictive. To experiment in detail with
hearing or playing from score can take much time and energy, and few have the skills
to work with a score. To take full advantage of the example in Figure 15.1, I ask that the
reader join in the experiment by repeatedly trying out saying. With repetition a reader
will, I hope, make discoveries—some in line with my suggestions, and some not.
1 Rescher, Process Metaphysics, gives a general and ecumenical definition. My narrower perspective is
informed especially by James, and Whitehead, Bergson, and Deleuze. Pred, Onflow, connects James and
Whitehead with John Searle and Gerald Edelman.
Experimenting with Poetic Rhythm 235
These experiments aim at feeling events of different sorts or levels and focus espe-
cially on duration or timing. They involve action (saying) and reflection (thinking-
about) in alternation. Indeed, there is a rhythm of experimenting: if thinking about
creates events, thinking about takes time. My position is that there is no ultimate es-
cape from time and passage. But, at the same time, I truly value the practice and also
the instruments of thinking-about—abstractions, diagrams, categories, schemata
that appear to resist passage. In fact, I will preface the following analysis with some
such abstraction—a distinction between rhythm performed (said, heard, felt) and
described or talked about. I call the rhythmic-performative “R1,” and the descrip-
tion of rhythm (about rhythm) “R2.” R1 is the actually felt or sensed course of events,
or their emergence; a process of event-formation in which repetition is transformed
into novelty and felt as such, felt as fully “now.” R2 is an intellectual construction
of rhythm involving naming, description, analysis—any thinking about. A domi-
nant variety of R2 overvalues itself to the point of denigrating or denying R1, the
temporal or performative. R1 is denigrated when it is dismissed as mere perfor-
mance, merely subjective. To the extent the temporal, dynamic, ongoing is a threat
to stability—to fixed objects, eternal laws; to the extent there is the threat of evanes-
cence and disappearing, ineffability and loss of control, R2 moves to eliminate R1
as an illusion—the illusion of time’s arrow, or of time as anything more than a mere
formality. But since R2 here means any construction, it can also refer to event-or
process-based constructions such as I will explore with poetry.
I specify the difference when I speak of the old R2 or ask for a new R2. Again, any
R2 will, in fact, be its own R1 as it is actually done. Thus, there is no real escape from
time or passage. It is crucial to understand that R2 must be performed—in speaking,
reading, writing, thinking about (all present progressive tense). Moreover, music-
poetic rhythmic performances and practices are never isolated from discourses.
Positing R1 as primary does not denigrate or demote such discursive (R2) activities,
but acknowledges the primacy of temporality and process. It also suggests a perhaps
inescapable (more or less Diltheyian) hermeneutic circle connecting R1 and R2;
suggesting also that such regenerative, rhythmic work can be more or less creative,
more or less sterile. Positing R2 as secondary is to recognize that no R2 description
can capture an intricacy that is always on the move. But we can make room for intri-
cacy if we make room for movement, and perhaps fashion an R2 practice that might
remember and honor its R1 involvements.
III
The “Hymn to Pan” stands out in Endymion as a fictively pre-composed piece, a

poem within the poem, sung by a chorus.2 An imaginary-archaic ritual invocatio,
2 Two weeks after the publication of Endymion, these five stanzas were excerpted and published as “Hymn
to Pan,” in Yellow Dwarf (May 9, 1818).
O thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang (1)
From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth
Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death
Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness;
Who lov’st to see the hamadryads dress (5)
Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken;
And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken
The dreary melody of bedded reeds—
In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds
The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth;
Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth (11)
Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx—do thou now,
By thy love’s milky brow!
By all the trembling mazes that she ran,
Hear us, great Pan! (15)
Figure 15.1 Keats, “Hymn to Pan,” first stanza (from Endymion, Book 1, lines 232–46),
annotated.
the first stanza (one long sentence!) proceeds by naming the attributes of the god
whose name is withheld until he is at last ready to be brought into full presence. This
withholding is at the same time a holding on to the initial sonorous address O thou!,
which evolves as the stanza goes on, holding and developing of the god’s atten-
tion. Pan here is approached as a latent power to be coaxed from his eternal realm,
awakened, pulled into the mundane, and reminded of his experience of suffering—
his loss of Syrinx—that can make him open to human need. There is in this invo-
cation a progression from naming and describing his immemorial habitat (ll. 1–4);
to his seeing (5–6) and then hearing (7–10); to his remembering (Bethinking) a
crucial incident (11–14) that brings remorse or pity; and finally, to his naming—
recognizing and being called forth by his name: O thou! . . . Hear us, great Pan!
Reading this stanza, we can live through a discourse or course of thought—a
dense, moving journey, vividly present. I have chosen this passage in part because
it is so clearly designed to hold on to its opening gesture of address.3 The word-
sounds that carry the address vanish right away but are carried on by others, and so
continue working through the passage. Thus, O thou! is sustained in the following
phrase, beginning with whose, and again in Who lov’st to see (5) . . . dost sit, and
hearken (7) . . . Bethinking thee (11) . . . Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx—do thou now
(12), By thy love’s milky brow (13), and finally in his audacious naming, Hear us,
great Pan! (15). The words of the initial address need not be remembered, because
they are never dismembered from the course that follows. They are there in the in-
tensification of bringing forth the god, the acceleration of lines 11–15, and in the
closing of the stanza. They are held in this way only by moving, carrying the rhythm
forward. That is, they are sustained by continuing to inform senses that are made
only by virtue of their power to inform—a power sustained/made possible only
by what is made of them, by their successors—followers that hold the fate of their
success.
In the extrinsic mode of R2, we step outside the flow to identify and hold on
to separate parts (like O thou! and Who lov’st), and so make a different discourse
with its own (much less compelling) rhythm. Perhaps we can negotiate this differ-
ence by experimenting with the text as an opportunity for spoken performance and
so oscillate between R1 (saying) and R2 (thinking about saying). Rather than ac-
count for the structure of the text or talk about it as something given, we can ex-
periment with it, by saying it. Let’s say the goal of saying is to stay with the evolving
rhythmic course of thought. Although each saying will be different, constraints
will be general—habits, rules, laws of speech (postulated by theories of prosody,
syntax, semantics). Variation in saying around these constraints will help us better
understand them.
Let’s begin by saying the first line, syllable-by-syllable. As M. H. Abrams
demonstrates, syllables are “mouth events,” gestures that begin and end either in
silence, or in beginning a new gesture, an immediately following syllable.4 The
rhythm of syllables is, I propose, the way they flow from one into another. The mo-
tion is continuous from one part to another, each becoming what it is by virtue of
an informing past and future. These syllable-parts are thus events or becomings that
become determinate entities whose achieved definiteness is both their pastness (as
determined) and their future-directedness (as potentially determining).
As they pass, the syllables prepare one another. We can feel/hear the vowel re-
bound in O thou!, thou setting up whose (feel the pursing of the lips in O, thou, and
3 Hasty, “Rhythmusexperimente—Halt und Bewegung.”

4 M. H. Abrams, Fourth Dimension of a Poem, 1–29, 30–52, eloquently describes poetry as involving “the
lungs, throat, mouth, tongue, and lips,” especially in “the material, articulative aspect of Keats’ language” (32).
whose). Feel/hear the sudden darkening (the movement to the back of the mouth)
from mighty palace-to -roof, and farther, through doth to hang. Notice also the fric-
ative, labiodental-to-linguadental movement from lips––roof––to tongue––d oth.
Hear the “timings” of such movements; they are part of the how of our saying,
influencing and influenced by all the countless factors that contribute to the po-
etic discourse. This how is what I call, adjectivally, “the rhythmic.” Feeling the flow
of syllables also involves specifically metrical differences, quantitative-qualitative
distinctions variously called “strong-weak,” “long-short,” “accented-unaccented,”
“beat-offbeat.” Traditionally, the alternation of such differences has been framed as
the production of poetic feet, separate units arranged in a line—here five iambic
feet structuring the ten syllables. This traditional R2 description, even if it could
be satisfactorily applied to all lines of iambic pentameter (which it has not been),
cannot capture the intricacy of a rhythmic performance. Indeed, no R2 description
can capture an intricacy that is always on the move. But we could make more room
for intricacy were we to make more room for movement. The approach I advocate
here has the analytic virtues of R2 while being open to the novelty/particularity of
R1—a sort of R2 that can experiment with and learn from R1 by explicitly taking
passage into account. To find a place for passage, prosodic objects would have to be
conceived as events that can emerge in our actual saying. Phonological prosodists
have been far more ready than poetic prosodists to focus on such events.5
“Can emerge” here indicates a bridge from labeled object (R2) to performance
(R1), and perhaps (ideally) back again, returning with more questions about the
object and its labeling. This bridging is made by experiment. Thus my invitations
to feel/hear the vowel repetition O thou!, itself preparing whose, and the darkening
movement to the back of the mouth with -roof all ask for testing. These things/
actions present opportunities for our saying, with the implication that such
attending can valuably extend or enhance our attention.
As a written or remembered artifact, poetry, like music, is an opportunity for
experimentation, saying/hearing/reading, again and again. Thus poetry is un-
like the “spontaneous,” unwritten speech of phonological prosody. And yet, as re-
corded or transcribed by the phonologist, the latter too is an artifact that invites
experimentation. Testing is common also in poetic analysis, where scansions are
tried out and revised. Traditional scansion practices are pedagogically useful in
drawing attention to duration and patterning in the saying of poetry. If successful,
traditional pedagogy serves as scaffolding for increasingly complex sayings. As a
vehicle for learning, traditional prosody leads to a complexity beyond its own lim-
ited categories. Indeed, if we take temporality seriously our aim cannot be to dis-
cover the way poetry should be said—it will always be said anew. Certainly, there
are more or less satisfying, more or less sensitive readings that take more or less
of the poem’s intricate potentiality into account. But more potential remains than
any performance can deliver, including incompatible potentials. This inescapable
5 E.g. Attridge, Poetic Rhythm on “beats” and emphasizing performance.

multiplicity is the cumulative, historical (temporal) work of poetry in human so-

ciety. For those literary scholars who value univocity, such multiplicity can seem a
danger; for an actor, reader, or poet, it is a blessing. Similarly, performing musicians
are keenly attuned to the inexhaustibility of the artifact, though musicologists posit
underlying, fully determined and fixed structures. Where research focuses on pro-
cess (open, experimental, novel, negotiable), rather than on product as “artwork”
(fixed, closed, same), there will be less need to determine what will or should be
said—an impossible goal in any case.
Speaking the first line of the “Hymn to Pan,” we can feel/hear five beats, marked
| in Figure 15.1.6 Offbeats are marked \ or /depending, as we shall see later, on their
movement relative to a preceding or following beat: \ designates arsic function
(falling, moving away from) and /anacrustic function (rising, moving toward). My
proposal opposes the traditional construal of beats and offbeats as ultimately sep-
arate (externally related) entities, each occupying its own temporal slot; rather, the
relation is a temporal dependency in the creation of duration. Beats, I argue, last
through the whole duration that leads from one beat to the next. Offbeats in var-
ious ways continue this becoming-duration. Rather than “offbeat” I prefer to say
“continuation.” Continuation (\ or /) names that part-event that does not end the
present event (|). Thus, in the situations labeled | \ and | /, the slanted line does not
end the duration promised by the vertical. Continuation is the beat’s duration, its
enduring. The marks /and \ designate articulated continuations, themselves events
that begin and end and have their own durations. We could conceive of them as
separate “units” only by disregarding their function of continuing the creation of
an event already underway. Traditional R2 construes separate units. The difference
between R2 units and R1 events is that the former, unlike the latter, are independent
of process/passage. To construct an R2 that respects the temporality of R1, we must
turn from unit-object to event. An event begun (|) is present as long as it is going on,
growing in duration, in the process of determining what it will eventually be when
it becomes past. Moreover, its becoming is not only its present process of deter-
mining “itself ” but also its becoming determined—some (definite, ended) thing—
for others yet to come. The new beat beginning with migh- doesn’t come out of
nowhere (as does O), but out of the preceding beat thou! whose (| /), inheriting that
beat’s duration as a potential for its own. Again, no event is without actual and po-
tential involvement in others. We later consider the emergence of successive beats
as measured and measuring, but for now let’s take beats as given, and inquire farther
into their internal structuring.
The distinction between two sorts of continuation, \ and /, is a functional one,
between “closing” (“moving away from”) and “opening” (“moving toward”). In
saying the first line, O can be felt leading to thou (much as whose moves on to
mighty), whereas -ty can be felt following or receding from migh- (as -lace trails
after pa-). For the function labeled \ we can use the terms “afterbeat,” “offbeat,”
6 Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, discusses “beats,” emphasizing performance.

or “thetic,” and for /“upbeat” or “anacrustic.” We might say that \ depends on a

prior |, for we are still attached to the present duration. Our interest is in being-
in this duration, feeling how much time is left to complete the present event. The
backslash \ does not imply a retrospective looking-back—the time that’s left is
definitely moving ahead. Anacrusis (/) looks forward, feeling how much time
we have to prepare for the upcoming event. The functions \ and /are quantita-
tive and qualitative categories. Anacrusis is in a sense untethered from depend-
ence on the event already begun, but not from continuing the duration already
begun. This untethering tends to happen relatively late in the beat duration, close
to the following beat. Afterbeats usually occur closer to their beat’s beginning.
Being untethered allows anacrusis to precede a first beat, as in O. In such cases,
anacrustic function emerges only when its follower (thou!) comes to have a suffi-
ciently long duration to become a first beat, always a duration longer than that of
the anacrusis.
The feeling of afterbeat (arsis) and upbeat (anacrusis) is a matter of both
timing and aim. Timing here is a decision of when to move based on how much
time we have left in the present duration, and on our aim in moving; timing al-
ways involves aim. “Timing” is used here as an R1 term, an activity—as, for ex-
ample, when we speak of an athlete’s, actor’s or comedian’s timing. Such timing
is fully contextual, a choice for when to say involving complications of intona-
tion, situation, and aim. In this broad sense, “timing” might be another word for
rhythm focused on the production of new events. For \, the aim is of completing
and thus holding onto the beat duration, before moving to the next beat, and it
considers how long the present beat might last; for /, the aim is of completing
and thus holding onto the duration now begun, \ “measures” how long the pre-
sent event might yet last. For /, the aim is moving to the next beat as a new
beginning—how much time we yet have before the upcoming new event. We
might think of the difference as that of a focus on the closing (\) and opening (/
) of a present event.
Often the distinction is syntactically-semantically motivated. The contin-
uation whose (/) opens to and asks for something (whose what?), a noun that
eventually emerges in palace-roof. The intensive auxiliary doth (/) asks for a
verb (leaving behind the palace-roof that does the hanging). And since the verb
hang here is intransitive it can hang briefly at the end of the line. The syllable -
ty (\) completes migh-; thus migh- asks for -ty. These askings-for are potentials
actualized in the line’s rhythmic flow: \ a potential for actualization within
the present beat, and /a potential for actualization in a successor. To perform
this stanza is to experiment with rhythms of actualizing potentials. This ex-
perimentation will lead to a variety of timings far more subtle than indicated
by the symbols |, \, and /and perhaps call into question some of the labelings
I have suggested (for example, in line 8 the -dy of melody might be suppressed
as a beat, as might that in line 14 if we accelerate to ran; in line 13, thy might
begin a beat continued by love’s). Notice especially the variety of patterns among
the lines—only lines 2 and 4 are given the same sequence of labels, but even
here there are differences in timing. The continuation in jagged can come more
quickly than that in unseen, and heavy peacefulness asks for a longer fourth beat
than does overshadoweth. None of the movements labeled |, \, or /is actually the
same in performance.
We know there are beats because we can feel them. The feeling is not just one of suc-
ceeding events but of successive events that are in some sense “equal” or commensu-
rate. The question then is how beats come to be felt. Again, this is a question of process
(how) rather than product (what). From a processive-temporal perspective, to be is to
be a potential for further becomings. Beats, as events/durations, must have the power
to affect a successor, to shape its becoming. To turn from products to process and thus
acknowledge temporal difference I suggest the term “projection” as a “throwing forth”
of one (past) event’s relevance for a (present) successor. It is a throwing and catching,
two continuous moments, not one relation of equality (“isochrony”) detached from
relata. “Projection” may be held as a general term. The projection of beats in particular
will be one of durational quantity—how much time, how long. Quantity or “length” is
one among many sorts of relevance. Later we will consider other sorts of projection.
For now, “projection” will be an abbreviation for the quantitative-durational projec-
tion of beats, and thus synonymous with meter. Thus, meter is understood not deter-
ministically or mechanistically, but as fully creative.
To focus first on feelings of quantitative–durational projection, try saying
O thou, whose mighty
stopping and listening for how long the second beat lasts. Several tries will be useful in
developing a feeling for duration here. The first beat can be lengthened or shortened.
The syllable -ty might come more urgently (quickly) or more leisurely (slowly). We
can listen for a more or less clear ending of the second beat. Or we can take this du-
ration for the precise timing of a following beat, saying palace. If we do choose to say
palace, we can experiment with earlier or later sayings, and with sayings too early or
too late, where “too early” could be felt as an interruption of the second beat and “too
late” a hiatus or break in which the second beat no longer works to give us a third.
Although this experiment asks for an unusual attentiveness to durational quantity
in finely observed distinctions, it points to the context-sensitivity of timing and the
special relevance of immediate succession in our decisions of when to say, and how
we value this when. More importantly, such experimentation can also serve quickly
to get us more deeply involved in the poetry. Introducing more context and time
will help hold onto such distinctions. Try the following two (re-composed) lines:
O thou, whose mighty palace roof
Doth hang from jagged trunks

Here four longer beats are marked. Those heard in mighty, -roof, and jagged are
now heard as continuations: still beats in themselves, they function also to con-
tinue larger beats already begun. In this case, try stopping with trunks and listening
for how long this beat lasts. A longer duration can be felt, and it should be easier
to hear the silence after trunks filled with a continuation of the beat’s duration, a
duration inherited from its predecessor. (A similar opening of duration might be
heard in stopping with hang.) We might even feel traces of a \, a silent smaller beat
inherited from the preceding beat’s \ (in jagged). To sharpen the difference projec-
tive context makes, say trunks (or hang) by itself. In this case, duration will be rel-
atively indeterminate—if trunks by itself begins a beat, how long does it last? Here
the silence is not filled with a palpable duration (no more or less definite silent
continuation).
Projection is a single process that involves two moments: the creation of an event
which itself passes into a new creating. I will call these two projective and projected
respectively. Neither is an actual duration. Rather, they are both potentials—
projective potential, potential for a successor, and projected potential, potential
used in the self-creation of a new (present) event, for example, the potential we
attended to in saying/hearing mighty and trunks. Figure 15.2 will facilitate our dis-
cussion: Two events A and B are represented here, each a beat. We can use hand
claps to make the two, again hearing a more or less determinate duration in the si-
lence that follows the second clap. The first event attains its duration only with the
beginning of a second. Its duration is now determined and past—we cannot now do
anything to change this duration. The second event, now present, will attain its du-
ration when it becomes past. The dotted line, labeled P’, symbolizes the relevance of
the past duration in the new event. P’ does not symbolize B’s duration—B will have
its duration when it becomes past, but this duration is not represented here. The
solid line with an arrowhead, labeled P, shows the relevance of a past, determined
duration for a successor. Both P and P’ are potentials or virtuals—creative powers.
P is a potential for future actualization (thus the arrow), and it is a determinate po-
tential (thus the solid line), a fact that can’t be changed. P’ is a potential actualizing
in the present and thus indeterminate or on its way to determinacy (thus the dotted
line). Note that P is not actualized in P’—P’ is still potential, projected into the
event B, inhering as an inheritance from A. P’ is an actualizing potential—“present
A B
P P’
Projective potential Projected potential
Figure 15.2 The two sides of “projection”

potential.” Actual here means present, going on, and so potential can be actual or
actualizing if it is working in a present event.
Two limitations of Figure 15.2 should be pointed out, each detracting from com-
plexity and passage. The diagram shows only one potential working in B, but in any
event there must always be many potentials at work. A and B must involve many
more factors than durational quantity (even with hand claps). And there must be a
context that involves past events preceding A that B must take into account, and fu-
ture events that can shape B’s course and how or what it takes from A (say, preparing
for a third beat). Both these limitations point to the impossibility of an actual same
as one or identity, such as we might represent in a diagram by “A” or a line segment as
a unit. Yet metrics as the science of unit measurement accepts both these limitations
in positing isochrony or a “same time.” Before returning to a reading the “Hymn”,
I shall consider the question of isochrony from the perspective of projection.
The projection of beats is achieved beat-by-beat, each different in what it
achieves and offers. Even in a line where beats are felt as precisely equal, the
isochrony must be achieved beat-by-beat—not given in advance as an already
determined, atemporal grid. “Isochrony” is problematic if it means “the same
length of time” apart from context, and if it implies a train of equal durations
apart from the novel contexts that arise beat-by-beat. The “same” (or “similar”)
implies a comparison of products, entities as faits accomplis, and thus returns us
to an R2 unit-based perspective in which time is a formality. (Again, from a per-
spective of process, beats are faits accomplissant.) Released from these reductions,
isochrony can be thought in processive terms as repetitions of durational quan-
tity arising from the actualization of potentials offered by past durations. Since
this actualization is part of the self-creation of the new event which involves many
factors that together form the context of this becoming, actualization cannot
be separated from contextual complexity. If the context of interwoven factors
supports the actualization of projected potential, and our focus is on duration—
how much time we have for the present event and how much time we have to pre-
pare for the next—we can attune to isochrony as repetition of durational quantity.
Conversely, context may be reduced to favor isochrony. Rather than many factors
working to support this actualization, factors that challenge the actualization may
be suppressed. Whether by a process of enhancing projective potentials, or one of
eliminating conflicting potentials, the actualization of a definite durational po-
tential can become keenly felt, as in the feeling of the new beat. This actualization
can be felt only as difference, the difference of now—the present emergence of a
new. This difference is real. Without this distinction P’ (actualizing) would repro-
duce P (actualized) as exactly the same. This would result in a “pure isochrony” in
which the difference of events would be that of position on a timeline. In such a
determined world there would be no novelty, no passage. This would be the world
of classical deterministic physics in which temporal passage, “the arrow of time,”
is seen as illusory, in which time can be understood as the difference of times
conceived as a numerical order.
There is another problem with isochrony, more empirical and so more difficult
to deal with—the question of what counts as the same. Repetition of quantity can
be highly variable. Successive beats can be the same but shorter or longer, faster, or
slower. Successive beats can also be “just right,” “dead-on.” A keen feeling of “the”
beat is not simply a matter of objective clock-time duration, but also also of focus
or prominence. With much accentual verse, a keen feeling of what we might call
strict isochrony is a dominant factor in our saying. In the nursery rhyme, “Humpty-
Dumpty” (Figure 15.3), a “sing-song” isochrony determines the precise timing of
syllables leading to an “equal division” of beats in triplets, even where there is only
one continuation, as in Hump-ty: one-(two)-three.
In Figure 15.3 I have reluctantly distinguished arsic (\) and anacrustic (/
) continuations—the dominance of triplets can overshadow the phonological de-
pendencies to make the distinction otiose. The contrasting (compounded) third
line can invite a variation in the triplets, lengthening the first syllable and making
the second shorter in a “dotted rhythm” (to use the musical term). Thus inflected,
the second continuation of the second beat in line 4, to-, can be similarly shortened
(such “dotted rhythms” are still within the triplet). To further illustrate the pressure
of these beats, try substituting for the last line the following: Couldn’t put Humpty-
Dumpty together again. I believe that there will be only one way to do this (finer
points of timing aside) and that it will come easily. The power of these beats derives
from a projective depth indicated by labeling alternating beats as continuations of
larger beats. As evidence of these greater projections, notice the duration opened by
the last syllable of the substitution—(a)gain. To test the projection, try beginning
the poem again from here. When is the right time to say Humpty-? What would
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,
And all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
Figure 15.3 One version, among many, of the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” as
an illustration of the determinacy of tetrameter (and also as an example of the pattern
long-long-short-short-long)
O thou, whose might· y pal· ace roof doth hang
S L S L S L S L S L
Figure 15.4 The first line said as strict iambic pentameter (five isochronous beats each
of the form “weak-strong”) in obvious violation of the line’s complexity
seem too soon? What is the effect of waiting “too long” or the difference “too late”
makes?7
Rather than limit isochrony to such situations, I speak of degrees of isochrony,
but loosely, given the variety of applications. I distinguish relatively strict isochrony
from loose, flexible isochrony, and treat -chrony not as clock-measured time but as
event-measured duration. Duration in the intended sense is not a purely quantitative
timespan, but a spanning of time in the old sense of stretching or reaching across.
Thus we might think of duration substantively as an action, a process of enduring
(from durus, hardening, solidifying) or becoming an event. Duration in this sense
blurs the quantity–quality distinction. The continuations labeled \ and /shape dura-
tion, as do the syntactic/semantic values of the words we say, the physical movements
of our bodies (vocal apparatus), and the larger socio-cultural environments of our
saying—all working together. If isochrony can never be an exact repetition, and if
what constitutes similarity in duration is quantitative–qualitative, we can allow for
degrees of isochrony and perhaps allow that there may be situations in which the
isochronous–non-isochronous distinction is not clear-cut.
To experiment with projection in the first line, let’s try three performances in
order of increasing attunement to the complications of context, taking more into ac-
count in our timing of beats/syllables. First (Figure 15.4), a strict-isochronous sing-
song reading of five iambic feet, where iambic means /|. To make the continuations
anacrustic—against the grain of syntactic-semantic dependencies—we must make
the continuations short, moving them close to the following beats. This reading
demonstrates (purported) iambic feet. Although the decision to reproduce iambs
is made prior to the performance as part of the context of performance (in this case
a context that works to limit the context of other factors), the performance is still
made beat-by-beat—not predetermined by an atemporal grid.
In Figure 15.5 the performance is more open to difference and variation in
timing with the distinction of /and \ (“iambs” and “trochees”). The more or less
equal spacing of beats shown here represents, like Figure 15.4, a relatively strict
7 Concerning question of scale, one might feel some trace of even larger projective potentials in which
the second half of the line functions as continuation (by focusing in two rather than four beats per line).
Such a possibility would clearly show that projection is dependent on many factors (for example, beginning
again Humpty-, emerging parallelisms, rhyme). In this connection, a large pattern emerges in this poem, one
found in other poems (all limericks, for example), and in many musical phrases comprised of four “measures”
(not necessarily bars). As here, the third line or measure is “compounded” or “divided” relative to the others,
leading us hear a sort of acceleration or compression in the third part as, say: long | long | short-short | long or
| | | \ |. See my Meter as Rhythm, 113–15, 225–36 for discussion of this pattern in music.
isochrony. Note that in Figures 15.4 and 15.5, unlike Figure 15.3, there is no robust
larger projective environment to support a strict isochrony, just a decision to deliver
the line “in time”—the time of a purported five-beat regularity (and in Figure 15.4,
a five-foot regularity). But here, unlike Figure 15.4, we might relax the regularity,
or give less keen awareness to it as we attend to other things, such as the timings of
continuations (and perhaps feel the change from “iambs” to “trochees” and back
again).
Figure 15.6 shows further differences in timing, taking more into account than
the distinctions of /and \, and allowing a freer, more variable isochrony. Should
we call such a performance non-isochronous? The performance represented here
(where line-segment length loosely corresponds to durational quantity) shows an
acceleration to –roof.
This performance begins with longish O thou! taking into account the focus
on this address, which is to be held throughout the stanza, the punctuation, and
the emerging syntactic/semantic in which the anacrustic whose promises a new
clause. Experimenting with a relatively slow tempo may be helpful, at least initially,
in giving more time for feeling variation and for sensing potentials for rhythmic
complexity. After experimenting with this slow tempo, the line can be said faster
(much like practicing a piece of music). If migh-ty is said quickly we will be left
with a long stretch if we attempt to reproduce the first beat’s duration—we must
either endure a long silence or begin to intone the second syllable. One solution is
to move more quickly to a third beat. The projective potential of the first beat is still
relevant in the second if we feel an acceleration—indeed, this potential is precisely
what allows a feeling of acceleration. If we were to shorten further the second beat,
making it too short—too short to realize the projected potential—the result would
O thou, whose might·y pal·ace roof doth hang
S L S S L S L L S L
Figure 15.5 The first line said as five more or less isochronous beats, but now allowing
for complexities of “weak” and “strong”
O thou, whose might·y pal·ace roof doth hang
S L S S L S S L S L
Figure 15.6 The first line said as five “flexibly isochronous” beats whose flexibility or
variability is determined (or “controlled”) by higher levels of complexity
be felt as an interruption, palace-coming too soon. But note that this feeling too is
the product of projection, a projection interrupted. The power (potential, virtue)
of projection is weakened only by withdrawing attention, feeling less, taking
less into account. Now that we have begun an acceleration, we will be inclined
to continue it, for acceleration is now part of the second beat’s projective poten-
tial. The third beat inherits from the second not an “absolute” length but accelera-
tion (projection is thoroughly relative and contextual). Nothing here contravenes
this inheritance; much supports it. Palace-is emerging as a second adjective, like
mighty, still under the sway of whose and not yet (fully) discharged in the promised
noun. Palace-, like mighty, has a short first syllable. Indeed, in the mouth pa- can
move to -lace more easily and hence more quickly than migh-to -ty. There is also
a syntactic-semantic intensification at work that can serve acceleration: [mighty
[palace-[roof]]]. Acceleration is broken in the fourth beat with -roof. Here is our
long-awaited noun and the opening for a verb. (Notice that acceleration might be
continued by further compounding: for example, whose mighty palace-by-the-sea.)
It is from -roof that the relative clause closes in doth hang (whose . . . roof doth
hang). The deceleration makes -roof momentarily focal and sets up the verb (doth)
hang, which will be crucial for comprehending the larger clause (lines 1–4)—doth
hang will be revived or sustained in overshadoweth, which in turn must be held
for its adverbial phrase in heavy peacefulness at the end of the clause. Notice too
that a feeling/hearing of the sudden darkening in -roof (from mighty and especially
palace-) enhances/is enhanced by the deceleration. As a measure of the force of a
possible multidimensional focus on -roof, notice that it is here possible to break
the “Compound Rule,” requiring a stress for the first element of a compound word,
and here to stress -roof relative to palace-.
These rhythmic possibilities are motivated (in part) by syntactic possibilities,
and serve the syntax in an ongoing process of making sense. The qualifier whose
implies (creates syntactic projective potential for) some as yet unspecified noun.
We await the appearance of “the” noun, even if we “know” it in advance; and it is
in this particular waiting that we are in time and rhythm. The qualifier whose also
implies a verb that would follow the noun (a “what” for the noun to be or to do—
here, finally, to hang) and thus opens the prospect for a longer clause, helping us
hold onto the movement from whose to the end of the clause. Whose is our link to
thou! (sustaining thou!) and remains throughout the first four lines. Its renewal in
who, line 5, initiates a second phrase-event and thus an end to the first. And again,
O thou! lasts well beyond its qualifiers, whose and who (thee and thou). Implying,
awaiting, opening the prospect for, remaining, renewing, reviving, sustaining,
holding, these point to a sort of projection, a working-in—present into future, or
past into present. But in contrast to the quantitative-durational projection of beats,
lexical-semantic and syntactic projection does not require immediate succession—
whose can be effective long after the word has ceased to sound. As we move to larger
contexts we will return to the question of other sorts of projection and to contexts
that expand beyond beats.
IV
Having come to the end of our first line we are already on the threshold of a larger
context, that of the line-event. Lines ask to be performed/heard as events, things
that begin and end. The following line is a new beginning. What then of the pro-
jective potential of the fifth beat? Does the first beat of a line take its measure from
the last beat of the preceding line? It is difficult to generalize. Indeed, even within
a line, projective relevance may be attenuated through hiatus (as in line 12 fol-
lowing Syrinx), and there can be great variety in the distinctness with which beats
are felt (for example, in lines 8 and 11).8 Such situations are neither defective nor
departures from the norm; beat suppression is a part of projective complexity (in
how many iambic pentameter lines can we feel clearly only four beats?). The emer-
gence of line-events carries its own complexity—the sixth beat (jagged) is now also
a first beat with its own anacrusis from (like O, thou!). There is now a continuity
of lines as well as beats. However it is accomplished in terms of timing, stress, and
pitch contour, the articulation of lines involves a feeling of beginning again and,
in the case of this stanza, beginning a new line of iambic pentameter. Does the
articulation of lines create the poetic meter or does the poetic meter make the lines?
Without the need to continue making pentameter lines there would be no reason to
hear hang as an ending (it is not an ending in my recomposed version on page 241).
Iambic pentameter is a form, a complex potential made of countless lines
internalized (learned, memorized, embodied) by poets and readers. I suggest that
such a form does not work as an out-of-time abstraction (except in pedagogical
contexts) but instead as a repertory of many past experiences constrained by a rule
that might be most simply put: (1) ten syllables (or nine if “headless,” or eleven if
a final continuation) most often beginning with anacrusis, (2) predominately one
continuation per beat, (3) five beats (or four where there are more continuations).9
Thus, a play between the constraint of syllable “count” and the constraint of beat
“count”—where “count” is internalized, becomes a bodily feel. Having these two
dimensions in play in this way is part of the charm of this form or habit. Think
of form as our habits of playing, and not just the rules of the game. Such a form
(like “the” sonnet, sonata, chaconne) has power or potential because it has so often
been repeated that it has become a rich reservoir of past experiences for readers and
writers of poetry.10 But the form would not have been so often repeated (to become
8 In line 8 the -dy of melody could enter early as a syncopation. In syncopation the syllable enters just before
the beat it bears (which must be felt as such for there to be an early or “just before”), as if an anacrusis were to
become a following beat, perhaps to detach from the crucial (for Pan) mention of bedded reeds. Line 11 is the
turning point—Bethinking thee. (Note the ending of line 10 with the triple, | \ \.) Here it is easy to say the two
beats of melancholy quickly, twice as fast as the two preceding beats, thus making -choly a continuation of the
larger beat, and perhaps give momentum for moving straight into the next line Thou hou wast to lose. (As we
shall see, from here it may be tempting to depart from the pentameter norm.)
9 These three constraints clearly work together—any two taken together will produce the third.
10 Of course, the question arises: which version of “the” sonnet, sonata, chaconne? Indeed, each of these
terms has its own taxonomical structure or history. That is to say, form need not be understood as a fixed and
separate entity, nor need structure be thought fixed if it is possible to think of structure in terms of history.
a b c d e
P P’
Q Q’
R R’
S S’
Figure 15.7 Beat-to-beat projections in which each new event is focally aware simply
of its immediate predecessor
a form) if it did not offer something of value. In its long history, iambic pentam-
eter has been developed on the basis of changing cultural values. Many writers have
pointed to the values of complexity and spontaneity as opportunities afforded by the
iambic pentameter line.11 Derrick Attridge has specifically pointed to the resistance
of the line to the strong inclination toward “doubling” found in tetrameter (creating
“2-beat” potentials such as we saw on pages 241 and Figure 15.3).12 One value that
emerges from the choice of five beats is a flexibility with regard to continuations
and timing, allowing departures from strict isochrony. Flexible timing is made pos-
sible by an openness to contextual complexity generally suppressed in tetrameter.
Comparatively strict or flexible here does not imply more or less metrical verse
(meter is not a rigid grid). From a temporal or projective perspective, pentameter
is no less metrical than tetrameter (nor “free rhythm” necessarily less metrical than
strict). Flexibility in timing is a mark of intense potentials working together, and
thus an intensely metrical phenomenon.
As we saw on page 241, four beats can give rise to a larger beat where beats 2 and
4 become continuations. Since the diagram in Figure 15.2 showed only two beats,
we should explore this possibility with more complex diagrams, that provide an
opportunity to consider projection further. Figure 15.7 represents four consecutive
projections.
I have omitted event labels and added brackets to represent the actual achieved
durations (a–e) of the five events. Again, the dotted lines are potentials, not actuals.
For each event is shown an actualized duration (a–e); a potential for its actualiza-
tion (dotted line); and a potential for actualization in another event (line with ar-
rowhead). In Figure 15.8 things are more complicated.
Discussing Figure 15.2, I said that one limitation of the diagram was in not
showing anything before A (or after B). Figure 15.8 shows more context. The third
beat enters a world of relevance larger than that of beat 2, and thus can assume a
larger potential. Here, I show the emergence of a projective potential R given to
the new beginning with beat 3 as a potential for reproduction (R’), and I show this
11 E.g., Easthope, Poetry as Discourse.

12 Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, 153–8, finds the power of doubling so strong that he classifies pentameter as one
of many non-quadratic, non-2 × 2 meters.
I II III IV
1 2 3 4 5 6(1) 7(2) 8(3)
P P’ T T’
denial of
Q projective potential
U
R R’
S S’
interruption
(denial of projected potential)
Figure 15.8 A representation of projective complexity showing the resistance of a

five-beat line to the determinacies of four, or rather two, beats (Attridge’s “doubling”).
NB: this diagram is not meant to represent the complexity of most “pentameter” lines
where a reduction to two is not an issue. (Indeed, in some “pentameter” nine-or ten-
syllable lines there are four beats, but these situations are hardly “square.”)
potential actualized in the duration of a second, larger beat labeled II.13 What then
of the relevance of beat 2? Here I suggest a denial of Q’ (crossed out) in a second
beat-event that takes its measure from a now first beat (I). In this way beat 2 becomes
a continuation. Beat 2 is still relevant for beat II, as is beat 1. The first event (I) would
not be this event with this potential (R) apart from all that constitutes it. To show
beat 2’s potential in this new context we might, instead of crossing Q out, move Q’
over a space to fall under beat 4, showing a delay of Q’ rather than a denial of Q. This
might account for our timing of a corresponding continuation in beat II (and of
the vivid feeling of silent beats). Perhaps both denial and delay can be involved and
more one or another depending on context. For example, since beat II is from the
start actualizing an R’ potential, beat 4 will emerge already as continuation and not
as “denied beginning,” as if it knew nothing of its fate. Or we might imagine a situ-
ation when we feel a sudden expansion into larger measure and thus denial of the
smaller. Such possibilities point to the openness of potentials in their emergence
(and, more specifically, to the projective relevance of continuations which did not
appear in Figure 15.2). Things can change quickly in complex situations.
Figure 15.8 shows a projection S–S’ interrupted by the beginning of a new beat
IV (if large) or 6 (if small, and thus a sudden reduction of beat length). The inter-
ruption (\→ |) actively denies projected potential S’ (rather than a denial of pro-
jective potential as in Q) and might be felt as a too-early new beat. There must be
reasons for feeling beats. For present purposes, let’s say that beat 6 (or IV) begins a
new line. So if we have large projective potentials—“2-beat” projective potentials
(i.e., two small beats)—we now have two choices: to wait before beginning the new
13 For illustration try trimeter, saying, “O thou! whose mighty roof /Doth hang from jagged trunks” hearing
a long measured duration with roof before beginning the second line; or Blake’s “I love the jocund dance, /The
softly breathing song.”
line, allowing S’ to play itself out (as in trimeter, the earlier odd number), by default
making six beats, or to begin the new line as an interruption.14 Neither choice is
what iambic pentameter aims for. The solution is to avoid 2-beat measures or re-
duce their strength, as in Figure 15.6 where acceleration and deceleration cut across
possible 2-beat measures following the 1 + 3 + 1 syntactic division: O thou! | whose
mighty palace-roof | doth hang. This sort of reduction reflects an opening of the line
to an intricacy of context not afforded by larger measures. Complexity of many
potentials (factors) working together can complicate beat projection. Projection is
enhanced, not weakened, by becoming more variable—free to respond to context
(more possibilities for performance, more challenging to perform, rewarding more
attentiveness and experimentation).
For iambic pentameter, a fifth beat offers a sixth relatively little. The sixth beat
here begins a new line and is thus a new first beat. Felt as a new beginning, the
second line-event can (perhaps must) escape local projective obligations arising at
the end of the first line (rather as beat II can escape Q’). This is a crucial moment
for timing, a movement to a new event. Some such crossings are difficult and take
some practice to enact successfully. In performance, they can be a provocation to
test or experiment with the poetic sequence or flow. Meeting this challenge repeat-
edly will develop poetic skill. Rather than of exceptions (with their threat of de-
formation) we might think of poetic refinements, enrichments of the art (technical
refinements) that open new dimensions. Within the constraints of iambic pentam-
eter, how many ways can line elision (ending into beginning) be plausibly done, i.e.,
how many forms/styles of elision are there, which are particularly stylish, when?
Each line presents its own problems/opportunities for articulation involving
many factors—the rhythm of the preceding line; the rhyming of the line ending; the
semantic connection of lines; local inflection (volume or stress, pitch contour, as
well as timing). An ending may be enhanced by suppressing a fifth beat in a “triple
ending” (dactylic | \ \) as in lines 2, 4, and 10 where the final (tenth) syllable is con-
tinuative. Here the following anacrusis, beginning the next line, can have even less
to go on, with a feeling of slowing down in the fourth beat’s lengthening. Notice that
line 4 ending in peacefulness (| \ \) closes the first large clause with the new begin-
ning, Who . . . (corresponding to the initial whose but moving the next step closer
to the god: from attributes/possessions to actions, verbs). At the end of line 2, the
triple overshadoweth is by contrast, an opening, crucial in that it must be held all the
way to peacefulness (doth hang . . . and overshadoweth . . . in heavy peacefulness). In
this long stretch, a sort of pausing, holding up, or holding onto overshadoweth helps
make the syntactic/semantic connection. In line 10, overgrowth (| \ \) ends the next
large clause which initiates the intimate address, Bethinking thee, leading to Pan’s
naming. Notice that the next line is broken by hiatus (||, a dissolution of projection)
14 To see this potential, try saying the two lines of recomposed verse on page 241, hearing the two-beat
projections, and then returning to Keats’ pentameter line. It may take some effort to get back into the
pentameter—the tetrameter has a very strong pull.
with the delay of do thou now (with stress on the do to carry into the imperative Hear
in the final line), which initiates a departure from iambic pentameter into trimeter,
preparing, two lines later, the turn to dimeter. This metrical change could be pre-
pared by the enjambment of line 11 and 12 motivated by syntax (loth Thou wast) in
the emergence of continuous beats across the lines (loth Thou wast to lose | /| /|),
thus providing an acceleration to fair Syrinx as an end. (The end rhyme growth-loth
is weakened by the clause division and perhaps more immediately by the alliterative
connection of loth and lose.) In any case, the hiatus (||) opens the possibility for a
shift (perhaps ecstatic) to a “displaced” or especially urgent and risky new pentam-
eter line, Do thou now, By thy love’s milky brow. The rhyme now-brow would argue
by “rule” (de jure), but rhythm always asks for much more than rule. In fact, such a
transitional displacement may again be turned in hearing the (possibly accelerated)
expansion from By thy love’s milky brow to By all the trembling mazes that she ran.
How long to wait to say line 15, when will the time be just right?
In attending to these line-articulations, much more context was taken into ac-
count than that of adjacent beats, but still less than the situation requires. The emer-
gence of a new line from the old is predicated on there being, or rather becoming, a
new pentameter line, which cannot happen immediately. The promised line takes
time to emerge, even if we decide to make it happen. (Try, for example, beginning
the second line and stopping with trunks, noticing the tendency of the new line
fragment to attach to the first line as a continuation). Potential is continuous, not
incremental but spread through the whole duration.
The preceding discussion of quantitative-durational projection or meter took

syntax and, to a lesser extent, semantics, explicitly into account—the distinction
of the two, certainly in poetry, is not clear-cut. Since rhythm involves all these
categories (and more) we must consider more specifically the role of syntax and
semantics. Seeing projections of durational quantity or meter as fluid and cumula-
tive, rather than as a series of discrete moves, helps us view this sort of projection as
continuous with syntactic and semantic projection. This is not the place to develop
a temporalized syntax or semantics; theorizing them in terms of rhythm would re-
quire new categories replacing products with process.15 But in closing I would like
to trace some contributions that syntax and semantics make to the rhythm of Keats’
stanza, thus suggesting further work along these lines.
Let’s begin with the first four lines heard/read as an event that is ended with Who
lov’st to see as a new beginning (a sort of |) that nonetheless continues a larger event
15 Numerous resources explore linguistic and semiotic process. See, for example, the systemic functional
linguistics of Michael Halliday and his followers. Relevant also might be the interdisciplinary work of Jay
Lemke, Stanley Salthe, and Paul Thibault that integrates dynamic systems theory and more or less Peircean
semiotics.
begun in the first line, O thou . . . (rather as beat 2 in Figure 15.8 continues beat
1). I say that the lines 1–4 event is ended with the new beginning, Who lov’st to
see . . . , because lines could have been continued, if, for example, a fifth line were to
begin, In silence. Line 1 is left open with hang. “Hang” asks for something more—
a qualifier (where? how?) answered in From jagged trunks which also moves us
(and Pan) downward from mighty palace-roof. Opening again from doth hang, and
overshadoweth moves us farther down this vegetative world to the forest floor, to
flowers. This transitive verb (overshadoweth) leads to a great expansion in the next
two lines—from six syllables (doth to trunks) to twenty-six. The syntactic expan-
sion is accompanied by semantic expansion in a new topic introduced by Eternal.
The new idea, which may take some time to figure out, could be paraphrased as
follows: We now enter the eternal realm of Pan’s dominion, a place of endless cycles
of birth and death, barely heard or seen (whispers, glooms), eternal because there is
no one here to make distinctions of before and after, beginning and end; a place of
nature passive, unconscious, asleep in heavy peacefulness. This sort of paraphrase
is an R2 thinking about that carries us forward in the thought, but not necessarily
outside it. When we return to saying, such an excursion can leave its traces in a new
saying. If truly felt, this excursus affects the “prosodic” dimensions of sound and
timing.
The next event, Who lov’st to see . . . , brings Pan into the picture and moves us
up again to the canopy (ruffled locks), no longer vegetative but animated by the
hamadryads. Lines 7–10 continue this event (with and), expanding it to six lines.
Yet the immediate promise of continuation in the conjunction of lines 5–6 and 7,
complementing seeing with hearing, can gradually dissipate as we move into this
darker, inward, emotional and musical world (of reeds and pipy hemlock, i.e., Pan’s
pipes) that leads to memory (Bethinking thee) and to a pity that fully awakens Pan’s
self-consciousness in lines 11–15. In this event, lines 5–7 can function as a tran-
sition. The formation of larger syntactic/semantic events is fluid; many events at
various levels, involving all poetic dimensions, unfold together according to the
unique exigencies of performance. The novelty, intensity, or vividness of perfor-
mance is a measure of rhythmicity, and eventfulness.
If the meaning of a poem is thought to reside exclusively in R2 paraphrasable
“content,” rhythm will seem superfluous; and if rhythm is viewed from a customary
R2 perspective, it will be equated with form and its study regarded as formalistic.
From the revised R2 perspective I have been advancing, meaning is a rhythmic ac-
complishment (without rhythm no meaning), involving syntax and semantics no
more nor less than (nor separated from) the “prosodic” or the “musical.” Paraphrase
is, as is every R2, a sort of performance (a “reading” of the text), but because the
semantic “content” seems extractable, holdable outside a reading of the poem’s
words, we can forget that it is a performance, no less subjective, idiosyncratic, and
evanescent than a reading of the poem’s words. Indeed, such “intellectual” content
might be more evanescent because capable of breaking away from the sounding,
sensible, “in-time” making of poetry heard, said, and vividly imagined. What sort of
R2 should we aim for that would value rhythm as temporal and experiential? There
is no end of ways to proceed, and we engage them daily. If an R2, however fash-
ioned, acknowledges its temporality and involvement in worlds of human activity
and exchange, then the distinction between R1 and R2 becomes less clear-cut, per-
haps by being seen as Rhythm itself, in one of its irrepressible manifestations.16 The
alternative—to deny R1—leaves us homeless, worldless: separated from our world
and from one another.
Works Cited
Abrams, M. H., The Fourth Dimension of a Poem, and Other Essays (New York, 2012).
Attridge, Derrick, Poetic Rhythm (Cambridge, 1995).
Easthope, Antony, Poetry as Discourse (London, 2002).
Gendlin, Eugene, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and Psychological
Approach to the Subjective (Evanston, 1997).
Gendlin, Eugene, A Process Model (Evanston, 2017).
Hasty, Christopher, “Rhythmusexperimente: Halt und Bewegung,” in Christian Grüny and
Matteo Nanni, eds, Rhythmus—Balance—Metrum (Bielefeld, 2014), 155–207.
Keats, John, “Hymn to Pan,” ll. 232–46 of Endymion, in Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger
([1818]; Cambridge, MA, 1986), 70.
Polanyi, Michael, Knowing and Being, ed. Marjorie Grene (Chicago, 1969).
Pred, Ralph, Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, MA, 2005).
Rescher, Nicholas, Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy (Albany, 1996).
16 Gendlin, Creation of Meaning, and A Process Model, give a processive semiotic. Polanyi, Knowing and
Being, points to a “rhythmic” movement of focal and subsidiary awareness in learning and discovery.
16
Encoded and Embodied Rhythm
An Unprioritized Ontology
Peter Cheyne
1. Rhythmic description, not prescription
Since Richard Wollheim’s Art and Its Objects appeared in 1968, philosophical
aestheticians have debated the ontology of art objects in terms of the type–token dis-
tinction, later joined by the work–performance distinction between compositions
and their historical instances.1 These analytic debates are foreshadowed by Sartre’s
famous ontology of the musical work being an “unreal” object existing primarily in
imagination—the work being an ideal object that can be physically and historically
instantiated indefinitely within loosely defined parameters.2
A contemporary position that prioritizes performance draws primarily from con-
tinental traditions, sometimes also drawing on process philosophy, to articulate an
important line of thought about the intricacy of performed rhythm. While I think
that position can often be misleading, it comes at root from a perennial experiential
insight that I would hate to see go undefended. Indeed, if it were not promoted by
exponents in this volume such as Christopher Hasty and Deniz Peters,3 and else-
where by musicologists such as Nicholas Cook,4 I should give it more defence my-
self as an expression of the vital, human sense of subjective rhythm, though one that
is very difficult to articulate logically and correctly.
While rhythm that is heard and felt can rightly be described as the “flow” of
performance, many qualities of this embodied, subjective sense starkly contrast
with what I shall call encoded rhythm, or rhythm in an objective sense. Encoded
rhythm refers to the signification of temporal patterning in such documents as mu-
sical scores, printed or manuscript poems, film screenplays and storyboards, dance
notation, and so on. It is important that encoded rhythm (e.g., scores) be unlike
embodied rhythm (e.g., performances), and, as I shall argue, keeping the encoded
1 Wollheim, Art and Its Objects; Davies, Works and Performances.

2 Sartre, The Imaginary.
3 See Chapter 15, Hasty, “Complexity and Passage”; and Chapter 7, Peters, “Rhythm, Preceding its
Abstraction.”
4 Cook, Beyond the Score.
and embodied forms separate, rather than making the encoding more like the final
performance, adds to performative freedom.
Being a bipolar construction, what I call the embodied–encoded dichotomy
comprises two opposite viewpoints, plus a third, which I shall defend, prioritizing
neither pole but rather their interdependence. To take the viewpoint from the
encoded pole is to prioritize the formalism and abstraction of theoretical, critical,
and notational objects: the score, the outline, the written work, the analysis, etc.
Defenders of the opposite viewpoint emphasize that only performed, embodied
rhythm is actual rhythm, as opposed to potential. A corollary of this view is that
while rhythm remains unperformed, encoded in conventional description, its
non-flowing timelessness means that it is held in a non-dynamic state of limbo in
which the encoded form lacks the necessarily temporal, felt features of embodied,
performed, actual rhythm. Described, encoded rhythm, the argument goes, is ab-
stract, and therefore secondary to performance, the concrete reality. More specifi-
cally, the concern is that conventional descriptions of rhythm such as the familiar
musical score and objective analyses that focus on unit-based constructions,
cannot, as Hasty says, “capture an intricacy that is always on the move.”5
Indicating the essentially abstract nature of the description of rhythm, Hasty calls
it an “intellectual construction . . . involving naming, description, analysis”6 whose
inevitable atemporality debars it from what is most essential and alive in rhythmic
performance, namely, the engaging course or flow of artistic works which he calls
“the active and characterful creation of things or events.”7 His main complaint is
that because traditional descriptions of rhythm lack the intricacy of rhythmic per-
formance, they suggest a false notion of rhythm as a timeless element separable
from actual rhythm, which latter he finds only in performance. Suggesting a wider
importance to the debate, Hasty argues that conventional doctrine regarding the
description of rhythm adamantly holds onto the dead part and denies the living,
rhythmic performance. To remedy this complaint, he argues that the traditional
priority of objective description (the conventional score; critical, theoretical ab-
straction) over the subjective interpretation given in performance gets things the
wrong way round.
One might object here that it is possible for a musical score to be drafted be-
fore any instance of its actual performance, and that the score therefore has at
least chronological priority. However, Hasty is likely correct in observing that any
codified composition in fact entails its own performance as it is actually being
made. That is, the composer, as the original describer, must be doing something
like hearing the rhythm in imagination, or tracing it rhythmically in the air by
hand while composing––creating and transcribing––the descriptive document.
Yet, while it weakens arguments for the absolute priority of the score, the view of
5 Hasty, “Complexity and Passage,” 235.

Encoded and Embodied Rhythm 257
composition as imaginative transcription does not imply the straight reversal of

ascribing necessary priority to performance; rather, it suggests objective–subjective
(score–performance) co-generation.
While upholding an unprioritized view, my main concern is not primarily to dis-
pute the logical and chronological priority of actual over described rhythm, or vice
versa. I aim, rather, to defend the ability of conventional description to preserve
the essentials of rhythm-involving artworks, most notably, their flow, albeit in an
encoded way. I shall further argue that conventional description favors intuitive
and expressive interpretation, where more detailed prosodic or musical notation
would be too strictly prescriptive for interpretive leeway. The current chapter, then,
promotes an unprioritized view that emphasizes equally (a) the ability of conven-
tional description to preserve musical works while keeping them open enough for
creative and sensitive interpretation, and (b) the not only valuable but also neces-
sary interpretation involved when performers bring a composition to life.
I contend that while rhythm is perceived through the senses as patterned tem-
porality (involving repetition, pause, continuation, return, etc.) that retains the
past and moves towards a future, none of this intricacy need be lost in conventional
codified description. It is therefore better to retain conventional description for
its referencing advantages and the interpretive freedom it allows. The intricacy of
the actual rhythm can as little prevent its description in objective form as it can
prevent its performance by another skilled performer who is present and listening
attentively. That is, if another musician can hear the performed rhythm and then
perform it anew, it can also be encoded in objective form without requiring any rev-
olutionary techniques of notation.
The subtleties of performance can powerfully affect the listening (and per-
forming) subject, but there is nothing capricious or magical about them. Or rather,
as the nineteenth-century pioneer of musical expression Matthis Lussy remarked,
Composers, in accentuating their works, are obedient to sentiment—to unknown

laws, and not to caprice, though indeed, what is caprice but unconscious obedi-
ence to an impulse from some unknown cause?8
Nuances can be transcribed according to a formal system that relates discrete

elements so that they become part of a flowing whole when performed by a sensitive
and talented musician. The formal—i.e., notateable, conventional, and coherent—
properties of the structure as a whole outperform the sum of the parts taken as dis-
crete units, in a way analogous to how the geometrical structure of an arch provides
resilience ordinarily beyond that of the materials from which it is composed. Much
as the resilience of an arched bridge or an egg maximizes that of its materials, an
artwork taken as a compositional whole has a power that exceeds that of its parts.
Both holistic property kinds—structural resilience in the arch and compositional
8 Lussy, Musical Expression, 3.

power in the artwork—exist as formal, detectable properties in the respective

objects themselves, though their existence is perceived only in experimental or ex-
periential context, as when a bridge or egg undergoes a heavy load or when an art-
work is performed to critical or popular acclaim. Intricacy, then, can be as much an
objective quality of the description or encoding of rhythm as it is of the embodied
performance. Thus, while performance-priority proponents are right to caution
against allowing discussion of rhythm obstinately to maintain the separable dis-
creteness of its elementary units and thereby forget the flow that is its most essential
characteristic, it would be misguided to replace traditional description—e.g., the
conventions of Western sheet music, or those of prosodic terminology—with an
alternative system of coding that added all the extra nuances of expression, timing,
note grouping, accents, offbeat stresses, etc. that many composers in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries increasingly tried to notate to ensure greater control.
Here, in the tension between notation and interpretation, each with a rightful
claim to intuition and expressivity, one must beware the siren call of a pseudo-
problem––as the Vienna Circle and Wittgensteinians would have said––inherent
in the nature of description, and what description of a practice must inevitably leave
out. More precisely, while there is nothing in particular of a practice, of perfor-
mance, that description must leave out, it is nonetheless inevitable that description
must leave some things out and remain incomplete––or open, depending on one’s
viewpoint––a s the description necessarily cannot capture all the minutiae of what
is described. For this, one has technique.
Technique, as Adorno said, is how art thinks.9 In poetry, say, the particulars of
form—as specified as the sonnet or as spontaneous yet musically structured as free
verse—provide a metrical and compositional frame once a rhythm becomes estab-
lished as a trellis over and around which ideas and feelings grow, take shape, and in-
teract. Form does not constrain good poetry, nor is it merely an aid to get creativity
going. Musical and poetic forms are rhythmic and experimental ways of thinking
and working through problems of comprehension and expression, much as in
philosophy syllogism, analysis, dialectic, and dialogue are ways of thinking and
working through problems of understanding and knowledge. The formal structure
(meter, rhythm, technique) and the living part expressed (ideas, feeling, mood) in-
terpenetrate, preventing the two theoretical sides from being truly held apart in any
simple dichotomy.
Through technique, structured levels of meaning and enjoyment are created,
inviting a discovery of thought in the work so that it is encountered as already
thoughtful. Without technical structure imposed by the artist, such thought as
the work does in fact contain could only be reached after considerable conceptual
struggle. With the technically structured artwork, however, the composer presents
the thought for more immediate aesthetic access, as the result of much thought
is presented. The thought that the audience then discovers in the work gives a
9 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 129, 279, 283; Jarvis, “What Does Art Know?”
seemingly miraculous intensity even to, indeed especially to, the simplest artworks.
The understanding and refinement of this structure is the work of prosody, which
reverse-engineers creative technique and works out a more penetratingly percep-
tive system of commentary and annotation that can certainly aid appreciation of
technical aspects in the work, and can sometimes help future composition through
the insights into structure it provides. Yet this very precision, converting the or-
ganic expression into the structuring trellis it originally grew around, can if taken
too far also stifle creative and appreciative possibilities.
Rhythm makes content more accessible. Even when the ideas are not
comprehended, entrance into the mood and aesthetic train of the music is more or
less universal, so long as the listener has at least some cultural acquaintance with
the forms and conventions used. Whether the rhythm is established solo or in con-
cert with other performers, rhythmic expression allows easier access for participa-
tory enjoyment, be it through dance, foot-tapping, or head nods carried through or
imperceptible. Awareness of rhythm in any communication, whether through art,
games, conversation, or simply being together, embodies consideration of others
and invites their fuller involvement. An unconcern for rhythm can lead to unkind-
ness, neglecting the welcoming changes of tempo that make space for others to join
in, and omitting those polite pauses for reflection and assent, which also permit
considered disagreement, rephrasing, and repositioning. This is the open dance of
give-and-take that rhythm creates. In the sense that it is created with the attentive
participation of others in mind at even the most basic, bodily level, rhythm is, as
Andy Hamilton argues, a humanistic phenomenon.10
On the other hand, an exhaustive, per impossibile, prosodic rendering would re-
duce the humanistic element of rhythm by limiting the freedom of access to the
work to one highly specified interpretation. Although notational or prosodic in-
struction can lift barriers to sometimes difficult or archaic works, a tendency to
increase the quantity of information encoded in a work, and the annotations to
it, would create more barriers and constraints to performance than it removed,
creating instead a jealous proto-performance, i.e., a code permitting only one en-
trance and way of proceeding. An exhaustively complete rendering would be too
“thick,” to use the parlance Stephen Davies borrows from ethics, in that the work
would become overdetermined, i.e., too rigidly prescribed, allowing only one ac-
cess to perform faithfully the “sonic detail of its accurate instances.”11
To be performed, embodied, more than once, a work must be encoded (even if
only in memory, but more usually in a text). It would be doubly mistaken, how-
ever, to replace conventional ways of describing rhythm with ones that more ex-
actingly aligned description to performance, adding ever-infinitesimal detail. First,
doing so would overload the description, creating an unwieldy apparatus. Secondly,
this new descriptive system (the jealous proto-performance) would be so radically
10 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis.”
11 Davies, Works and Performances, 20.

particularized that it would be far more prescriptive than any conventional score. It
is in fact largely by not detailing every possible nuance of expression that conven-
tional description leaves the variables of living rhythm open to the interpretative art
of the actual performance.
I am therefore arguing that the infinitesimal variations borne of living, perfor-
mative expression are best left, as they are in traditional descriptive systems, to the
intuitive sensitivity of the performer. The relative lack of complexity in traditional,
abstract description––relative, that is, to a more finely detailed account of the
nuances of any specific performance––c onstitutes the important quality of open-
ness to interpretation that allows conventionally described works to be brought to
life in so many different yet meaningfully expressive ways. The conventional de-
scription of rhythm thus avoids rigidly prescribing the very flow that comes alive
only in the performance. The original artifact, the score, for example, or the poetic
text, is therefore a descriptive document that supports innumerably many and dif-
ferent actual or possible performances. In virtue of this formal document, which
is open to innumerable varieties of becoming actual, temporal performance, the
original description has a priority over subsequent performances. But this is not the
full story.
2. An Unprioritized view
An analogy between photography and music from the master photographer

and printer Ansel Adams––a lso a proficient pianist––illustrates this point about
one original description supporting and encouraging many possible expres-
sive interpretations in actual performance, where the encoded comes alive in the
embodied:
I have often said that the negative is similar to a musician’s score, and the print to
the performance of that score. The negative comes to life only when ‘performed’
as a print.12
It should be noted that there is, and can be, no such thing as a “straight print” from
a negative, just as there is, and can be, no such thing as a “straight performance” of
a score. The duration of exposure to the overhead light is always a matter of judg-
ment. The master printer in the darkroom might use a wand to prevent certain
parts of the photographic paper from receiving too much light. He or she might use
techniques such as feathering in certain areas and borders. The paper itself has to be
chosen, and this choice affects qualities such as micro-contrast and macro-contrast.
One might object, nonetheless, that in music a read-through does in fact involve
a “straight” playing, which consists in playing the notes without any pre-considered
12 Adams, The Print, 2.

interpretation. A read-through, however, unlike a performance for an audience,

need not be done in real time, and often involves moving quickly through slower
passages, and more slowly through rapid, or otherwise difficult sections. Perhaps
sight-reading––performing a prima vista––is more pertinent, but even then it
is practically impossible to deliver a “straight performance.” Indeed, as Louis
Armstrong described highly skilled musicians, “they might read a Fly Speck, if it
get in the way.”13 Playing a prima vista must be done in real time, so even skip-
ping notes, or playing wrong ones––w hich itself involves interpretation––would
be more acceptable than losing the rhythm. There can, then, be no such thing as a
straight print from a negative, a straight reading of a poem (however, characterless
an actual reading might seem), or a straight performance from a score. Straight per-
formance is impossible because any performance from a description requires an
interpretation that necessarily contains a degree of openness. An exhibition that
hung photographic negatives on the walls or a performance that consisted only in
distributing the sheet music to the audience to imagine the work in relative silence
might count as conceptual art, but the practice would not become conventional.
Against those who argue that performance is primary, Adams’ analogy
illuminates the mutual importance of the codified description (the negative or
the musical score) that is necessarily the antecedent original and any rhythmic
performances that are then produced. This is not to argue that performances are
simply inferior copies of an archetypal and more perfect original. Even a photo-
graphic connoisseur who admires a negative for its exposure and composition does
so with the understanding of how this serves the quality of the print, and much
the same can be said of the admirer of a musical score. Like the negative, the score
primarily has instrumental value, whereas the performance (like the print) has in-
trinsic value. But if the performance has intrinsic value, and the score has primarily
instrumental value, does that not therefore mean that the performance has priority?
The answer must be no, because of an inescapable asymmetry. While the perfor-
mance depends on the score for its very existence, the score does not likewise de-
pend on the performance for its existence. However, in the unprioritized view that
I am presenting, while the score may be chronologically prior to performance (this
is not true for improvisation, but even here there is often an initial idea and outline),
it nevertheless depends upon performance for its actualization, which is in an aes-
thetic sense its completion.
Although the score in itself, as a concrete artifact, has only instrumental value,
it is the fundamental prerequisite that subsequent performances depend on be-
fore any intrinsic value can be realized. It is the work that has intrinsic value, and
the musical composition as work of art is a composite of co-dependent encoded
form and actual or imagined performance. Perhaps the performance never entirely
realizes the work, which is always, as Sartre suggested, held in “the imaginary”;
thus it never quite exists concretely as accomplished, once and for all. If this view
13 Armstrong, His Own Words, 26.

is correct, while the performance effects the completion of the work, it never quite
achieves its perfection. The score, then, encodes, though necessarily incompletely,
with gaps concerning expression, nuance, grouping. What one might call the
arch-performance is created by the composer in imagination and is ever and anew
appreciated, rediscovered, in the imagination of the performers and the audience.
The musical score and the photographic negative are both creations of their re-
spective composing artists. As encoded, prototypical artifacts, they have a unique-
ness that performances do not, in that the original encoded version is the one from
which any number of performances develop. Note, however, that it is not because
the score or the negative are each one, and only one, whereas the performances
are many, that the prioritizing of performance is prevented. Copyright allowing,
the score is often published and facsimiles can be reproduced from film negatives.
Still, these copies remain multiplied tokens of the one prototype. A question also
arises from multiple editions of the composer’s score leading to the quest for schol-
arly editions to construct an Ur-text out of various manuscripts, proofs, and prints.
The point concerning the uniqueness of the encoded prototype is that although
performance-prioritizing theorists wish the descriptive artifact to be understood
as secondary, and although it is only as performance that the art achieves intrinsic
(actual not potential) value, it is the encoded artifact that originates and inspires
worthwhile performance. Accepting this co-dependence of form and performance
is key to the unprioritized view of encoded and embodied aesthetic qualities such
as musical rhythm.
My assertion of an unprioritized account amounts to defending encoded–
embodied (description–performance) co-dependence. It is based on the argument
that a conventional descriptive text holds open the possibility of many different
performances that might embody it, rather than minutely describing expressive
nuances such as the finer points of timing, note grouping, offbeat stresses, etc.
Indeed, the method of increasingly minute and burgeoning description would, par-
adoxically and unfortunately, become the ideal if some original, authoritative per-
formance were always prioritized over the encoded prototype. The job of such a
minutely finessed, burgeoning description would be to convey every nuance and
particular of that performance. While one can commend the scholarly quest to con-
struct the most accurate description of the composer’s intentions, it should also be
noted that those intentions often change as a composer returns to a score over many
years, so further questions inevitably arise as to whether any one of these can have
priority over another. Further, the existence of multiple editions might produce in-
teresting historical and scholarly questions, but these are of lesser importance to
the performing artist, who is, and ought to be, free to explore perceived nuances
across different texts that variously suggest alternative expressive responses and
resonances in the performer. Thus the unprioritized view has value here, being an
account where the rights of the work are balanced in co-dependence with the sensi-
tive intuitions and expressive instincts of the interpretive performer.
It could, however, be argued that the existence of multiple texts supports the op-
posite view, that particular performances have a uniqueness that is almost com-
pletely missed by the atemporality and universality of conventional description.
Each performance is a one-off event that that can be recorded but not repeated,
while a musical score can easily be photocopied and is essentially repeated, with
added nuance, by becoming embodied with each performance. Performances in-
volve different maestros or even the same ones but on good and bad days; the syn-
ergy of all involved is such that small differences in some factors can affect the power
of the whole. So while performances can rightly be said to be interpretive iterations
of the score, they are necessarily unrepeatable in terms of the many particulars in-
volved and how they add up to an aesthetic whole. Certainly analogue or digital
reproduction is possible, but that is quite different from the (impossible) repetition
of the event. The unity of the text, however, even if there are multiple versions from
which to choose, is performance generative, without itself being in any normal
sense of the word a performance.
Performance, aside from improvisation, develops from code—the text—but the
issue of priority is not such a vital quarrel. Each is necessary for the more-or-less
faithful reproduction of embodied rhythm from an encoded composition. A good
score never performed is wasted, almost a nullity. And a performance of a composi-
tion is equally dependent on the score, however radically the performer departs in
expressive interpretation. Those who radically prioritize performance aim, quixoti-
cally, I believe, toward a reversal of values that not only promotes the particular and
embodied (there is nothing wrong in that), but which also denigrates the powers
of form as timeless agents of perpetual identity (which I consider to be tilting at
windmills). But all this sounds like fighting an imaginary Platonic bogeyman,14
as if one should, like a good Nietzschean, fear shadows that threaten to engulf the
living world of matter and bodies. What is really being opposed here? If the en-
during identity of the text were instead to become, per impossibile, as unrepeatably
nuanced as the temporal performance, then the text could not be the performance-
generative artifact that it undoubtedly is.
Nobody seriously argues that the score––or any text intended to generate
performance––dictates or ought to dictate each detail and expressive nuance of
every possible performance. As T. V. F. Brogan diplomatically but decisively judges
the matter, with respect to poetry:
It is natural to want to enrich scansion with other kinds of analyses which cap-
ture more of the phonological and syntactic structure of the line . . . But all such
efforts exceed the boundary of strict metrical analysis, moving into descriptions
of linguistic rhythm, and thus serve to blur or dissolve the distinction between
14 Cook, Beyond the Score, 8–32, blames what he sees as the traditional prioritizing of score over perfor-
mance on “Plato’s Curse.”
meter and rhythm. . . . Scansions which take account of more levels of met-
rical degree than two, or intonation, or the timing of syllables are all guilty of
overspecification.15
Those who wish to enrich scansion all too easily end up “guilty of overspecification”
through blurring the distinction between meter and rhythm and jealously
prescribing not only precise timing, but also tongue movements, etc. Yet, though
one might annotate a rhythmic, rather than just a metric, scansion, a greater
freedom of experiment and expression in rhythm exists, perhaps counterintui-
tively, in remaining with the more basic, binary metrical scansion. Greater freedom
is afforded by simple metrical scansion, marking only ictus (/), i.e., the metric beat
or pulse, and non-ictus (˘, or ×), because by not prescribing any rhythm, the re-
citer is left free to experiment and discover rhythmic possibilities without needing
to fixate on any particular one as the rhythm. This is not to deny that the lines
strongly lend themselves to a particular rhythmic reading, indeed, I contend that
reasons for favoring one reading over another already lie objectively in the text or
in the cultural context. Yet it is equally true, however, that some lines are deliber-
ately inflected with the ambiguity of multiple, contradictorily rhythmic readings.
It therefore bears reflecting, against overspecified scansion and rhythm analysis,
that, as William Empson said: “The machinations of ambiguity are among the very
roots of poetry.”16 These insights return me to Adams’ analogy of the photographic
negative, whereby the print is the performance, which serves well to show that the
text (the score, or negative) is not a code that dictates exactly how the performance
ought to turn out in each detail and in every instance.
Could there be more at stake, then, in the argument for the living reality of actual,
temporal, flowing presence than the apparently not very vital question of which
of two necessary components is to be given priority? The foregoing discussion
suggests that what is at stake is an assertion of personality, vitality, of spirit above the
dead letter. My response is that such vitality requires an alternative to prioritizing
terms on either side of the debate. An unprioritized theory of objective–subjective,
descriptive–performative co-dependence is free to pursue atemporal and tem-
poral aspects of the artwork. The atemporal form is the imagined ideal, that which
allowed Sartre to insist of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony: “I do not hear it ac-
tually,” because it is “outside existence,” such that “I listen to it in the imaginary,”
where beauty is possible.17 The unprioritized, co-dependence view of rhythm and
other aesthetic qualities is at once common sense, in defending the openness and
utility of traditional conventions, and dynamic (opposing merely static forms), in
celebrating the fact that every new performance brings the ideal creation that is the
15 Brogan, “Scansion,” 1118.
16 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 21.
17 Sartre, The Imaginary, 193.

artwork (Sartre’s “imaginary”) into an aesthetic, embodied reality that actualizes

the power of the work to touch and move audiences intellectually and viscerally.
3. The objective reality of rhythm
With the unprioritized view, I am defending the sense of rhythm as a representable
objective pattern. The fact that rhythm can be embodied across different forms and
for different human senses––sound, sight, and touch being the most pertinent––
shows that it is an objective property perceivable by more than one sensory channel
and that it is therefore quantitatively analyzable and describable. This objective
sense is what Locke called a primary quality, one that exists objectively, can be
expressed numerically, and consists in “Bulk, Figure, Number, Situation, and Motion,
or Rest” of bodies, “whether we perceive them or no.”18 It is only because of this ob-
jective basis that rhythm in one art form perceivable primarily through one sensory
channel can be translated into or illustrated by another, so that in ballet, contempo-
rary, or popular dance, for example, the rhythm in the dance often corresponds to
the rhythm in the music in the objective terms of magnitude, figure, number, situ-
ation, motion, and rest. These correspondences are intuitively apparent, but harder
to explicate in words or formulae.
Central to calculus, the mathematics of such transformation or correspondence
is continuous as opposed to discrete, typically using “t” as the time axis moving from
left to right. Magnitude is the simplest variable to measure with respect to time, and
can also be done with sound (in decibels), light (in lux), and force (in pressure—“P,”
bars, or p.s.i.—felt through touch). These are all objectively describable in terms of
number and mathematical convention, as is figure (shape). The primary quality of
figure, represented for instance by pirouettes or whirls in dance, resembles rapidly
repeating phrases in music by a topological dynamics. The formulae underlying this
continuous mapping of “various ‘repetitiveness’ properties”19 of the motion to the
music would take considerable effort to calculate, yet would be superfluous to the
audience, who need no proof of correspondences that they perceive and enjoy. An
example of the highest one-to-one correspondence between rhythm as heard and as
seen is the display of a graphic equalizer. These objective qualities are what would
remain, in a recording for example, even in the absence of any living mind. One
might not want to say that rhythm in such circumstances would remain “living,”
but it would nonetheless remain real, as does the rhythm encoded in the score and
other texts.
To argue for the reality of objective rhythm and its importance is not to den-
igrate the subjective sense of rhythm, but only to emphasize that the subjective
18 Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk 2, Ch. 8, §23, 140.

19 Anosov, “Topological Dynamics.” McGinnis and Newe, “Topological Dynamics: A Framework,” and
Sutil, “Topological Movement,” discuss topological dynamics as a framework for dance notation, drawing on
the pioneering choreography and movement notation of Rudolf Laban.
depends upon the objective. Flow, or fluxion, the essence of rhythm, far from
inaccessible to objective, mathematical analysis, is the very core of calculus. The
connection between music and mathematics has been appreciated and often
venerated since ancient times. There must first be a something heard, seen, or
otherwise sensed before that thing is then felt in terms of meaning and value.
Only then, with the objective rhythm established, can a subjective sense of it
arise as the mode in which the rhythm affects the subject, prompting the sub-
jective repetition of the rhythm. With this repetition, a meaningful quality with
a felt value is added, such as calmness, solemnity, or jubilation, which is experi-
enced at the same time as the rhythm. These subjective qualities or feels, how-
ever, are not themselves rhythmic, because what cannot be given quantitative
analysis and description might be a response to rhythm, but cannot itself be
rhythm. Thus while a rhythm may be calm or jubilant, calmness and jubilation
are not rhythms.
The foregoing argument can also be used against the subjectivist assertion that
there is no rhythm without its actual appearance. To hold that there is no X without
the actual appearance of X is a form of subjective idealism that is indefensible ex-
cept when X is itself an appearance in the subject. For example, to say that a trumpet
does not exist until someone hears it is indefensible, but to assert that the particular
sensations that this trumpet creates in person Y exist only when person Y hears that
trumpet is at least not logically indefensible. (It could be admitted, however, that
stimulating a certain pattern on the subject’s auditory cortex might activate those
particular sensations, or that a recording of the trumpet could produce the same
effect.) To reiterate, a rhythm has objective qualities that exist in the absence of a
subject. The fact that that the most aesthetically important effects of rhythm are its
feeling, meaning, and value as felt by the subject does not give logical priority to the
subjective sense of rhythm, which remains dependent on the objective qualities of
the rhythm. That the subjective sense of rhythm depends on the objective sense (on
the primary qualities of the series of events) is in fact the usual relation of subjec-
tive and objective qualities. The objective qualities exist first and their emotional,
significant, or axiological resonance in the subject follows. This view is entirely con-
sistent with agreeing, as I do, that meaning is found in the engaging course or flow
of things.
This meaning in rhythm is, I believe, a discovery of the harmonic resonance
of things in the world within oneself. Indeed, to understand how music––or
any rhythmic happening or creation––stimulates sensations and thoughts that
refer to meaning and value is to have an at least implicit metaphysical under-
standing. Perhaps the historically first explicit metaphysical understanding
of how the objective and subjective unite in musical phenomena remains the
deepest, where the rational (ratio) is felt in the qualitative (quale). According to
legend, Pythagoras, gripped in difficult mathematical thought of balance and
measures,
walked by a smithy, and by divine chance, heard the hammers beating out iron on
the anvil and giving off in combination sounds which were most harmonious with
one another . . .20
Thus Pythagoras marveled, the story goes, at how objective mathematical ratios (of
rods, pipes, and strings) are sensibly intuited across harmonious musical intervals.
Each sonorous ringing is perfectly harmonized in the listener’s mind with the nu-
merical ratio describing the placement of the grip that divided the rod into struck and
unstruck portions. From this he understood that a law governs how change in the
latter accounts for a correspondent change in the former and that this account is ulti-
mately rational. The qualia and the numerical ratios are correspondences, resonances
in fact, that are ultimately connected to the same nature, so that what in the subject is
experienced as a musical note, is in the object the physical expression of a ratio.
Yet one need not be a Pythagorean (mathematic or acousmatic)21 to hold that the
objective in rhythm is prior to the subjective, such that quantitative properties pre-
cede qualitative ones insofar as the objective, mathematical properties of music de-
termine what becomes the subjective sound of music and the qualities of its flowing
parts. Another way of stating this is to say that subjective rhythm is how objective
rhythm is experienced. This formulation allows a clearer view of the mind’s role,
whether projective or intuitive, in the experience of emotional timbre in rhythm.
Thus some rhythms promote a slow pensive mood, others light-hearted moving
around without much thought at all. Objective qualities in rhythms can make one
piece of music stir one emotion, while another evokes a quite different mood.
The meanings of progression and return, ascent and descent, and so on, are
conveyed in objective rhythm and can be straightforwardly indicated. Return to a
musical motive, for example, can convey a sense of remaining, or lingering, but with
greater variation it will convey a similarity that progresses or one that regresses. It
is quite natural, when experienced by a thinking being with life projects, that these
objective qualities in rhythm will stir thoughts and feelings related to the advancing
through, enjoyment of, regression to, or pensive dwelling around those life projects. The
rhythm does not convey what is to be thought about, i.e., the content, but it influences
the form and manner, which is to say the mode and the mood, of one’s thinking.
Thus a very clipped performance that crisply enunciates the separation between
each note or unit encourages a marching mood that does not linger on the past;
emphasizing action over memory and thought, it thereby avoids being deeply af-
fected. By contrast, a melody played rubato promotes a more comprehending,
pensive mood in which less gets left behind. For instance, John Cage instructed
20 Nicomachus, Manual of Harmonics, 83, the earliest extant record of the account (83–97).
21 The “mathematicians,” with their more scientific Pythagoreanism, opposed the “acousmatics,” who
followed the sayings—however cryptic—of the master on authority without need of mathematical proof
or reasoning: see Riedweg, Pythagoras, 107–8. The acousmatic thesis in current aesthetic theory holds that
music does not move, or if so, moves only metaphorically. The acousmatic theory is named in allusion to
the Pythagorean acousmatics who heard the teachings of the master only through a veil or screen. Thus an
acousmatic account of music makes no reference to anything beyond the sounds qua sonic phenomena.
that his haunting, returning and gathering, composition “Dream” (1948) be

performed
Rubato: Always with resonance; no silence, tones . . . freely sustained, manually or

with pedal, beyond noted durations . . .22
In such a gathering, synthesizing style, ideas build into a greater, cohering whole,
with a wider, pulsing now retaining remembered presence. Understoodthus,
rhythm does not present any specific content of thought or meditation, but instead
presents thought or meditation itself. The fundamental meanings of departure and
return, and of expectation and surprise, can be conveyed in the music, and can
help comprise a basic, largely aesthetic comprehension of life, its necessities, and
contingencies.
These fundamental meanings, which are essentially musical, invite reflection, yet
they are more basic and embodied than any conceptual assertion. Such meanings
can be conveyed in musical and poetic structure, with elements such as tone, tempo,
resonance, and pause adding significant nuances to the meaning. The meaning of
rhythmic expression is directly related to its form, being composed of the formal,
objective qualities already embedded in the description before they have become
embodied in the performance with the addition of expressive elements added in the
performer’s interpretive process.
Remaining with the topic of merging and separateness in rhythmic flow, I re-
turn now to a specific contention in Hasty’s argument, to address his challenge
against what he calls the “traditional construal of beats and offbeats as ultimately
separate . . . entities.”23 Hasty wishes to replace this discourse of separate entities
with a sense of each beat enduring through the arsic and anacrustic offbeats until
their dynamism is passed on to the next beat. But is he not here challenging a straw
man? It is already implicit in most understandings of musical rhythm that the beat
commences a duration that endures until the next beat. And surely it is already gen-
erally accepted, certainly by those who hold that music in some sense “moves” (lit-
erally or metaphorically), that the pulsing of arses and anacruses propels the motive
and the phrase in a movement that comes to life in the subjective sense of rhythm.
This sense of the beat persisting through the movements of the offbeat until the
next beat is not new. In 1874, Mathis Lussy published his theory of the formal qual-
ities of rhythm as foundational for performative expression. To perfect expression,
he required that nothing be added to the formal qualities of the musical phrase that
was not capable of being generated from the formal description itself. Thus Lussy
was an early demystifier of the processes of performative expression. One need not
look for something mysterious or capricious in the soul of the performing artist
to explain the intricacies and effects of the expression, as these are, rather, evolved
22 Cage, “Dream,” instructions at top of score.

from the already objectively described phrasing itself. As Lussy puts it, “the cause of
the expression resides and must be sought in the structure of the musical phrase,”24
so that even if the composer omitted all marks of expression and notated no slurs
or accents,
the true artist would play as if they were there, since their raison d’être would
still exist. This is supported by logic, and daily confirmed by observation. As the
generating causes of expression exist in the musical phrase, they must evidently
act upon the purely material forms which are susceptible of observation and of
submission to analysis and synthesis.25
The cause, then, of the expression would still exist objectively, even if only entailed
by, rather than explicitly stated within, the musical score as read by a sensitive and
talented performer.
Comparable to the enduring of the beat through the offbeats, Lussy portrays
rhythm as the music “breathing.” In his analogy, as the music “breathes,” the
downbeats are the inevitable exhalation, his point being that rhythm is the pulsa-
tion of building up and relaxation, a process as vital to music as breath is to life. Each
downbeat carries on the impulse from previous beats, passing them on through the
offbeats in a continuous flow. So long as he or she has more than merely mechan-
ical ability, the performer intuitively appreciates all this, even though the signs of
expression—the accents and so on—may be absent from the score.
Throughout his essay, Hasty asks a series of questions about the enduring of past
events of a musical series in the present, i.e., the moment being performed right
now. When is one to let go? Is that even possible? When to move to the next level
or at least to a more fully new one? It is true that conventional descriptive models
might seem to encourage “letting go,” but I contend that this only helps the per-
former to exercise sensitivity and tact. Conventional description in fact neither
forces nor prevents the loosening and binding, the holding onto beats, phrases,
motives, and other forms, that constitute the enduring, lifelike, breathing qualities
of music that do not merely unfold time, but seem almost to enfold time, so that the
past and the future are also in the present as resonance, memory, and expectation.
But is one to believe, as Hasty argues, that conventional descriptive structures are
in fact destructive, designed to prune natural growth, and cut off the past from living
in the present? I have argued the contrary, that conventional descriptive structures
leave enough openness in the system for performative expression and judgment
by in fact not prescribing exactly where, when, and how to bind, loosen, cut, re-
member, and so on. Whether notation by the composer, or annotation by a critic or
instructor, to create a new system of description that added so much extra informa-
tion would be to prescribe too much. Such rigorous prescription made on behalf of

“living rhythm” would be counterproductive, constraining the expressivity of the

artist, reducing latitude for interpretation, and intruding on the performing artist’s
sensitivity for what, as Lussy explained, already resides “in the structure of the mu-
sical phrase.” The existing conventions of description have evolved not to prune the
outgrowths of memory, nor to excise the living rhythm, but rather to allow the artist
at sensible or unexpected junctures to cut or not to cut and to bind or not to bind,
according to a sensitive intuition of possibilities already there in the musical score.
Thus Lussy celebrates, rather than bemoans the fact, that: “In music there are no
special signs to mark the rhythm.”26 The reality is that such questions as when one
should let go of a beat, let it peter out through its successors, or move onto the next
level, are addressed afresh in each instance to the spontaneous artistic conscience.
One should therefore resist giving prescriptive answers, let alone inscribe them as
a new notational norm. If conventional descriptions and encodings such as tradi-
tional scores did indeed note where to let go of a beat and its memory, when to stop
its pulse and begin a new level, and notate every accent and emphasis, etc., then
that would stem experimental and creative performance and result in an artifact
with much more information than is needed for an elegant encoding of music to be
performed and thus embodied.
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Time, Rhythm, and Subjectivity
The Aesthetics of Duration
Max Paddison
Art manipulates our experience, and all art forms experiment with the ways we per-
ceive time, space, and motion. This is particularly so with the experience of dura-
tion and rhythm in the temporal arts—music, dance and also performed poetry and
drama. And yet, this experience of temporality as a continuity is not in itself a given,
but is something that we ourselves create. As Célestin Deliège has put it, “whatever
our perception of time might be based upon, it is we who create this time, it remains
always our work, our oeuvre.”1 This chapter starts from the position that the concept
of rhythm needs to be understood in the context of its relation to time and subjec-
tivity. The approach taken is phenomenological, with a focus on Gaston Bachelard’s
phenomenology of time (via his critiques of Bergson and Husserl), together with the
Bachelard-influenced theory of musical time-perception to be found in the work of
Célestin Deliège.
My argument falls into three parts. First, the case is made for an experiential con-
cept of temporality through a brief survey of philosophies of time that takes Kantian
subjectivity as its point of reference and argues that temporal experience is funda-
mentally subjective and exploratory. Second, attempts to define rhythm are placed
in this context, with music as the focus. The argument is made for a concept of
rhythm that also involves a large-scale notion of “rhythmicized duration” as form,
a concept that affords extended scope for an aesthetic experience of temporality
that is also experimental in character. And third, I argue that the concepts of tem-
porality, duration, and rhythm, which have a particular identity in the experience
of music, are subject to historical change, and in the case of Western art music have
functioned both normatively and metaphorically in different historical periods. It is
suggested that there are different “aesthetic times”—something reflected in the fact
that paradigms of temporal experience in the arts shift2—and that our experience of
rhythm as structured duration is shaped by this.
1 Deliège, “Perception du temps musical,” 88 (my translation).

2 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 208, writes: “To the extent that the book portrays
scientific developments as a succession of tradition-bound periods punctuated by non-cumulative breaks,
its theses are undoubtedly of wide applicability . . . for they are borrowed from other fields. Historians of
Time, Rhythm, and Subjectivity 273
1. Time, duration, and the subjectivity

of temporal experience
How do we understand the experience of time and duration in the temporal

arts? Before discussing rhythm directly, I want first to provide a context of basic
arguments in the philosophy of time (Newton, Leibniz, Kant), which I shall outline
as briefly as possible, before focusing on Bachelard’s phenomenology (particularly
through his critiques of Bergson and Husserl), and on the concepts of subjectivity
and the relationality of experience on which it is founded.
The two fundamental historical positions on the philosophy of time normally
referred to in this context are the “absolutist” and the “relationist” arguments. The
first, associated particularly with Newton, argues that time is “absolute” and is an at-
tribute of reality. True time flows, as he outlines it in the “Scholium” that introduces
his Principia (1689), and does so independently of any other considerations, being
independent of space, place and motion. Newton writes:
Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows
equably without relation to anything external, and by another name is called dura-
tion: relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and external (whether
accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is
commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.3
Thus Newton recognizes what he calls “relative time”—the relativist or relationist

position, which measures duration in relation to external factors like motion (the
moving hands of a clock, for instance, or dividing the cycle of the year into twelve
months)—but he considers that this is only how time appears to us as human beings.
True time—that is, absolute time—flows of itself, needs no external measure, and
can only be understood through mathematics. Like time, space is also regarded
by Newton as an absolute that exists apart from our perception of it. The second
position, which is a critique of Newton’s argument, is associated particularly with
Leibniz. It argues that time is only experienced through the relation between things
or events in space, which makes time appear to flow, but it has no absolute reality
in itself, is relative, and only perceived through motion. In a letter to Newton’s sup-
porter Samuel Clarke in 1715 (his so-called “Third Paper”) Leibniz writes:
These gentlemen [including Newton] maintain, then, that space is a real absolute
being . . . As for me, I have more than once stated that I held space to be something
purely relative, like time; space being an order of co-existences as time is an order
of successions.4
literature, of music, of the arts, of political development, and of many other human activities have long
described their subjects in the same way.”
3 Newton, Principia Mathematica, 6.

4 Leibniz, Philosophical Writings, 211.
It is true to say that it is the relationist view that prevails today, particularly in the
natural sciences since the theory of relativity,5 but also in the arts. It is therefore
both significant and unexpected that the musicologist Christopher Hasty opts for
the absolutist position on time,6 in the process appearing to raise a contradiction to
which I shall return shortly. There is, however, a strong case that has been made in
the cognitive sciences that our experience of time is dependent on our encounter
with things and events either outside us (changes in the environment, the cycle of
the seasons) or internal to us but largely independent of our volition (breathing,
pulse).7 This lends support to the relationist rather than the absolutist position.
Udo Will, for example, points out that we don’t actually possess a special internal
organ that enables us to “sense” time directly as such, and can only experience time
through our relationship to other things.8 It is true that this does not in itself dis-
prove the “absolutist” case that time flows of its own accord, independently of space
and whatever happens to be filling it or going on in it, but it does demonstrate that
our perception of time as “flow” and “continuity” is contingent upon the motion of
things and events, and that we have no other way of sensing it than through these
relations. The claim that we only really perceive time through our perception of
change as motion or movement of some kind I find persuasive. For example, while
the experience of a piece of music (as an object or event “outside” us) might con-
vince us that “time flows” of its own accord and that the “music flows” of itself and
in some way “contains time,” the Bachelardian view taken here is that music and the
temporal arts are constituted of discontinuous elements to which our conscious-
ness lends continuity. Without an attentive mode of consciousness that makes
connections as part of the experience of the music, the sense of temporal conti-
nuity collapses, as happens in distracted listening to extended pieces. The music
then appears to us as a series of disconnected fragments.
What the Newtonian and Leibnizian positions, and also empirical experiments
in the cognitive sciences and neuro-sciences, do not directly address is the nature of
our subjective experience of time, and it is, of course, how time appears to us that is
most significant in the experience of the temporal arts. Interestingly, given his “ab-
solutist” stance on time, Christopher Hasty writes that
[r]‌hythm, in our aesthetic sense, seems to refer to a time of subjectivity and human
experience—a world apart from the objective ‘absolute’ time of Newtonian physics
(but perhaps not so far from quantum physics).9
5 In physics, the dominant view since Einstein’s theory of relativity has been that time is an illusion, the cor-
responding reality being “space-time.”
6 Hasty, Meter as Rhythm, 7 n.1; also 9–10.
7 E.g. Pöppel, “Temporal Perception”; Le Poidevin, “Perception of Time”; and Paddison “Musical Time,”
244–52.
8 Will, “Rethinking Musical Time.”
The contradiction between the subjectivity of musical (that is, temporal) experience
and the objectivity of the Newtonian position on “absolute” time stands revealed by
Hasty, but is not addressed directly by him. It is precisely the issue of subjectivity
and temporal experience that I now wish to pursue further.
The problem of the subjectivity of our experience and its relation to objectivity is
addressed most fundamentally by Kant. For Kant our empirical experience is of the
appearance of things—that is, how they appear to our minds. He writes,
we dispute all claim of time to absolute reality, namely where it would attach to
things absolutely as a condition or property even without regard to the form of
our sensible intuition. Such properties, which pertain to things in themselves, can
never be given to us through the senses.10
Kant does not, of course, deny the empirical reality of time, how it appears to us as
experiencing subjects, but only its absolute reality—that is to say, time is “empirical”
because it is fundamental to the way we, as human beings, experience the world,
the way it appears to us through our senses. Particularly significant, therefore, is
Kant’s insistence that time is not an attribute of the object but is something brought
to it by the experiencing subject. It is, however, important to note that “subjectivity”
in this sense, does not refer to the everyday meaning of the term as entirely per-
sonal and a matter of individual choice, but refers instead to the subject side of the
subject–object relationship, and indeed to the subject’s relationship to the world.11
The Kantian position on the subjectivity of the experience of time is taken up by two
of the most influential philosophers of temporality in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries: Henri Bergson and Edmund Husserl. I want to consider their
positions here in brief overview, both as a preparation for my main methodological
focus on Gaston Bachelard and phenomenology, and for the support they provide
for the concepts of “rhythmicized duration” as form, and the subjectivity of tem-
poral experience.
In his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Time and Free Will) of
1889, Bergson makes a well-known distinction between what he called temps durée
and temps espace. He defines these terms again in his Introduction to Metaphysics
(1903) as follows (and I paraphrase): temps durée (duration) is the flux of experience,
fleeting, elusive, not measurable, and identified with intuition; temps espace—as its
designation clearly indicates—identifies measured time, clock time, with space,
and with intellect, reason and rationality. The former is characterized by continuity,
the latter by discontinuity.12 Duration, as temps durée, is what underlies the conti-
nuity and persistence of consciousness of the self for Bergson, the connectedness of
“lived moments.” Bergson claims that the experience of duration is characterized
10 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 164 (A36, B52).
11 Cox, “Tripartite Subjectivity,” 1 n.1.
12 Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, 9.

by a simultaneity and multiplicity of different durations, and he writes in Durée et

simultanéité (1922) that “different—or rather I should say diversely rhythmicized—
durations may coexist.”13 By this he means that duration may be structured in dif-
ferent ways by the rhythmic events that occur within it, and that several different
“rhythmicized” durations may exist simultaneously and be experienced together.
In the same passage Bergson also writes of consciousness itself as duration in the
following terms:
Such a consciousness would grasp in a single instantaneous perception multiple

events situated at diverse points in space; simultaneity would be precisely the pos-
sibility for two or more events to enter into a single instantaneous perception.14
Even though this sense of the continuity of the self is also characterized by constant
change from one minute to the next, it is memory, according to Bergson, that gives
this duration its feeling of continuity, in spite of apparent discontinuities along the
way. Underlying Bergson’s philosophy of time is the notion of the persistence of
the self through change. He writes of a “self which endures,” or “a present which
persists.”15 As he puts it:
There is one reality, at least, which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by
simple analysis. It is our own person in its flowing through time—our self which
endures.16
In spite of his references to “rhythmicized duration,” the musical metaphor for du-
ration and continuity Bergson chooses to emphasize is that of melody, rather than
rhythm. His expanded conception of duration has some significant implications,
and has been influential not only on the phenomenology of temporal experience,
but also on art itself, and especially on music and on conceptions of musical form.
I shall return to the problem of defining Bergsonian “duration” in relation to music
in Section 2.
One of many ambiguities in Bergson concerns the nature of temporal experi-
ence. Husserl (who was a self-confessed Bergsonian) appears to see Bergson as a
proto-phenomenologist.17 Taking Kant’s arguments for the subjectivity of time
and consciousness as his point of reference, Husserl refers to what he calls “phe-
nomenological time,” which he distinguished from “cosmic time,” or “objec-
tive time.”18 In his late, unfinished work, The Crisis of the European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology (1936) he writes that the world we live in, our
13 Bergson, Durée et simultanéité, 42–3 (my translation).
14 Bergson, Durée et simultanéité (my translation).
15 Bergson, “La perception du changement,” 170 (my translation).
16 Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics,  6–7.
17 Winkler, “Husserl and Bergson,” 93.
18 Husserl, Ideas, 1: 155 (§81).

“life-world” (Lebenswelt), is a spatio-temporal world, where “our focus on the world

of perception gives us . . . only the temporal mode of the present.”19 We live in a pre-
sent moment where only the content of our “lived experience” (Erlebnis) constantly
changes, giving a sense of duration and continuity, and what he calls the “horizons”
of this constantly changing present moment are a sense of a past, through recollec-
tion (“retention”), and a sense of a future, through anticipation (“protention”). For
Husserl we experience the “flow” of time as a continuum through this process, and
in this way we make sense of time in relation to the events that pass through our
experience of the present moment. This extended experience of time, through re-
tention and protention from the immediacy of the experience of lived time, can be
designated, I propose, by the term Erfahrung (employed rather vaguely by Husserl
himself), which I have identified elsewhere as mediated “interpretive experience”
that understands the present moment (in a piece of music, for example), in relation
to memory of what has already occurred and in anticipation of what may still be
yet to come.20 I emphasize the significance of this conception of an extended ex-
perience of time beyond the immediate experience of the lived moment because
it has important implications for our understanding of the temporal arts: that is,
Erfahrung points to the experimental and exploratory aspects of artistic form.
I argue that the development of extended structures as “emergent forms” has histor-
ically always gone hand-in-hand with the exploration of new possibilities for tem-
poral experience.
I now want to turn to Gaston Bachelard’s dialectical phenomenology as an ap-
proach that has particular relevance to the temporal arts, and especially music.
Bachelard’s phenomenology of time is most immediately derived from Husserl
and Bergson—in particular from his critique of Bergson’s concepts of continuity,
intuition, and duration in his The Dialectic of Duration (1936). Furthermore, the
similarities to Husserl’s late philosophy are especially notable in Bachelard’s own late
work The Poetics of Space (1958), which is methodologically indebted to Husserl.
There are three aspects to Bachelard’s concept of time that I see as especially signifi-
cant: (i) our sense of time is not inherent but is dependent on our relation to objects
in space—this he derives from the psychologist Pierre Janet;21 (ii) the experience of
time is dialectical and not a psychic given—indeed, it is made by us, and is not, as
such, natural and intuitive; this emerges from his critique of Bergson’s concepts of
duration and continuity, where he puts the emphasis on discontinuity and rhythm
in place of Bergson’s emphasis on continuity and the metaphor of melody;22 and (iii)
his emphasis on the concepts of form and causality, where he sees ideas of duration
and continuity as metaphors constructed in reverse through the connections we
make between discontinuous elements and a projected totality as “form.” Through
19 Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 168.

20 Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 213–16.
21 Pierre Janet (1859–1947), French psychologist and psychotherapist who developed a theory of memory
and of the concept of dissociation.
22 Corbier, “Bachelard, Bergson, Emmanuel,” 19.
his critique of Bergson, Bachelard seeks critically and dialectically to demonstrate

the lacunae in Bergson’s concept of duration, and argues for “the need to base com-
plex life on a plurality of durations that have neither the same rhythm nor the same
solidity in their sequence, nor the same power of continuity.”23
We have established that for Bachelard it is important to demonstrate that “psy-
chic continuity is not a given but made.”24 It is precisely this aspect of the phenome-
nology of time that Bachelard sees as experimental in character—something which
derives initially from his critique of Bergson in his earlier writings and which is
strengthened in his later turn to Husserl’s phenomenology; both of these can be
traced back to Kant’s argument for the subjectivity of our experience of time and
our re-creation of the world out of our own subjectivity. That this constitutes the
springboard for Bachelard’s conception of a phenomenological approach to the
experience of duration as essentially experimental is made clear in his introduc-
tion to The Poetics of Space, where he argues for the experimental character of the
oscillating relation between subject and object in the context of the poetic image.
He writes that “the duality of subject and object is iridescent, shimmering, unceas-
ingly active in its inversions. . . . In this union . . . the phenomenologist finds a field
for countless experiments.”25 While Bachelard is talking here of the poetic image in
relation to space, his argument applies equally to time and the temporal arts. The
key issues are those of the experimental character of subjectivity and the centrality
of the phenomenological experience.
So, to summarize at this stage: Bachelard’s argument that the experience of time
is dialectical in character in its “backward and forward” shifts provides the theo-
retical underpinning for the rest of this chapter, together with his claim that “it is
rhythm, not melody . . . that can provide the real metaphors of a dialectical philos-
ophy of duration.”26 This constitutes the larger context within which I locate the
concepts of rhythm and “rhythmicized duration” and on which I shall now focus.
2. Rhythm, duration, form
Bachelard’s position is well represented in the thinking of Célestin Deliège, and

informs his notion of the experience of the complexity of the musical work. Deliège
writes: “In order to experience time, our faculties of perception are in need of a ma-
terial of some kind, a canvas that allows it to flow.”27 This observation draws our at-
tention again to the view that we experience time only in relation to something else,
never “in itself,” and that we make objects that enable us to extend and experiment
with our experience of time through the potential they afford for the perception
23 Bachelard, Dialectic of Duration, 19.
25 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, xv.

of complexity and simultaneity. It is these relationships and their structural ar-

ticulation that constitute, so I argue, the large-scale rhythmicized duration of the
temporal arts.
But first, some general considerations on rhythm. The composer Olivier
Messiaen defines rhythm as “the ordering of movement.” He goes on: “This defini-
tion has the advantage of being applicable to dance, to words, and to music, but it’s
incomplete.”28 As a definition this is interesting because it locates rhythm in move-
ment in space and makes no mention of time.29 Messiaen’s enthusiastic utilization
of ancient Greek theories of rhythm as well as Bergson’s philosophy of time in his
own theory of time and rhythm in his Traité is, however, unusual and even con-
fusing,30 not least because of his own tendency as a composer to treat time as space.
What becomes again apparent is the overlap between temporal and spatial notions
of rhythm—something clearly so in the case of dance as the articulation of move-
ment in space and time, but less obviously so in music because of the irreversibility
of time. (Messiaen’s ideas of retrogradable rhythms as well as the idea of “cancri-
zans”—retrogradable canons, as in Bach’s Musical Offering—occupy an odd place in
a temporal art like music.)
But what about the attribution of rhythm to the non-temporal spatial arts like
painting, sculpture, and architecture? Roman Ingarden writes: “Some interpret
the phenomenon of rhythm so widely that according to them it is also present in
nonmusical works like architecture and includes the ‘rhythm’ of arches and vaults.”31
Ingarden doubts the validity of these views, suggesting that they are merely arguing
by analogy, that is to say, metaphorically. By this token, however, one would have to
say that rhythm certainly has a spatial dimension because of the “measuring” func-
tion of meter within rhythm, as temps espace, although this is perhaps only literally
present in dance as an art form that really does combine time, space, and motion.
On the other hand, “space” could also be said to be a metaphor as could “motion,”
in relation to music.32 Carl Dahlhaus has suggested that notions of tonal space and
motion in music are highly problematic, particularly when we attempt to argue that
pitches (or tones) “move” in tonal space. He asks how we might imagine motion
without some agency that carries the motion, given that musical movement seems
to lack such an agency:
For it would be a questionable hypothesis to claim that it was a tone that moved
in tonal space . . . A higher tone following a lower one is ‘another’ tone rather than
‘the same’ tone in another place.33
28 Messiaen, Music and Colour, 67.
29 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” also argues a case for rhythm as movement in space.
30 Taylor, “Time and Eternity,” 256–80.
31 Ingarden, Work of Music, 89.
32 Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought, extends the discussion of metaphor theories applied to music.
33 Dahlhaus, Aesthetics of Music, 80.

In his demolition of the notion that pitches can really “move,” and in his refusal to
account for the importance of metaphor in the way we listen to music, Dahlhaus
also underlines the frailty of the fictions that sustain the illusion of movement and
continuity in music. He concludes, like Bachelard, that the appearance of motion in
music is really only carried by rhythm:
One can think a rhythm without any succession of tones, but not a succession of
tones without some rhythm. This indicates that rhythm forms the basic compo-
nent of the impression of musical motion. Time—temps durée made into a firm
temps espace—is the primary dimension of tonal space; verticality is secondary.34
In view of all this, what do we mean by rhythm? It is not simply a regular pulse
or meter, but also patterns that repeat, whether exactly, or in varied or developing
shapes that retain something recognizable from the original patterns, though they
may also depart from them in some way, whether suddenly or very gradually. Such
patterns may also recur or develop at different “levels” (however literally or meta-
phorically that term may be understood). The tension between rhythm and meter
(this term can be taken both as metrical scheme or as a sense of pulse) has been
exploited to an extreme degree in music, and also in dance and to an extent in po-
etry. Christopher Hasty considers that meter and rhythm are not to be separated in
reality, and that rhythm is really the combination of meter and the play against or
departure from meter that constitutes a musical event. He argues that
the word ‘rhythm’ speaks to us . . . of a time that is not other than the partic-
ular course of an event that we follow with interest—a time that can be neither
predicted nor recaptured, a time articulated not by points or segments but by the
emergence of felt events.35
In this respect Hasty comes close to the large- scale notion of rhythm as
“rhythmicized duration” that interests me here.
The development of large-scale rhythmically articulated forms goes back to an-
tiquity, where it is inseparable from mimesis, understood as the mimetic impulse
toward imitation as mimicking, whether of actions, emotions, or of narrative.
Aristotle underlines the significance of the dynamic process of progressive innova-
tion in the extension of form through improvisation:
Given, then, that imitation [mimēsis] is natural to us, and also melody [melos] and
rhythm [rhythmos] (it being obvious that verse-forms are segments of rhythm),
from the beginning those who had the strongest natural inclination towards
34 Dahlhaus, Aesthetics of Music, 80.

these things generated poetry out of improvised activities by a process of gradual

innovation.36
The unmediated and spontaneous rhythms of shorter popular forms as well as im-
provised extensions of them appear to have developed into the highly mediated and
even contrived large-scale “rhythms” of sectionalized epic poetry and tragedy. It
is probable this would have involved initially a move from epic feats of memory
to writing things down in order to record the extended structure for future
performances. Rhythm as “form,” through its gradual disengagement from ritual
and its involvement in innovation, could thus be said to have become historical and
dynamic. Furthermore, the possibility of expanding our experience of increasing
complexity can also be seen to have gone hand-in-hand historically with the devel-
opment of technologies of writing, notation, score, and in due course electronic and
digital modes of production and reproduction.
This process—a movement from the immediacy of direct and unmediated
rhythm to the mediated character of the “rhythmicization” of large-scale extended
duration as structures—has several important features. First, just as small-scale
rhythm is mimetic in its imitation of the repetitive aspects of actions and processes,
so is large-scale rhythmicization of duration mimetic through the imitation of
longer-term processes involving repetition, contrast, varied repetition, develop-
ment, and so on. Second, there are technical and technological developments, as
already suggested—for example, techniques for developing the drama or the nar-
rative, as outlined by Aristotle in the Poetics as mimetic, as well as technologies
(i.e., writing) for recording and preserving it, because memory can no longer be
entrusted with this, due to increasing complexity and the number of elements in-
volved. Third, while time and memory are encapsulated in this process, they are
in effect spatialized through being preserved, for example, on the written page.37
Fourth, as far as the performing arts are concerned, this spatialized time, reified
as written page or score, has to be turned back into a “flow” of time available to ex-
perience through performance. Fifth, all of this, as the process of making (poiesis),
serves to mark out a separate aesthetic sphere, a place for different experiences of
time, as dramatic time, epic time, choreographic time, musical time (or rather, mu-
sical times, as I shall argue), where experiments in making elaborated and extended
aesthetic objects have taken place, and where experiments in temporal experience
can also be undertaken as a matter of course.
But what of the counterargument that there is no necessary connection between
these two concepts? Messiaen, for instance, insists on keeping the two strictly apart,
as is brought out in the following exchange between the composer and his inter-
viewer Claude Samuel. Messiaen has been talking of Debussy’s attempt to capture
36 Aristotle, Poetics, 7.
37 Adorno, Zu einer Theorie, 69–72/Towards a Theory, 52–3, discusses this in a note dated June 20, 1946.
the fleeting movement of nature in his music with his delicate use of subtly “irreg-
ular” rhythms and orchestral timbres:
O.M. By dint of monitoring nature, Debussy understood its mobile aspect and its
perpetual undulation, which he conveyed in his music. Thanks to this, he was one
of the greatest rhythmicians of all time.
C.S. Doesn’t this freedom of rhythm imply a renewal of form? Isn’t there a con-
nection between the form of a work and this rhythmic treatment?
O.M. I don’t think so; those are two distinct fields.38
It is obvious that Samuel thinks that rhythm informs every aspect of form—
something that is clear to him in Debussy’s music. Messiaen, on the contrary, sees
no connection at all between these two levels. For him, rhythms are one thing (he
deals with them as if they are objects, and seeks to utilize them as such in his system
of retrogradable and non-retrogradable rhythms), while form is another thing (al-
though he also treats “form,” and the sections that make up his forms, as objects in
space). This seems to me to reveal a gap between (i) what artists consider they are
doing in making a work, and (ii) how a work of art is actually experienced and what
causal connections are made by an attentive consciousness. Messiaen manipulates
his distinctive rhythms and his block forms as if they were quite separate composi-
tional matters, but I suggest that in the experience of listening to Messiaen’s music
the listener hears the larger formal connections derived from the juxtaposed and
superimposed “rhythmicized” timbral blocks that typically characterize his work as
also constituting a larger formal rhythmicized structure—an example of this would
be the Antistrophe I & II in his appropriately named orchestral work Chronochromie
(“Time Colouration”) of 1960. In “musical time,” which is uni-directional and
where musical events must succeed each other, memory and anticipation in the
listening experience seek causal relations that sustain a sense of continuity, even
where the composer has sought to emphasize structural discontinuity. However, it
is also the case that Messiaen’s music can disrupt the impression that time “flows,”
to the extent that it often seeks to create the experience of time standing still. He
sometimes does this through using extremely slow repeated rhythmic units against
a continuous melodic line, as in the final movement of his Quatuour pour la fin
du temps (1941), where there is a continuous, unbroken violin line lasting eight
minutes or so, with what seems like an endlessly repeated and unvarying rhythmic
motif in the accompanying piano chords. On the other hand, there is the sheer pro-
fusion and density of rapidly moving material derived from birdsong where the ex-
cess of rhythmic and melodic diversity acts to blot out all sense of difference, and as
a consequence seems to arrest completely any perception of time passing, as in the
sixth movement, Épode, of Chronochromie. I consider that these examples clearly
demonstrate the close connection between small-scale rhythm and large-scale
38 Messiaen, Music and Colour, 70.

“rhythmicized duration” as form in Messiaen’s music, and in our experience of it, in

spite of the composer’s insistence that there is no connection between rhythm and
form. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine that the composer would deny that such
pieces certainly constitute clear examples of the manipulation of our perception of
time, and to that extent they are experimental.
Experimentation and innovation are particularly associated with twentieth-
century modernism across the arts, and it was at the beginning of this period
(which actually starts in the late nineteenth century) that Bergson’s vitalist ideas
had their greatest influence. This is strikingly the case in music, as the musicologist
Jann Pasler has argued in her work on temporality and the Bergsonian influence
on Debussy, and later on the spectralist composers towards the end of the twen-
tieth century in France (in particular Tristan Murail, Gérard Grisey, and Hugues
Dufourt).39 I want to consider the example of Debussy’s ballet Jeux in this context,
and in the light of Pasler’s comments on it, to clarify what I understand by the con-
cept of “rhythmicized duration” in music.
Debussy’s Jeux (1913) is a late work, written for Diaghilev and Nijinsky, and it
represents the composer’s rhythmic and formal innovations at their most radical. As
a ballet it takes as its point of departure the rather nebulous plot of a game of tennis
and the constantly changing interrelations between the players—a love triangle of
two women and a man. It is usually performed as a concert work, however, and is
a highly structured piece in its own right. It lasts about seventeen minutes. Pasler
writes: “What gives Jeux its formal coherence is its overall rhythmic organization;
recurrence of motives and timbres support this form rather than create it.”40 In each
of the sections that make up the mosaic-like structure of the work Debussy creates
a distinct and self-contained set of timbres, textures, and rhythmic motives. Pasler
demonstrates this in her analysis, and emphasizes that “form is the rhythmicization
of sections, each with their own colour and sense of time.”41 She points out that time
for Debussy is seen as free-flowing and in a state of flux, depending for its percep-
tion on what is filling it. This Bergsonian conception brings us to the point where
we must now attempt to clarify what is meant by “rhythmicized duration” in rela-
tion to music, because the concept of “duration” is difficult to pin down in Bergson’s
philosophy.
For Bergson, as we have seen, duration is the indivisible flow of “becoming” that
cannot be rationalized mechanistically, and can only be experienced intuitively.
Bachelard had criticized this at a philosophical level. For Debussy, you could say
that, while influenced by Bergson, he has no choice but offer a critique of Bergson’s
ideas at a practical and technical level. For the artist as composer, involved at the
poietic level in making musical works, the problem is how to make something that
appears to embody the experience of this endless flux of time with its ebb and flow,
39 Pasler, “Debussy, Jeux,” 60–75, discusses the influence of Bergson on Debussy, and the coexistence of dif-
ferent “rhythmicized durations.” See also Pasler, “Spectral Revolution,” 125–40.
40 Pasler, “Debussy, Jeux,” 61.
41 Pasler, “Debussy, Jeux,” 63.
its speeding up and slowing down, and its increasing and decreasing of intensity.
This unavoidably involves calculation and artifice. Viewed in this context, I suggest
that “duration” in music can be understood as the period of time taken up and ani-
mated by an event, in this case a musical event. Seen in this way, distinct durations
can be made to shade into each other, be superimposed upon each other (for ex-
ample, in simultaneously occurring different rhythms, as happens at many points
in Jeux), and to overlap, creating a larger “rhythmicized duration” of which these
individual events become the rhythmic elements. Debussy achieves this with such
subtlety that we are not aware of his contrivance. Pasler cites from a letter Debussy
wrote to his publisher Durand in 1907:
Music is not, in its essence, a thing which can flow within a rigorous and tradi-
tional form. It is de couleurs et de temps rythmés [made of colours and rhythmicized
time].42
As Pasler convincingly shows, Debussy captured the essence of the natural and
intuitive by means of calculation and artifice. In Jeux his models were, on the one
hand, games, and on the other hand the montage techniques of cinematography
that Bergson himself had identified as the very opposite of the flux of durée, with its
calculated intercutting, superimpositions, and juxtapositions employed to achieve
the appearance of the ceaseless interactions of reality. In Jeux, Debussy structures
duration through an infinitely subtle interplay of fluctuating rhythmic fragments
that coalesce to build sections that in their turn serve to articulate the large-scale
form. However, “form” understood in this way as experimental and innovative, is
not only a radical development of twentieth-century modernism, or of Bergson’s
concept of rhythmicized duration. “Form” as the rhythmicization and extension of
duration has always been the arena for experimentation in the temporal arts, in spite
of the historical and cultural tendency for particular forms to become standardized
and normative.43
But experiments with duration as “aesthetic time” are not unique to the arts or
by any means privileged in this respect, and we also experience other “times” as
structured. We can talk, for instance, of the time of a football match, the time of a
game of cards, or the time of a walk in the country. Each one of these, self-contained
and combined with elements of structure, play, and the unpredictability of improv-
isation, has a time of its own, different from other times. Interestingly, this raises
the question: What might characterize the difference between the time of games
as “play” and the “aesthetic time” of the experience of the art object or event? Both
come under what has been identified by Gadamer as “transformation into struc-
ture” and into intentional object of experience.44 I argue that, if there is a distinction
42 Debussy to Durand, cited in Pasler, “Debussy, Jeux,” 71.

43 Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought, on Heinrich Koch’s theory of form, is helpful in this respect, as is
Clayton, Time in Indian Music, on the case of metric cycles and extended forms in Indian music.
44 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 110.
to be made, it lies in the exploratory and innovative dimension of art and aesthetic
experience that can also involve the breaking of rules or the invention of new ones.
This in turn raises a further question: If we can distinguish in broad terms between
the time of games, for instance, and the aesthetic time afforded by the structure of
“rhythmicized” art objects, is there also a distinction to be made between different
aesthetic times, especially in the temporal arts? I now want to address this through
an expansion of the issues raised so far.
3. Aesthetic time, historical time, experimental time
I have argued for an experiential concept of temporality that is subjective in char-

acter, and have made a case for a concept of rhythm that also involves a large-scale
notion of “rhythmicized duration” that becomes objectified as artistic form, and
which is exploratory and innovative. I now go on to argue that the experience of
musical time, while distinctive, is not one kind of “aesthetic time” common to all
music, but that there are different types of temporal experience characterized by
the musical norms associated with different historical periods. I shall also argue
that the gap that appears between innovation and normativity in the aesthetic ex-
perience of duration in the temporal arts takes on a critical character: innovation as
critique of normativity.
First, how might our experience of time through the temporal arts differ from
our “normal” sense of time? Deliège claims that
forms of art that need duration for their accomplishment are the most apt at
abolishing our usual perception of time and leading it towards an experience of
time that is richer, more complex, less easily analysable.45
He asks the question: If, from the moment an artform like the musical work
slips between our consciousness and our usual experience of time [and] as a result
a new quality of time experience offers itself to our consciousness, then does this
not imply that it is indeed the art form itself that engenders its own time, a time
conditioned by its organization, its rhythms and the hierarchy of its structures?46
This appears to claim that the work itself is the sole source of the complexity and
richness of such an experience of time, that experience is merely shaped and
directed by the complexity and richness of the structure of the musical work.
But Deliège recognizes that this conclusion needs to be treated with caution. He
46 Deliège, “Perception du temps musical,” 87–8 (my translation).

writes: “If a particular ‘time’ of the work of art does exist, then it belongs to our con-
sciousness to make it real.”47
This is the most Bachelardian feature of Deliège’s theory. As Bachelard puts
it: “Indeed, causality in its many forms brings many reasons for relations, links,
and successions, and by doing so makes time and space organic.”48 Furthermore,
the sense of continuity and duration we come to ascribe to “the music” is not nec-
essarily the experience of the “innocent” first hearing. It is, rather, an experience
constructed in reverse, the result of a combination of memory and expectation. In
effect, the sense of the “form” of a work is as much the result of a psychological
process of “re-forming” and “reflux” as it is of the facticity of the work as struc-
ture “in itself.” Indeed, the continuity of the sounds themselves is illusory, according
to Bachelard, and likely to break down at any moment. It is sustained only by our
consciousness and our active attention through the process of making connections,
through perceiving recurrences of groups of material, of rhythms, of motivic ideas.
In a sense, therefore, the Bergsonian notions of duration and continuity are fictions.
As Bachelard puts it: “In this way then, it gives us not really duration but the illusion
of duration.”49 He concludes: “Music’s action is discontinuous; it is our emotional
resonance that gives it continuity.”50
And yet, it also has to be argued that the facticity of the musical work and the po-
tential it affords for a structured experience of time cannot be denied. Deliège, un-
like Bachelard, cannot help but recognize the materiality of musical works. That is to
say, works exist not only as successions of sounds given a sense of continuity by our
consciousness, but also as “spatial” objects that can be read silently as scores, and
where connections can be made both forwards and backwards as superimpositions
of simultaneous levels, as similarities compared, as differences and contrasts
recognized, and as the relationship of parts to whole seen as part of a process of
increasing familiarity. Deliège restores the strong counterweight of the existence of
the “work,” albeit as a work still to be re-composed and re-formed by an attentive
consciousness, and in the process develops it further. The extent of his indebtedness
to Bachelard nevertheless remains evident, which is to say, what it means to talk of
the experience of time through music as specifically the perception of musical time.
This is to be seen in a passage like the following, where Deliège writes:
In effect, time is not a thing, but an experience where one lives time and constructs
it at the same time; experience sufficiently fluid to accept its own disruption and
provisional annihilation, all under the pressure of a simple fiction.51

But our experience of time is dependent on the objects and events that occupy our
consciousness. In this respect, musical works constitute a particular category of
objects that can occupy our experience. That is to say, they are intentional objects,
and as such tend to be highly structured with relationships between parts and
whole that demand an attentive consciousness which also imbues such works with
causality and continuity.
Is the temporal experience afforded by any particular piece of music unique
to that piece and different from the experience of any other piece? This raises the
problem of nominalism (not addressed by Bachelard or Deliège), where any attempt
to generalize from particular instances, and to establish universals is resisted by the
uniqueness of each piece and the uniqueness of the experience of temporality. An
example in support of this extreme position could be Edgard Varèse, each of whose
works (there are fewer than a dozen) defies any attempt at generic categorization. To
ask, therefore, whether there might be, on the contrary, a strong similarity between
the experiences of temporaity enabled by most pieces of music regardless, would be
to see composers like Varèse merely as exceptions to the rule, and to argue, unten-
ably, that generic norms in music do indeed provide a sufficient similarity of experi-
ence across different historical periods. Deliège has to consider the problems raised
by the implication in his argument that each work might indeed appear to imply its
own unique experience of temporality. From a modernist perspective it could well
be argued that this is to some extent the case. However, can extreme nominalism
also be said to apply to musical works of earlier centuries? How might this apply,
for example, to the Baroque, or to the early Classical period in Western art music?
Deliège proposes that on one level, the experience of musical time is also always his-
torical and cultural, because it involves culturally learned responses, expectations,
and indeed, you might say, skills, that are to do with period, style, language and, one
might add, idiom.
Deliège draws two conclusions from this. The first is that, if a musical style or lan-
guage underpins in some way the temporal structure of a musical work, then it is
absolutely pointless to attempt to provide a single general definition of musical time
that will apply in all cases and for all times. As he points out, the time of Machaut,
of Handel, of Mozart, and of Wagner are not the same. He therefore proposes, quite
reasonably, that there is a sort of “standard time” that characterizes the musical
time of any particular period. It does not follow from this, however, that the experi-
ence of individual works will be similar, but only that general features of style, me-
lodic phrasing, harmonic progressions, and characteristic rhythms will be familiar.
Deliège’s second conclusion is that the concept of musical time is not one possessed
by either the individual artist or by the art community, because these come down
to the mediated relationship between listener and musical work, and this is largely
a question of the acceptance or rejection of a dominant musical-historical style or
language, conditioned by, as he puts it, “four centuries of tonal polyphony.”52 He
52 Deliège, “Perception du temps musical,” 92–3.

concludes, therefore, that much of the temporal structure of music and of the mu-
sical consciousness of a particular period is a given, especially in relation to phrase-
ology, which is itself the most obviously rhythmic aspect of melodic lines and also
of harmonic progressions. It is this cultural, historical—and indeed, ideological—
dimension of musical time and rhythm that seems to me to be the important fur-
ther development of Bachelard’s dialectic of duration, and his critique of Bergson
in Deliège’s scheme. At the same time, the dialectical aspect of his approach also
reveals itself yet further when, in talking about one important style period in the
nineteenth century—that of “developing variation”—he moves back and forth be-
tween musical structure and listener demands to demonstrate how close and even
fragile the relationship between them is.
This suggests that ideas of continuity and coherence that we attribute to the mu-
sical work, and which we understand as belonging to the experience of musical
time, are constructs, metaphors sustained by the norms of their historical period,
and which are liable to disruption and change. Musical time is seen by Deliège as
an “ingenious metaphor” that psychologically and ideologically we attribute to the
work itself, and do so until the historical paradigm shifts and a different musical
time takes its place. Deliège points out that this operates only as long as there is a
degree of harmony between artists and listeners in a particular period. However, a
crisis develops when such harmony breaks down through artistic innovation, and
the gap between the musical time of innovators and the musical time of everyone
else then widens, so that incomprehensibility results.53
What are the implications of such crises of comprehensibility between innova-
tion and normativity in the experience of musical time? Viewed in the historical
context of the crisis of musical modernism, Deliège distinguishes two antagonistic
groups reflecting the kind of conflict of cultures of which “the state of crisis is the
expression,” as he puts it.54 Group 1 is characterized by what he calls bi-dimensional
sonic processes, non- reversible, continuous and linear movement. The tem-
poral structures hinge on the valuing of development and homogeneity. Group 2
opposes the linear and continuous values of the established culture, putting in its
place “a non-Euclidean geometrical space” that characterizes the contemporary
imagination, so Deliège proposes, and the projection of “multiple dimensions in
a succession of discontinuous instants favouring . . . a dynamic present.”55 These
two antagonistic groups represent two distinctly different metaphors of time. The
first group he suggests is characterized by the phraseological type of process or-
ganized according to the mode of development by variation. The second group is
characterized by other modes of temporal organization like, for instance, moment
forms, where the experience of continuity is constantly interrupted, as each “mo-
ment” is discontinuous with every other moment.56 Other forms of organization
54 Deliège, “Perception du temps musical,” 95.
56 Deliège, “Perception du temps musical,” 97.

might also be included here, like labyrinth forms, with different routes through the
structure, and mobile forms where different orderings of elements might be used in
each new performance. You could therefore say that Deliège presents the second,
the metaphor of discontinuity, as a critique of the first, the metaphor of continuity.
Deliège takes Bachelard’s notion of a dialectical mode of experience of duration
and attempts to sketch a critical theory of music and musical experience that has
ramifications beyond Bachelard’s theory of rhythm, and is clearly influenced by
Adorno.57
4. In conclusion
I have argued that rhythm needs to be understood not simply as an independent

parameter but as a fundamentally structural dimension of the temporal arts, as
“rhythmicized duration” as form. In this respect, moreover, innovations in the
temporal arts afford us opportunities also to experiment with our perception of
duration, extending our experience into areas of increasing complexity, simulta-
neity, and multiplicity. I have also made the claim that our ideas of rhythm, seen in
this larger context, are historical and metaphorical in character, in that they have
emerged in particular historical and cultural circumstances and have changed and
developed over time. Underlying the position I have put forward is the argument
that the aesthetics of rhythm in the temporal arts is concerned with an intensive
experience of time that is essentially experimental in relation to the kinds of art
works and events, as structured “rhythmicized forms,” made at any particular his-
torical period. The aim has been to suggest the extent to which the creative and
experimental impulse of the temporal arts has sought to extend the limits of our
experience of time, to paraphrase Bachelard, through “the restoration of form” to
rhythm.58
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Gretel Adorno (Frankfurt, 1970).
Adorno, Theodor, Zu einer Theorie der muskalischen Reproduktion, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt,
2001). Tr. as Adorno, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, tr. Wieland Hoban, ed. Henri
Lonitz (Cambridge, 2006).
Aristotle, Poetics, tr. Malcolm M. Heath (London, 1996).
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Bergson, Henri, Durée et simultanéité: A propos de la théorie d’Einstein ([1922]; Paris, 1968).
57 The connection is particularly striking, because Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 207, proposes that “musical
time” acts as a critique of “empirical time.”
Bergson, Henri, “La perception du changement,” in La pensée et le mouvant ([1911]; 15th edn,
Paris, 2003), 143–76.
Bergson, Henri, An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. T. E. Hulme ([1903]; London, 2007).
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Philosophie, 75 (2012), 1–19.
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87–100.
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(London, 2004).
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Carr ([1936]; Evanston, 1970).
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Jean B. Harrell ([1973]; London, 1986).
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18
Husserl’s Model of Time-Consciousness, and
the Phenomenology of Rhythm
Salomé Jacob
1. Introduction
This chapter examines the implications of Edmund Husserl’s model of temporal

consciousness on the experience of musical rhythm. In Husserl’s phenomenology,
temporality structures perception, but also memory and imagination. We visually
perceive objects as enduring or moving through time. If our experience were only
a succession of now-points, the perception of endurance, movement, and change
would be impossible. Husserl aims to account for the temporal structure of con-
sciousness that renders possible these kinds of experiences. He argues that the living
present—any current moment of experience—includes three phases: the retention
of the just-past; the primal-impression which corresponds to the now-point; and
the protention, which is a short-term anticipation of what is just about to come. The
living present encompasses what has just happened and what is about to occur, thus
enabling the experience of continuity and movement.
The notion of rhythm is ambiguous; there is a tension between an objective and
a subjective (or experiential) dimension of rhythm. In the first case, rhythm refers
to the durational patterns of accented and unaccented sounds, as well as silences.
This rhythm could be instantiated in other pieces; it seems to be repeatable as a
type. In the experiential case however, rhythm is not studied as a pattern that can be
instantiated, but rather in its particular experience. Rhythm as experienced—which
I shall term rhythm as lived—involves the sensing of a flow, requiring a certain co-
herency in the events—if the events occurred completely by chance, there would
be no feeling of flow. Is there a real dichotomy between objective and subjective,
experiential, rhythm?1 Christopher Hasty suggests that dictionaries and technical
studies privilege the objective view of rhythm. However, I agree with his argument
that one cannot think about rhythm in isolation from the temporal experience of
it. Hasty claims that the reading of a score or a poem occurs in time, suggesting
that it is in this sense a “performance”; we talk for instance of “the reading” of a
1 In this volume, Chapter 15, Hasty, “Complexity and Passage,” and Chapter 16, Cheyne, “Encoded and
Embodied Rhythm,” present contrasting views on this question.
poem. There is thus, even in the study of rhythm on a score, a certain experience of
movement. It does not make sense to speak about rhythm as atemporal and non-
experiential. This chapter aims to articulate rhythm as lived.
Why is Husserl relevant in an examination of musical experience, and more spe-
cifically of musical rhythm? In his discussion on time, he provides the example of
listening to a melody.2 Husserl examines the perception of change (how each tone
heard is colored by the preceding and the following one) and duration (what it is to
perceive a tone as having a certain duration). Why, then, concentrate on rhythmic
experience specifically? The first motivation may be that rhythm seems more fun-
damental than melody, if melody is to be understood as pitched sounds organized
in musical time. This temporal organization is precisely what we take to be mu-
sical rhythm. It is also possible to have rhythmic pieces which are not harmonic, al-
though it is ambiguous whether we may have completely arrhythmic pieces.3 Simha
Arom examines, for instance, pieces of “pure rhythmics” in the Central African
Republic that can be produced on idiophones, membranophones, or by the human
body, such as foot stamping.4 A second motivation is the intimate relation between
lived rhythm and bodily movements. When listeners attend to rhythm, they often
engage with it by tapping their foot, swaying their head, or balancing their body. As
developed below, Husserl’s phenomenology of time strongly enables us to connect
the experience of musical rhythm and the listener’ bodily movements.
Yet, can Husserl’s model really say much about the distinctiveness of rhythmic
experience? Given that it also applies to the perception of isochronous sounds, one
may question the appeal to a Husserlian framework. I argue that Husserl’s anal-
ysis of time-consciousness is particularly useful in a study of rhythm, although
this analysis does not do justice to the full complexity of the phenomenology of
rhythm. First, the dynamic structure of time-consciousness, when applied to
rhythm, suggests that listeners retain just-past sounds and anticipate sounds to
come based on what has been heard. Short-term memory and short-term anticipa-
tion should not thus be studied separately but in close interrelation. Second, I con-
centrate on bodily interaction with rhythm—such as foot tapping—and suggest
that these movements are also intrinsically temporal in requiring an anticipation
of where the movement is going, and how it will unfold. Experientially, rhythmic
bodily movements encompass both the perception of musical rhythm and a bodily
awareness of one’s own movements, both sharing the same structure of retention,
primal-impression, and protention. The anticipation in foot tapping, for instance,
parallels anticipating when the next beat will occur, and suggests a particularly rich
phenomenology of embodied rhythm.
2 Husserl, Internal Time,  24–5.

3 By arrhythmic pieces, I do not mean pieces that are ametrical (see Section 2). Neither do I mean that there
is no rhythmic structure specified on a score, even if, like John Cage’s “As Slow as Possible,” its performance (in
this case, some notes lasting two years) prevents any experience of rhythm, and therefore of music. Similarly, a
creation that has no temporal organization at all, i.e., notes with no sense of coherence between each duration,
lacks a rhythm. I leave open the question whether or not such a piece may be experienced as musical.
4 Arom, African Polyphony, 233.
Husserl’s Model of Time-Consciousness 293
In this chapter, I aim to illuminate Husserl’s phenomenology of temporality by

putting together ideas on time from his 1904–5 lectures with notions developed
in the latter part of his career, e.g., the term “living present” (lebendige Gegenwart),
first mentioned in the C-manuscripts in 1929. These important Husserlian notions,
I argue, demonstrate their full relevance in rhythm studies. However, the account of
a temporal nature of bodily movement that I develop in Section 3, on the temporal
nature of bodily movements, was not addressed by Husserl and is influenced by the
work of more contemporary figures such as Shaun Gallagher and Evan Thompson.5
2. Rhythm
In order to understand in what sense and to what extent Husserl’s analysis of time-
consciousness may be relevant to a study of rhythmic experience, we need to say a
bit more about rhythm first. Rhythm is rarely experienced in isolation from other
musical features.6 We find in Edgar Varèse’s work, for example, a very close inter-
action between rhythm and timbre. In pieces such as “Arcana” and “Octandre,”
rhythm is united with timbre to put different musical forces into tension. A pas-
sage in the first movement of “Octandre” (bars 19 to 21) exhibits a tension between
the first pattern (horns, trumpets, trombone, and a double bass), consisting in a
dotted semiquaver and a demisemiquaver rest, followed by four demisemiquaver
notes, repeated four times. Varèse wrote on the score that it had to be “heavy and
savage.” By opposition, the following pattern—brief alternation of quaver rests and
quavers—exhibits very different timbral characteristics (piccolo flute, oboe, clar-
inet, and bassoon). In this passage, the sense of movement is not simply given by
the rhythmic patterns but also by the timbral features. I assume in the rest of the
chapter that rhythm can be conceptually distinguished from other musical features,
even if it cannot always be separated from these features in our experience.
Rhythm is often associated with meter. Meter involves alternation between
stressed and unstressed beats—regularly recurring divisions of time. The most com-
monly found time signatures in Western music are 3/4, 4/4, or 6/8, and they usually
remain stable throughout a piece. These signatures indicate the number of beats in
each bar. The first beat of the bar, the downbeat, is traditionally the stressed one,
but composers can—and indeed often do—play with this, as in the case of upbeat
notes (the anticipatory note occurring before the first bar line), and in syncopations
when the rhythmic stress is placed where it is not expected. The wide variety of du-
rational note patterns, such as combinations of crochets, quavers, and demisemi-
quaver rests, corresponds to rhythm.
5 Gallagher and Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind; Thompson, Mind in Life.

6 I do not hold a conservative position on what features are constitutive of musical works. I am not claiming
in particular that a musical work necessarily involves pitched notes.
Meter isn’t always regular. Composers in the twentieth century in particular have
denied that meter ought to be the fixed framework within which rhythm can be
heard. Luigi Dallapiccola, for example, developed what he termed a schwebender
rhythmus, literally a “floating rhythm.” The idea is that there must be an inter-
play between meter and rhythm. Meter cannot simply be this rigid fragmentation
of time. Schwebender rhythmus can occur thanks to three main characteristics: a
meter that changes abruptly; phrases that go beyond the bar; and metrical super-
imposition. The first characteristic informs the main theme of Dallapiccola’s second
“Due Liriche del Kalewala,” in which the time signature changes in each bar (4/4,
3/4, 2/4, 7/8, 4/4, 7/8,  4/4).7
Dallapiccola’s work shows that meter can be more or less flexible. Some music
may also be ametrical. Gregorian chants as well as a lot of non-Western music, such
as the Arabic taqsim, do not have a regular beat.8 I still want to maintain though
that such pieces are rhythmical: the duration of each note is not completely ale-
atory; even if the temporal organization is minimal, the possibility to experience
this organization grounds rhythmic experience. Crucially here is Hasty’s point (see
Chapter 15 in this volume), that meter is also experienced and, as such, needs to be
included in the study of rhythm as lived. It is mistaken, Hasty argues, to consider
that meter is an unfelt, objective division in the score. As claimed below, beat induc-
tion does provide a feeling of the beat.
The close interaction between rhythm and meter is particularly clear when
examining the role of anticipation in rhythmic experience. Paul Fraisse writes that
we say that there is rhythm when we can predict on the basis of what is perceived,
or, in other words, when we can anticipate what will follow.9
The listener’s faculty to anticipate the sounds that will be heard depends on
a relatively coherent rhythmic structure (and often includes a relatively stable
beat). Admittedly, music plays with these forms of expectation, e.g., with syn-
copation. Anticipation occurs at various levels and can have a shorter or longer
time-lapse.
Edward Large and Mari Riess Jones’s study claims that anticipation plays a cen-
tral role in the perception of rhythm.10 They argue that a periodic pulse affords
anticipation of when the next notes are likely to occur. Central to their theory—
the dynamic attending theory—is the role of entrainment. Entrainment happens
when two or more autonomous rhythms interact, e.g., the human circadian rhythm
entraining to the twenty-four-hour cycle of light and dark. In music, entrainment
occurs for example when musicians play together in time.11 Large and Jones focus
7 Brown and Fabbri, “La Sperimentazione Ritmica,” 143.
8 The Arabic taqsim may have an ostinato pedal in a passage but would most often be ametrical.
9 Fraisse, “Rhythm and Tempo,” 153.
10 Large and Jones, “Dynamics of Attending.”
11 Clayton, “Entrainment, Ethnography.”

on the entrainment between brain processes and music, more specifically between
neural oscillators (called “attending rhythms”), and the periodicity in the music,
i.e., beats and meter. Beats, however, are rarely isochronous; the interval between
each beat may vary slightly. Attending rhythm must thus be capable of adapting it-
self to such variations. Large and Jones’ study points out that attending rhythm can
be “tuned,” i.e., it is able to take into account the temporal alterations in the external
stimuli.12 Their research suggests that tone grouping is facilitated by an accurate
perception of strong and weak beats. In particular, the listener’s attention is more
acute at strong metric positions. Entrainment to the beats thus facilitates the expec-
tations one has with regards to rhythm: the beginning of a new rhythmic pattern,
for instance, is expected to fall on the strong metric position.
Entrainment to the beat can also be manifest in the synchronization of one’s
body parts with the music, such as foot tapping.13 In such cases, the body
movement occurs at the same time as the sound: stimulus and response are si-
multaneous. Fraisse emphasizes that this phenomenon is possible “only if the
motor command is anticipated in regard to the moment when the stimulus is
produced.”14 More precisely, the signal for the response is not the stimulus but
the temporal interval between successive signals. Without anticipation of the
sound stimuli to be heard, synchronization would not be possible. Fraisse stresses
that synchronization is established very quickly, after the second or third sound.
This means that it relies at most on short-term memory (of the interval time be-
tween the sounds) and that the expectation process concerns quasi-immediate
events.15 Fraisse adds that synchronization can occur when the interval between
two sound stimuli ranges from 200 to 1800ms, and it is most accurate for intervals
from 400 to 800ms.16
Rhythmic anticipation is also crucial when one engages with the music, as
in the case of dance and groove. Someone familiar with Chuck Berry’s “Johnny
B. Goode” is likely to anticipate the development of the first succession of quavers
running over five bars on a quick tempo. The bodily movement may follow
this unfolding of the notes. Admittedly, one’s degree of familiarity with a mu-
sical piece or a musical genre can bring more or less determinate anticipations. It
appears from the above that anticipation plays a fundamental role in the experi-
ence of rhythm, and does so at various levels. Listeners may not be actively aware
of their anticipation of sounds but their bodily movements suggest that there is
an implicit anticipation of coming notes. The following section brings in Husserl’s
framework of time-consciousness, which I think clarifies the anticipatory char-
acter of rhythmic experience.
12 Large and Jones, “Dynamics of Attending,” 149.
13 Fraisse, “Rhythm and Tempo”; Thaut, Rhythm, Music and the Brain.
15 Section 4 develops the notion of short-term memory.

3. Husserl’s Phenomenology of Time-Consciousness
Throughout his work, Husserl was concerned with the phenomenology of time,
although his arguments on the topic developed and changed. Toine Kortooms
identifies three main stages of Husserl’s thinking about time-consciousness. The first
stage corresponds to the fourth part of Husserl’s 1904–5 lecture course; the second
stage is mainly developed in the L-manuscripts; and the later stage is found in the
C-manuscripts.17 I largely draw upon the second stage, notably the L-manuscripts
or Bernau manuscripts, named after the location in which they were written. Here,
for the first time, the concept of protention becomes important. In addition, the dy-
namic account of the experience of time-consciousness is particularly developed,
as we will see. I also rely on Husserl’s 1904–5 lectures and his Analysis Concerning
Passive and Active Synthesis (1918–26).
3.1 Retention, Primal-Impression, and Protention
One must suspend belief in objective time (e.g., the divisions between hours and
minutes) in order to concentrate on the subjective apprehension of time, i.e., how
time appears in experience. Husserl introduces the notions of retention, primal-
impression, and protention to characterize the living present, i.e., the constitution
of experience at a certain time:18
Perception is a process of streaming from phase to phase . . . In each phase we have

primordial impression, retention and protention, and unity arises in this progres-
sion by the protention of each phase being fulfilled through the primordial im-
pression of the phase that is continuously contiguous to it.19
It is important to note that these three phases do not occur successively in a tem-
poral horizontal line. Rather, the Now is continuously colored by the retained per-
ception of the just-past and an openness towards what is just-about-to-come. Thus
retention and protention are simultaneous with the primal-impression. In this
continuously dynamic process, retention constantly colors the primal-impression
and partly shapes the protention itself, which in turn impacts on the new primal-
impression as soon as it is fulfilled.
17 Kortooms, Phenomenology of Time, xiii–iv.

18 The term “living present” (lebendige Gegenwart) is introduced in the C-manuscripts. It is understood as
a flowing present and replaces Husserl’s earlier term “primal stream.” It encompasses the phases of retention,
primal-impression and protention.
19 Lectures on Transcendental Logic, 107. Gallagher, “Phenomenology of Temporality,” 137, notes that
Husserl was here influenced by William James’ concept of the specious present in his Principles of Psychology.
Bp Cp Dp
A B C D
Ar Br Cr Dr
Ar’
Figure 18.1 Husserl’s structure of time-consciousness
Husserl’s favorite example is that of listening to a melody.20 A melody, like a

rhythmic pattern, which it also involves, is a structure that is extended in time. To
perceive its unity, each note must be heard in relation to the past and the coming
ones. Husserl stresses that retention, primal-impression, and protention allow for
the creation of continuity and motion in sounds. Figure 18.1, borrowed from James
Mensch,21 is useful in characterizing the relation between the three phases of the
listener’s perception of music. The horizontal line corresponds to the continuum of
perception. The vertical lines indicate the listener’s apprehension of temporal rela-
tions at each moment. For instance, the now-point C is not experienced alone. The
now-point C is combined with the retention of B (Br), the more remote retention of
A (Ar’), and the protention (short-term anticipation) of D. The diagram shows that
A does not disappear immediately but turns into Ar, then Ar’, and so on and so forth.
Ar’ is a retention of a retention. A past note then fades away, while losing some of its
vividness, as it dies out into the past. Our grasp of the just-past tones gets weaker
and weaker.
Husserl spent more time developing the concept of retention than that of
protention—although in two of his Lectures on Transcendental Logic he insists on
the crucial importance of protention.22 There is an important asymmetry between
the two notions. Retentions are fulfilled intentions whose content has already been
given. In contrast, protentions are unfulfilled intentions toward what is just about
to come: their content increases in vividness as we get closer to the event. Husserl
talks about “protentional continuity” or “directedness-ahead.”23 This means that a
constant intention towards what is about to be heard allows for the perception of
20 Husserl, Internal Time, 24–5.
21 Mensch, “Husserl’s Conception.”
22 Husserl, Lectures on Transcendental Logic, 106–21.
23 Lectures on Transcendental Logic, 116.

continuity and change. Protention corresponds to the consciousness that there is a

future continuity of tone phases, i.e., the consciousness that the music will carry on,
at least in what is just about to come.
Protentions are not necessarily devoid of content, but their degree of clarity varies.
The following quote sheds light on the role of retention in shaping protentions:
The further an event progresses, the more it offers in itself for more differentiated
protentions, ‘the style of the past is projected into the future.’24
The more retentions there are, the more precise the protentions can get. If a
rhythmic pattern has been unfolding for a couple of bars and has a predictable
structure (such as the succession of three quavers played together with six semi-
quavers in the opening of Chopin’s “Ballade No. 4”), the short-term anticipations
can have a better defined content.
Husserl adds that any experience has a double intentionality. The term “inten-
tionality” relates to the awareness of something, which is most often implicit: one
does not reflect upon it. Any experience is the experience of an object, an event,
etc., and the subject’s thought is directed towards this object or event. In the case of
listening to a melody, one is aware of the melody itself. At the same time, however,
one is also aware of one’s ongoing experience of that melody (see Section 4.2). The
retention is not just the retention of the past-note, but one also retains the just-
past experience of this note. My experience thus has this temporal structure, which
enables me to be aware both of the melody—i.e., of temporally extended units—and
of my experience of this melody. Put differently, there is an implicit awareness that
I am the subject undergoing the experience. This double-intentionality also applies
to protentions. While I can protend toward the notes which are about to be heard
there is an implicit anticipatory sense that I will be the subject listening to these
notes.25 Husserl’s purpose is thus two-fold: to account for the experience of tem-
porally extended objects and also to account for the experience of one’s ongoing
stream of experiences.
3.2 Distinguishing Retention and Recollection,

Protention and Expectation
As stressed above, retentions and protentions are tied with primal-impressions.

They are part of a living present. These moments are not subject to our active con-
tribution; they are involuntary and passive. Recollection and expectation differ
considerably from retention and protention. They are not part of the perceptual
experience. Recollection concerns events which fell out of the present experience;
24 Husserl, Bernau manuscripts (1917–18), 20, cited in Kortooms, Phenomenology of Time, 178.
25 Gallagher and Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 88.

they are not in the just-past but in a more remote past. Likewise, expectations are
driven toward moments in a more distant future than just-about-to-occur events.
Husserl introduces the term “representation” (Vergegenwärtigung) to characterize
how a past event appears in consciousness.26
Because recollection has lost the vividness of the just-past, it requires that one
brings this event to consciousness, thus reconstructing—or “representing”—it.
In the L-manuscripts, Husserl underlines that the structure retention/primal-
impression/protention remains. An event is represented in relation to what was in
the living present the just-past and the just-about-to-come. In other words, a rec-
ollection involves the memory of an event as rooted within a succession. Kortooms
writes:
In the original process, a unity has developed on the basis of retentions and
protentions, for example in the unity of the melody that is heard, and this plays a
role in the reproduction of the original process in recollection.27
The recollection of a past note thus involves, for instance, the representation, the
awareness of the position of this note as part of a rhythmic pattern. Husserl does
not expand much on the notion of expectation. Although it is unfulfilled like
protentions, it does not structure the present experience the way protentions do.
Familiarity with a musical piece may offer richer expectations, as in the case of the
listener who anticipates the final chords of a passage. Following this examination
of Husserlian time-consciousness, the next section integrates the framework to
rhythmic experience.
4. Rhythm and Temporal Consciousness
4.1 Dynamic Process
To reiterate, Husserl’s analysis does not say much about the experience of rhythm,
given the ubiquity of the experiences that are grounded on the temporal structure
of consciousness. But there are crucial aspects of his analysis that a phenomenology
of rhythm should take into account. In particular, Husserl’s theory sheds light on
the interaction between short-term memory and short-term anticipations. What
is pervasive in the perception of rhythm is not just the anticipatory aspect but the
full intrinsic temporality of the process. To clarify, the anticipation of when the
next note or the next rhythmic pattern will be heard does not depend solely on the
26 Cited by Kortooms, Phenomenology of Time, 68, drawing from Husserl’s Nachlass (a manuscript on
“Phantasy, Mental Images, and Memory”).
27 Kortooms, Phenomenology of Time, 199.
anticipation of the listener, but the anticipation itself is shaped by the short-term
memory of the past notes or past rhythmic pattern.
Let us first develop what short-memory is and why I am relating this concept to
Husserl’s notion of retention. Memory consists of three phases: echoic memory and
early processing; short-term memory; and long-term memory. Each of these phases
has a different time-scale, although they may sometimes slightly overlap. Echoic
memory usually fades away in less than a second: during this phase, the acous-
tical features of sounds, e.g., frequencies and timbre, are processed in the brain and
grouped together to form coherent events.28 Short-term memory lasts on average
3–5 seconds. The information then gradually fall into long-term memory. Bob
Snyder writes that short-term memory is the “memory of the immediate past.”29 He
adds that it plays an essential role in perceiving duration. Long-term memory falls
beyond the 3–5 seconds of short-term memory. At this point, the events are not im-
mediately present to consciousness but can be experienced only in retrospect: they
must be “recollected.”30
Snyder’s terminology seems to echo Husserl’s, and the similarity requires further
examination. Snyder stresses that short-term memory is tied up with present expe-
rience, being “immediately available to conscious awareness at any given time.”31
He adds:
Each frame persists for a time, fades, and is continuously related to others coming
immediately after it while retaining its proper time order. At the same time, new
memory and experiences are almost always fading in. In this way, separate ‘chunks’
of experience are integrated into an ongoing, unified world.32
Husserl’s framework is well suited for making sense of these processes. Information
in short-term memory is retained in the present experience, enabling the experi-
ence to be “unified,” as Snyder writes. As soon as a current moment falls into short-
term memory, it fades away to then fall into long-term memory. When it is no
longer part of the just-past, it must be “recollected” (a term used both by Husserl
and Snyder). When we are listening to a whole musical piece, we can also make
sense of the connections between certain passages—e.g., echoes and modulations
of a particular motif—by having events coming back into awareness from the long-
term memory.33
28 Snyder, Music and Memory, 48.

29 Snyder, Music and Memory.
32 Snyder, Music and Memory.
33 Snyder draws a distinction between voluntary recollection and spontaneous awareness of events/objects
from long-term memory. Recollected memories require the voluntary bringing-back-into-awareness of
the subject. He distinguishes voluntary recollection from automatic reminding occurring from environ-
mental cues, and also from recognition where an environmental event acts as its own cue: Snyder, Music and
Memory, 70.
Snyder argues that rhythm is perceived thanks to the role of short-term memory:
The length of short-term memory is important in the definition of rhythm be-

cause to form a pattern, the component events of a rhythm must seem directly
connected.34
Sequences of events within short-term memory are perceived as being in the pre-
sent and as forming patterns which can be integrated and experienced in their en-
tirety.35 Husserl’s analysis illuminates the relation between just-past events and
the ones that are just about to come. It is not just the role of short-term memory
which is crucial, as Snyder suggests, but the full intrinsic temporality of the experi-
ence: short-term memory is integrated to the anticipation of the sounds. Listeners
experience rhythm because they can retain the notes and also anticipate the ones in
the quasi-immediate future.
Unexpected rhythmic patterns, a sudden change in the tempo, etc., can occur,
but Husserl’s analysis seems able to incorporate such unexpected events. As Lanei
Rodenmeyer writes,
this new situation will not be apprehended as fulfilled until it is part of retention,
when the interrelation of retention and protention will once again allow me to
form protentions towards the continuance of this new situation.36
Unexpected events then fall into retention and when they are retentions (and
retentions of retentions etc., as Figure 18.1 in Section 3 indicates), they shape new
protentions. To reiterate, the experience of every musical aspect—melody, tone,
rhythm—is experienced within this temporal framework. Why develop Husserl’s
argument specifically with regard to rhythm then? Husserl’s framework applies at
all levels of rhythmic anticipation, mentioned in Section 2. It is particularly perti-
nent when we consider the listener’s bodily engagement with rhythm. Part of the
process is enabled, I think, by the fact that the listener’s bodily movements have the
same intrinsic temporality.
4.2 Rhythmic Experience, Time, and Bodily Movements
Rhythm as lived often entails a bodily engagement on the part of the listener.37
Subjects may sway their head, tap their foot, or sway their whole body. The sugges-
tion is that rhythm as lived encompasses both the perception of the musical rhythm

36 Rodemeyer, “Theory of Time-Consciousness,” 139.
37 Bodily engagement, of course, also occurs on the part of the performer, an element that would be ex-
tremely interesting to develop, but this would extend the scope of this chapter.
and a bodily awareness. There are different degrees of self-awareness. For Husserl
and later phenomenologists, Merleau-Ponty in particular, there is always a min-
imal awareness of oneself. This minimal awareness corresponds to a pre-reflective
sense of mineness, also termed ipseity.38 “Pre-reflective” here means that one’s
sense of self is not explicitly posited as an I: the sense of self remains tacit and non-
thematic. This ipseity is not additional to an experience, as if this could be taken
away without altering the experience itself: rather, it is intrinsic to any experience.
This corresponds to the double-intentionality mentioned in Section 3. The percep-
tion of music is also accompanied by a tacit sense of selfhood, i.e., that I am the sub-
ject undergoing the experience.
Husserl emphasizes the role of kinesthesis in any experience. My perception of
the environment is structured by the way I orientate or move my body. I am con-
stantly (pre-reflectively) adjusting my body in relation to the surroundings. My eyes
may focus on an object, which may involve a movement of the head. My posture may
change if I am following the movement of an object. In the case of rhythmic percep-
tion, listeners are most often engaging with the music with their body. Movements
such as foot tapping most often remain pre-reflective, staying in the background of
the experience as the listener attends to the rhythm. Joona Taipale points out that
there are different levels of bodily awareness.39 Breathing and digestion are part of
a primal sense of bodily awareness. When kinestheses are freely executed, such as
foot tapping, jumping, swaying of the head, we talk of agency. If body movements
are habitual (the activity remains implicit), as in the case of walking, which is a
practical skill that remains implicit in the activity, the movements are “passively ac-
tive.”40 This seems to correspond to foot tapping: subjects most often perform this
movement habitually when they listen to music. This is something they do, but such
an activity remains implicit. On the other hand, more full-fledged movements, such
as swaying one’s whole body when listening to a rhythm, may give a stronger sense
of bodily-awareness. These movements are not habitual the way foot tapping may
be. This kind of movement may be accompanied by a slightly slower breathing and
movements of the foot: ipseity, “passively active,” and active agency are not mutu-
ally exclusive, but they correspond to different modes of self-awareness.
These movements are also temporal. Gallagher stresses that temporality is found
in all bodily movements and actions and that it manifests itself at the sub-personal
and at the personal levels.41 In the case of bodily synchronization to a beat, foot tap-
ping along to the music requires a (pre-reflective) retention of the initiation of the
movement as well as an orientation toward the complete realization of this move-
ment. What is interesting is that the temporal structure of this bodily movement
interacts with the temporal structure of the music (in this case the beat). The an-
ticipation of the body movement is grounded on the anticipation of the coming
38 Taipale, Phenomenology and Embodiment, 23.
39 Taipale, Phenomenology and Embodiment,  55–9.
40 Taipale, Phenomenology and Embodiment, 57.
41 Gallagher, “Phenomenology of Temporality,” 142.

beat. If the beat is late, the body needs to readjust itself as this late beat impacts on
the bodily anticipation one had. The anticipation of the completion of the move-
ment (raise the foot and finally hit the ground) corresponds to the occurrence of the
anticipated beat. If the beat fails to occur at the expected time, then the bodily tem-
poral structure is in asynchrony with the music and needs to readapt itself. Tiger
Roholt’s quote is particularly pertinent:
While moving to a pulse, late eighth notes are experienced—not as late to a spe-
cific degree, not as so many instances of an ‘eighth note’—but as pulling against
the regularity of the movement of one’s body. In other words, through movement
to the pulse, I set up expectations of rhythmic regularity in my body. Timing
nuances thwart that regularity, and these tensions are felt more profoundly than
many other perceptual qualities because they are felt in and by the body as a bodily
disequilibrium.42
In one particular example, Roholt contrasts Ringo Starr’s version of “Love Me Do”
with that of Andy White. Ringo Starr tends to play certain notes a tiny bit late,
which gives the feel of a pull, in contrast to Andy White who plays some notes early.
Although Roholt does not mention the phenomenology of time in his book on
rhythm and groove, Husserl’s analysis is seminal in this context. The bodily dise-
quilibrium that Roholt evokes is felt because bodily movements have this inherent
temporal structure. The bodily protention was coordinated to the protention of the
next beat. A delay in the beat is felt in the body as the bodily protention no longer
matches the “beat protention.” Only in retention can the body readjust itself in
order to be again in synchrony with the music. The same temporal process is found
in more full-fledged bodily movements, as in the case of dance.
Roholt examines what a groove is, and stresses that its study is two-fold. First, it
involves the music itself, that is, the rhythmic patterns (which can be written down
on a score) and the way this rhythm is played (with a slight anticipation for instance).
Repetition but with certain variations is central in creating a groove. A rhythm
that has no repetition cannot give this feeling of groove. Certain rhythms by con-
trast, such as a shuffle pattern (subdivision of the beat into uneven triplets), tend
to create a groove feeling. This is particularly blatant in Tame Impala’s “Elephant,”
for instance. The electric bass plays all along, despite sudden brief interruptions, a
shuffle rhythm that gives the impression of notes being pulled back. Besides, Roholt
points out that timing nuances play a crucial role in creating a groove. In this same
piece, the electric bass and Kevin Parker’s voice are not always exactly synchronized
on the beat. Second, Roholt stresses that a groove necessarily involves the way the
music feels for the listener. More precisely, it involves the listener feeling this sensa-
tion of notes being pushed or pulled, due to timing nuances. This is, fundamentally,
a bodily experience, as noted in the quote above.
42 Roholt, Groove, 111–12.

Not all experiences of rhythm are groove experiences. To feel a groove, however,
necessarily involves a rhythmic experience. Perhaps one may characterize the ex-
perience of groove as that of a sophisticated lived rhythm. One may suggest that
feeling a groove can depend in part, or be enhanced, by other musical features, such
as harmony. For instance, the shuffle rhythmic pattern in “Elephant” ends with a
semiquaver and dotted quaver that also comes with a harmonic progression (from
D to F); this change precipitates the entrance of the voice. Whether this harmonic
progression might participate in the groove is a question I leave aside. For the sake
of this chapter, it is relevant to speak about groove insofar as it is primarily grounded
in the lived experience of rhythm. Furthermore, the tension that Roholt describes
can be felt, I think, although perhaps to a lesser degree, in pieces that do not yield
any experience of groove. Beethoven’s famous syncopation with the entrance of the
first violins (bar 7) at the overture of his Third Symphony conflicts with the regu-
larity of the quavers played by the second violins. This tension can be felt bodily
if we are synchronizing with the beats. The violins enter on a weak beat, thus dis-
turbing this regularity.
In rhythm as lived, subjects experience musical rhythm, but this is accompanied
by a bodily awareness of their movements. Movements such as foot tapping are not
merely additional but are part of the overall rhythmic experience. The body’s tem-
poral structure, although not the same as that of the music, closely matches what is
occurring (and what is anticipated) in the music. What this suggests is that a phe-
nomenology of rhythm should take into account the integration of the temporality
of the bodily movement and the experience of the temporal structure of the music.
This framework incorporates the listener’s own temporal structure in the very expe-
rience of the music’s rhythm. Following from Roholt’s point, changes in the rhythm
can be felt bodily precisely because there was a bodily anticipation which coincided
with the anticipation of the rhythm. Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness is
promising in that it offers an integrated account of the relation between the subject’s
temporality and the temporality in the music. The rhythmic phenomenon cannot
be reduced to the temporal patterns in the music; one needs to include the tempo-
rality on the side of the subject in order to provide an adequate phenomenology of
rhythm.
5. Conclusion
This chapter has examined the extent to which Husserl’s analysis of time-
consciousness could prove useful in a study of rhythmic experience. Crucial to
rhythmic experience is the listener’s anticipation, which is most often pre-reflective
and can occur at various levels, including at the bodily level in the case, for instance,
of synchronization to the beat. According to Husserl, the consciousness of temporal
objects and processes is integrally related to the temporal structure of consciousness
itself. In order to account for the experience of duration, change, and movement,
one must provide the basis that enables this experience. The processes of retention,
primal-impression, and protention in the subject render possible the experience
of temporal objects. I have argued that this framework applies to the experience of
rhythm. It is useful in insisting on the interaction between the just-past sounds and
protention toward the new ones. Rhythmic experience is like a continuous cycle, in
which unexpected events can be integrated and shape new coherent protentions.
This claim appears consistent with empirical research on short-term memory.
Furthermore, in rhythmic experience the subject’s body often engages with the
music, whether or not the subject is consciously aware of it. A phenomenology of
rhythm must be able to take into account the bodily dimension of the experience.
Admittedly, Husserl’s analysis of time cannot do all of the work. A much more de-
tailed analysis of bodily engagement would be required. The temporal structure in-
herent in bodily movements is of particular interest however. There is in rhythmic
experience an interrelation between several temporal continua, including move-
ment in the music and of the body. Bodily movements follow the expected sonic
event and variations in the musical rhythm entail an implicit re-evaluation of the
bodily movements. This highlights the particularly rich and complex phenome-
nology of rhythm, in which temporality interacts with the body. Thinking about
rhythm cannot be thinking about time on the one hand and about the body on the
other, as both are intertwined.
Works Cited
Arom, Simha, African Polyphony and Polyrhythm: Musical Structure and Methodology
Brown, Rosemary and Paulo Fabbri, “La Sperimentazione Ritmica in Dallapiccola: Tra Libertà e
Determinazione,” Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, 13.1 (1978), 142–73.
Cheyne, Peter, “Encoded and Embodied Rhythm: An Unprioritized Ontology,” in Andy
Hamilton, Peter Cheyne, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music,
Clayton, Martin, “Entrainment, Ethnography and Musical Interaction,” in Martin Clayton,
Byron Dueck, and Laura Leante, eds, Experience and Meaning in Music Performance (Oxford,
2013),  17–39.
Fraisse, Paul, “Rhythm and Tempo,” in Diana Deutsch, ed., The Psychology of Music (Cambridge,
MA, 1982), 149–80.
Gallagher, Shaun, “Husserl and the Phenomenology of Temporality,” in Heather Dyke and Adrian
Bardon, eds, A Companion to the Philosophy of Time (Oxford, 2013), 135–50.
Gallagher, Shaun and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind ([2008]; 2nd edn, London, 2012).
Hasty, Christopher, “Complexity and Passage: Experimenting with Poetic Rhythm,” in Andy
Hamilton, Peter Cheyne, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music,
Husserl, Edmund, The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, tr. John Barnet
Brough ([1893–1917]; Dordrecht, 1991).
Husserl, Edmund, Analysis Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental
Logic, tr. Anthony J. Steinbock ([1918–26]; Dordrecht, 2001).
Kortooms, Toine, Phenomenology of Time: Edmund Husserl’s Analysis of Time-Consciousness
(Dordrecht, 2002).
Large, Edward and Mari Riess Jones, “The Dynamics of Attending: How People Track Time-
Varying Events,” Psychological Review, 106.1 (1999), 119–59.
Mensch, James R., “A Brief Account of Husserl’s Conception of Our Consciousness of Time,” in
Valtteri Arstila and Dan Lloyd, eds, Subjective Time: Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience
of Temporality (Cambridge, MA, 2014), 43–60.
Rodemeyer, Lanei M., “Developments in the Theory of Time-Consciousness: An Analysis of
Protention,” in Donn Welton, ed., The New Husserl: A Critical Reader (Bloomington, 2003).
Roholt, Tiger C., Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance (London, 2014).
Snyder, Bob, Music and Memory: An Introduction (Cambridge, MA, 2000).
Taipale, Joona, Phenomenology and Embodiment: Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity
(Evanston, 2014).
Thaut, Michael H., Rhythm, Music and the Brain: Scientific Foundations and Clinical Applications
(London, 2005).
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge,
MA, 2007).
19
Pictorial Experience and the Perception
of Rhythm
Jason Gaiger
1. The Question at Issue
Can a painting—a static array of marks and lines on a surface—have a rhythm?

This apparently simple question provides a means of thinking about some com-
plex issues. While paintings and other examples of graphic art such as drawings
and engravings are frequently described as rhythmic, or as possessing rhythmic
features, it is far from clear how such observations are to be understood. The cen-
tral problem facing any attempt to extend the concept of rhythm to the graphic
arts is that rhythm is standardly recognized to be an inherently temporal phenom-
enon: rhythmic structure or organization unfolds in time.1 If rhythm is essentially
durational, how can a stationary configuration of marks and lines be rhythmic?
Even a minimal definition of rhythm as “pattern in time” would appear to exclude
the non-temporal or spatial patterns exhibited by painting and the other graphic
arts. To put the point in a more productive way, we might ask: What stands to be
gained from characterizing the repetition and variation of a two-dimensional pat-
tern of marks or shapes as rhythmic? Why not simply identify it as a complex spatial
pattern and be done with the matter?
To answer this question, we need to consider not only the intrinsic properties of
the shapes or marks themselves, and the way in which they are ordered, but also the
kinds of experience that the array can stimulate in the viewer. Once we acknowl-
edge that the process of looking at a painting is something that takes place over
time, painting can no longer be excluded from consideration on the grounds that it
is a static, two-dimensional art form. For it is conceivable that spatial patterns can
1 To give just two examples, The Oxford Dictionary of Music characterizes rhythm as “In the full sense of
the word everything pertaining to the time aspect of music as distinct from the aspect of pitch” (Kennedy
and Kennedy, “Rhythm,” 703), while the entry in the online Oxford Companion to Music states that “Rhythm
in music is normally felt to embrace everything to do with both time and motion—with the organization of
musical events in time, however flexible in metre and tempo, irregular in accent, or free in durational values”
(Whittall, “Rhythm”). It might be countered that both of these examples refer to music, and thus to the con-
cept of rhythm as it is understood in relation to a specific art form. However, even if we take as our starting
point natural phenomena, such as the beat of the human heart, the swing of the arms when walking, or the
crash of waves on the shore, rhythm is still identified as something that is essentially durational.
be designed in such a way that they are apprehended by the viewer in a temporally
ordered sequence. This would allow what I shall term pictorial experience to pos-
sess or be sensitive to rhythmic structure and thus to meet the minimum require-
ment of attending to temporal rather than merely spatial phenomena.
In this chapter I put forward a number of considerations that are intended to
cast doubt on this proposal. The position I shall defend is that pictorial experience
takes place in time, and thus is successive, but that it cannot be temporally struc-
tured in a sufficiently determinate manner to sustain the kind of attentional focus
required for the communication of even simple rhythmic patterns. Although my
conclusions are largely negative, I believe that there are important insights to be
gained from investigating whether the concept of rhythm has application in the arts
beyond the paradigm cases of music, poetry, and dance. The approach I adopt is
for the most part argument-based but I also refer to recent empirical studies. The
evidence provided by sophisticated eye-tracking technology that allows the gaze
movements of viewers to be analyzed supports the claim that picture perception is
internally discontinuous and highly selective. The decision to focus on the viewer’s
perception of the work rather than analyzing properties that belong to the work it-
self parallels the shift of attention that has taken place in musicology.2 There are fas-
cinating but still insufficiently explored connections here to the current interest in
“what rhythm does,” that is to say, the perceptual experience of rhythm and the way
this manifests itself in embodied cognition and action.3 However, in the case of the
graphic arts we need to pay particular attention to the relation between the ordering
or arrangement of the marks and the way this can guide or otherwise structure the
perceptions of the viewer. It seems that we look in vain for anything comparable to
the phenomenon of entrainment or the kinds of interaction between individuals
that can be sustained through the shared experience of rhythm in music and poetry.
This itself should give us pause for thought.
2. Rhythm and Painting
There is a familiar and widely accepted use of the term “rhythm” to describe a rec-
ognizable if loosely defined feature of works of visual art. When Michael Podro
observes of Tintoretto’s portrait Vincenzo Morosini (c.1585) in London’s National
Gallery that “the brushstrokes marking the sleeves have an independent rhythm
which informs rather than models the folds of the drapery and the posture of the
figure,” he draws attention to the procedures of painting and to our capacity to
2 Clayton, “Entrainment,” 184, observes, “Rhythm, for late twentieth and early twenty-first-century
theorists, is not an immanent quality of a musical work or performance. Rather, it emerges in the individual’s
engagement with an auditory stimulus.”
3 Clayton, “Entrainment,” 185–187. For recent studies of cortical motor activation when viewing works of
visual art, see Battaglia et al., “Corticomotor Excitability”; and Umilta et al., “Cortical Motor Activation.”
Pictorial Experience and the Perception of Rhythm 309
attend both to the marks on the surface and to the subject matter that they serve to
represent.4 I shall return to the question of whether the attribution of rhythm can
be linked to the rhythmic making of graphic marks and thus as—in a sense yet to
be fully explained—a response to the movements of the artist in making the work.5
Although there are instances for which this explanation may hold, I don’t think it
can be generalized. For this reason, I want to begin instead by considering some
of the ways in which the established meaning of the term “rhythm” as it has been
deployed in reference to music has been taken up by artists and critics and extended
to include the graphic arts.
Detailed historical studies by Peter Vergo and Simon Shaw-Miller, covering an-
tiquity to the eighteenth century and romanticism to the mid-twentieth century,
have revealed the extent to which “over a very long time-scale and in quite different
contexts, writers on a variety of subjects have persisted—obstinately, repeatedly and
sometimes bafflingly—in comparing music with art.”6 These comparisons, whose
roots can be traced back to the pre-Socratics, have frequently fulfilled a legitimating
function, with music serving as a model for painting in virtue of its “inherent order-
liness” and its capacity to “move the feelings.”7 As Vergo notes, the appeal to music’s
underlying order or structure often had little to do with the actual practice of
making and listening to music, and was based for the most part on abstract theories
of harmonic relations.8 However, the recognition that so-called “pure” music could
engage the listener’s emotions through its formal properties without any obvious
dependence on directly represented content took on added importance at the turn
of the twentieth century, when artists began to explore the expressive potential of
line, form, and color as independent factors. Even before the emergence of fully
non-representational or abstract art, the concept of “rhythm” began to acquire spe-
cial importance as a means of designating the formal properties of an artwork, often
in contradistinction to its represented content. Wassily Kandinsky uses the term in
this sense in the final section of his On the Spiritual in Art (1911) with specific ref-
erence to the work of Paul Cézanne and Ferdinand Hodler, and it is also to be found
that same year in the more sober prose of the English critic Roger Fry:
Particular rhythms of line and particular harmonies of colour have their spiritual
correspondences, and tend to arouse now one set of feelings, now another. The
artist plays upon us by the rhythm of line, by colour, by abstract form, and by the
quality of the matter he employs . . . Rhythm is the fundamental and vital quality
of painting, as of all the arts—representation is secondary to that, and must never
encroach on the more ultimate and fundamental quality of rhythm.9
4 Podro, Depiction, 91.
5 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 25, notes that “We also talk—though perhaps metaphorically—of the
rhythm of a line in a drawing, reflecting the movement of the artist’s hand.”
6 Vergo, That Divine Order, 13. See also Vergo, Music of Painting, and Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music.
7 Vergo, Music of Painting, 192, and That Divine Order, 17.
8 Vergo, That Divine Order, 14.
9 Fry, “Post Impressionism,” 105. For Kandinsky’s use of the term “rhythm,” see Kandinsky, Spiritual in
Art, 217.
Figure 19.1 Sonia Delaunay, Rythme coleur n° 1076 (1939). Centre national des arts
plastiques. © Pracusa S.A./Cnap/Photograph: Yves Chenot
Given the intensive interest in the relation between music and painting, it is not
surprising that many artists gave their works musical titles. Here we might think
of Paul Signac’s decision to allocate his paintings Opus numbers and in some cases
even tempo markings, or Whistler’s use of titles such as “Symphony,” “Harmony,”
and “Nocturne.”10 After the breakthrough to full abstraction, we find artists ex-
plicitly characterizing their work as a “rhythm” in line or color. For example, Sonia
Delaunay produced a series of paintings from the late 1930s with titles such as
Rhythm (1939), Rhythm Colour no 1076 (1939) [Figure 19.1], Coloured Rhythm
(1946), and Syncopated Rhythm (1967); and Robert Delaunay’s Rhythms (1934)
graces the cover of this book. A retrospective exhibition of her work at the Musée
d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and at Tate Modern in London, 2014–15, pro-
vided an opportunity to view several of these paintings together in a room ded-
icated to “Rhythm and Abstraction.”11 Delaunay’s use of repeated motifs such as
circles and curved bands of color allows for subtle variations of line, color, and
shape organized around one or more axes that subdivide the paintings into parts.
10 Vergo, Music of Painting, 57, 74.
11 Montfort and Godefroy, Sonia Delaunay.

If we are to take the designation of these works as “rhythms” or “colored rhythms”

seriously, we need to explore the suggestion that just as sound can be organized
in rhythmic temporal patterns, so colors and shapes can be organized in rhythmic
spatial patterns. Although this use of the term “rhythm” is intuitively accessible,
we quickly encounter difficulties if we ask ourselves basic questions such as “what
is the rhythm of this painting?” and “could I tap the rhythm out or move in time to
it?” The capacity for entrainment—the capacity to move in time to a rhythm—that
plays such a central role in explaining our responses to musical rhythm seems to
have no equivalent in relation to works of graphic art, and it is highly implausible to
suggest that several viewers of the same painting could coordinate their actions in
response to a discernable rhythmic structure. Indeed, there seems to be no mean-
ingful equivalent to the basic building blocks of rhythm in Western music: the es-
tablishment of a regular pulse or tactus and its subdivision into metrical units.12 It
may seem obtuse to consider requirements that are proper to the temporal art of
music rather than the spatial art of painting. However, since reference to time is
definitional for the concept of rhythm as it is employed elsewhere, we risk losing
our grip on the meaning of the term if we apply it to spatial phenomena without
any temporal reference. To do so is to court redundancy, for we would no longer
have a way of marking the distinction between a spatial pattern and a rhythmic spa-
tial pattern. We need to know what work the term “rhythm” is doing, otherwise it
can be replaced by any number of other terms or, as the quotation from Roger Fry
suggests, it simply serves a placeholder for a concern with formal properties that is
generalizable across all the arts but lacks any real specificity.
The only option available to us, or so I wish to argue, is to consider whether a
painting such as Delaunay’s Rhythm Colour no 1076 is designed in such a way that it
can guide the responses of the viewer as these take place over time. The presence of
features such as the repetition and variation of identifiable motifs, the placement of
stresses or accents through different intensities of light and shade and different hues
of color, and the creation of subdivisions and relations of symmetry and asymmetry
around the axes—all of which correspond to devices that are regularly deployed in
music—suggests that it may be possible for regularities in the visual organization of
the work to structure attentional regularities in the perceptions of the viewer. This
is the view that I set out to challenge in this paper. Eye-tracking studies that trace
gaze movements during picture viewing provide some empirical evidence that can
be used to examine the persuasiveness of such claims. First, however, I want to put
forward an independent argument to show that the graphic arts—in distinction to
12 London, Chapter 11 (this volume), “Entrainment and the Social Origin of Musical Rhythm,” 174,
considers the tempo limits within which listeners “are able to (a) individuate the elements that make up a
pattern or sequence; (b) determine their number; and (c) determine their duration.” For London, it is “self-
evident that if one cannot make these sorts of discriminations and determinations, one cannot tell one rhythm
from another, and hence one cannot be aware of the particular rhythm one is perceiving/has perceived.”
A similar point can be made in relation to the work of Sonia Delaunay: in the absence of the appropriate
discriminations and determinations, in what sense can the viewer be said to perceive or be aware of a specific
“rhythm”?
music and poetry—are non-sequential, and that this has important consequences
for how a work of graphic art is perceived.
3. Sequentiality
Musical and poetic rhythms can be notated or otherwise presented in graphic

form. Since we are able to identify and experience a rhythm by reading a score or a
printed poem, why should this not also be the case for a work of graphic art such as
a painting? In all three cases—the score, the printed poem, and the painting—the
object before us is static and spatially organized in two dimensions. It is, of course,
no more than a convention that in the Western tradition both written texts and
musical scores are designed to be read from left to right and from top to bottom.
However, in order to identify the rhythm(s) of a printed poem or a musical score,
we cannot read the words or notes in reverse order, or, indeed, ad libitum in any
other order, for that would result, in most if not all cases, in a different rhythm. The
question at issue, then, is whether graphic art has the same sequential structure as
poetry and music. Is the viewer, like the reader or the listener, required to follow the
sequence in which the individual marks have been arranged, or does graphic art
permit a greater freedom of selection concerning the order in which the parts are
apprehended?
We can approach this question by considering the following simple examples. In
Western musical notation, an L-S-S rhythm, in which a long note is followed by two
shorter notes in a 2-1-1 proportion, can be written in 4/4 time as a minim followed
by two crotchets.13 The temporal “shape” of this rhythm has a correlate in poetry
in the metrical unit (foot) termed a dactyl, in which a stressed syllable is followed
by two unstressed syllables. Dactylic verse, though comparatively rare in English,
has an L-S-S rhythm, perhaps most familiar in Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light
Brigade. The term “dactyl” derives from the Greek δάκτυλος (dáktylos), meaning
“finger.” It is sometimes explained through a graphic illustration (Figure 19.2).
The spacing of the human finger has a long part, or phalange, closest to the palm,
followed by two shorter phalanges toward the tip. It is initially tempting to think
that Figure 19.2, or indeed a finger on one’s own hand, simply is an articulation of
the L-S-S rhythm in visual form. However, despite the fact that the hand in Figure
19.2 is shown in the deictic gesture of pointing, nothing constrains the viewer to
start from part of the finger closest to the palm rather than from the tip. We can just
as well look at the fingertip first and then allow our gaze to move inward to the rest
of the hand. This would result in an S-S-L rhythm, or the metrical unit termed an
“anapest”: two unstressed followed by a stressed syllable. The word “anapest” comes
from the Greek ανάπαιστος (anapaistos), which means “struck back,” that is to say,
a dactyl reversed. Similarly, in the case of music, reading or playing our original
13 London, “Entrainment,” 176.

Figure 19.2 Dactyl illustration (Creative Commons)
example backwards would also result in a different temporal pattern: two crotchets

followed by a minimum forms an S-S-L rather than an L-S-S rhythm, since the
notes are now in a 1-1-2 proportion.
What these considerations show is that whereas rhythmic patterns in music and
poetry are sequential, gaining their specific temporal “shape” from the order of pre-
sentation, visual forms do not need to be apprehended in a specific order. The shape
of a finger remains identical whether its parts are viewed from left to right or right
to left, or indeed, in any order whatsoever. The same holds for more complex forms,
such as the hand or the human body. The greater “freedom” enjoyed by the viewer
in relation to works of graphic art has important consequences when it comes to
identifying a rhythmic structure. Although the experience of viewing Delaunay’s
Rhythm Colour no 1076 unfolds over time, there doesn’t seem to be anything in-
herent in the work itself that can guide or structure the viewer’s experience so that
the parts are viewed or apprehended in a specific sequence. There are, of course,
visual properties that can be used to articulate a stressed-unstressed-unstressed
pattern, either singularly or in coordination, such as dark-light-light, red-blue-blue,
or large-small-small. However, the same pattern can also be read as unstressed-
unstressed-stressed, depending on the order in which the viewer apprehends the
parts. If we ask ourselves, what is the “correct” order or sequence in which to view
the different parts of Rhythm Colour no 1076, we have no way of knowing where to
begin. In short, regularities in the spatial organization of the painting do not suffice
to structure attentional regularities. For this reason, we cannot tap out or otherwise
entrain to the painting’s “rhythm” and that the experiences of viewers diverge in
ways that do not permit of synchronization.14
14 An exception here may be some works of Op Art that “trigger” responses in the viewer, such as pulsation
effects and other sensations of visual movement. I take these works to be atypical insofar as they rely on dis-
cordant figure–ground relationships that are purposely avoided in most graphic art.
A legitimate objection at this stage is to observe that I have focused my discus-

sion exclusively on abstract art. Surely if we turn to figurative painting, there are
other resources available that can be used to guide the viewer’s attention in a par-
ticular order or sequence? In the case of large-scale, multi-figure compositions that
have a recognizable narrative structure, it seems plausible to suggest that the eye
is led from one figure to another in a rhythmic pattern. This thought lies behind
Kenneth Clark’s celebrated description of Raphael’s The Miraculous Draught of
Fishes (Figure 19.3):
A rhythmic cadence runs through the whole composition, rising and falling, held
back and released, like a perfectly constructed Handelian melody. If we follow it
from right to left . . . we see how the ‘river god’, like a stoker, drives us into the group
of heroic fishermen and how the rich, involved movement of this group winds up
a coil of energy; then comes an artful link with the standing Apostle, whose left
hand is backed by the fisherman’s billowing drapery, and then St Andrew him-
self forming a caesura, a climax in the line, which holds us back without lessening
our momentum. Then, at last, the marvellous acceleration, the praying St Peter to
whose passionate movement all these devices have been a preparation, and finally
Figure 19.3 Raphael, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1515–16), bodycolour

over charcoal underdrawing, mounted on canvas, 320 x 390cm, Victoria and
Albert Museum. © The Royal Collection, HM The Queen/Victoria and Albert
Museum, London
the comforting figure of Christ, whose hand both checks and accepts St Peter’s
emotion.15
Raphael’s strongly linear composition has a relief-like structure in which the figures are
aligned in a horizontal band parallel to the picture plane. This can be contrasted with
the recessional composition deployed by Rubens in his depiction of the same subject
(The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, 1618–19, National Gallery, London), in which the
figures are aligned on a diagonal that recedes from the foreground deep into the pic-
torial space.16 The planar organization of the Raphael composition allows the painting
to be read from right to left as Clark proposes. It is worth noting, however, that this is
a cartoon for a tapestry, and so the composition is reversed.17 In the actual tapestry,
commissioned by Pope Leo X to hang in the Sistine Chapel, the figure of Christ is
located on the right rather than the left. This can be seen in the engraving after Raphael
made by Dorigny (Figure 19.4), which shows how the work was intended to look.
More important for my argument here is the recognition— acknowledged
by Clark through the use of a conditional clause—that the viewer is not obliged
to follow the sequence he identifies. An alternative reading might identify the
“rhythmic line” as flowing from rather than towards the figure of Christ, whose ges-
ture is received with supplication and astonishment by the two disciples, and then
by the attentive gaze of the first of the fishermen, before the sequence is brought to
a close in the reclining figure of the river god. Moreover, since the visual interest of
the composition is not restricted to the principal figures, the viewer’s attention may
initially be held instead by the three vigilant cranes that occupy the foreground be-
fore moving upwards to the standing Apostle, who is placed just off center. Another
viewer may be more concerned with identifying the contents of the catch (fishes
and eels), the ravens in the sky or the crabs on the shore, perhaps because of the
symbolic significance accorded to these creatures in the early modern period.
This brief discussion of a single example raises a host of questions. Even if, as
I have argued, the viewer is free to attend to the parts of a painting in any order,
is there not still a “correct” sequence that needs to be followed in order to iden-
tify the internal rhythm that links the principal parts together? Perhaps this can be
identified by an expert critic, such as Clark, and the viewer can be helped to experi-
ence it through an accompanying textual or verbal commentary?18 If so, should we
15 Clark, Looking at Pictures, 64–5. Grant, The Critical Imagination, 165, insightfully discusses this passage,
analyzing Clark’s use of metaphor as a means “to cause a reader to have, or to imagine or to recall having, cer-
tain experiences.” Clark’s description closely follows the analysis in Wölfflin, Classic Art, 109–10: “With aston-
ishing skill, Raphael brought all the occupants of the boats into one major line, beginning with the oarsman,
rising over the two men bending forward, coming to a climax in the standing figure and then turning abruptly
downwards, rising again to its conclusion in the figure of Christ: everything leads up to Him, He is the goal
of all the action, and, although quite small as a mass and placed at the very edge of the picture, He dominates
everything. No one had composed like this before.”
16 Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 74, 80.
17 Wölfflin, “Links und Rechts,” notes that we are disturbed by the reversal of images—for example when
a slide is shown the wrong way round—and that this seems to be the case even for highly “symmetrical”
paintings such as Raphael’s Sistine Madonna.
18 Durà-Villà, “Soundless Rhythm,” Chapter 20 in this volume, defends this proposal.
Figure 19.4 Nicholas Dorigny, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1719), etching and
engraving on paper, 51 x 65cm, Victoria and Albert Museum. © Victoria and Albert
Museum, London
concede normative force to a particular way of viewing a painting and what might
justify privileging one interpretation over another?
One way of responding to this line of thought is to accept that a work of graphic
art has many rhythms and that the rhythm of the work depends on the particular
“route” that the viewer takes through the painting or the engraving. This would
explain why entrainment is so rare. However, once we allow that a painting has a
plurality of rhythms—perhaps even an unlimited plurality given the diversity of
possible ways of looking at one and the same work—we are close to giving up the
claim that it has an identifiable rhythm at all. The order of viewing can be from right
to left or left to right, but also top-down or bottom-up, center to periphery, corner
to corner, and from any area of the work to any other. Moreover, we can focus our
attention on the depicted content or the pictorial marks themselves, or, alterna-
tively, on larger-scale features such as foreground, middle ground, and background.
This opens onto another, more far-reaching question concerning the “parts” of a
work of graphic art and how they are to be individuated. Without a secure grip on
what distinguishes one “part” from another, or the means by which they are to be
identified, it is hard to give precision to the claim that the parts are to be viewed in a
“correct” sequence. Even if we restrict our discussion to the principal figures—and
thus to the scene that is represented in the painting rather than the arrangement of
the marks on the surface—we need to know which features of the individual figures
should be given priority: hands, faces, and gestures all vie for our attention, drawing
the gaze along different pathways.
These observations suggest that it is likely to prove extremely difficult to secure
the authority of any one way of viewing a work of graphic art. However, the main
challenge to the claim that there is a “correct” order of viewing a work of graphic
art is that this cannot be established by the work itself, that is to say, through purely
graphic means. In order to meet what I shall term the “normativity objection,” my
original proposal can be reformulated in the following way: pictorial experience
takes place in time, and thus is successive, but it cannot be temporally structured
in a sufficiently determinate manner to sustain attentional focus on a determi-
nate sequence of viewing, and thus on one way—out of the many possible ways—of
viewing the work, without relying on extra-pictorial guidance. The inclusion of this
additional clause acknowledges the possibility that viewers might be guided or oth-
erwise assisted in identifying a particular sequence of viewing a work of graphic
art—whether by a critic such as Clark or through privileged access to the artist’s
intentions—but it also emphasizes the fact that such guidance is extra-pictorial and
thus extrinsic to the work itself. This holds even where the guidance does not rely
on language, as in the majority of cases, but is given through pointing or other non-
verbal deictic gestures.
4. Visual Processing and Picture Perception
Given the diversity of ways a work of graphic art can be viewed, the question arises
as to whether there are nonetheless regularities, conventional or otherwise, that
inform a “normal” or “standard” viewing of pictures, such as from left-to-right or
in a Z pattern. Thanks to the experimental research that has been carried out by
cognitive psychologists and other scientists who investigate the human visual pro-
cessing system, there is now a large body of empirical data that can be drawn on to
answer this question.19 Advances in eye-tracking technology and the development
of dedicated software programs has allowed gaze movements that take place during
picture viewing to be analyzed in detail, including saccades, fixations and fixation
clusters, scanpaths, and areas of interest. There are studies, for example, that com-
pare the gaze-movements of expert and non-expert viewers under specified control
conditions, and that investigate whether there are specific viewing patterns associ-
ated with different kinds of depicted content, such as the human figure and the nat-
ural environment.20 Vision research is a vast and rapidly developing area of enquiry.
19 Useful overviews include Kowler, “Eye Movements”; Carrasco, “Visual Attention”; Solso, Visual Arts; and
Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye.”
20 Nodine et al., “Formal Art Training,” an influential early study, examined visual-exploration patterns in
eye-movement data from trained and untrained viewers. Massaro et al., “Eye-Tracking Study,” shows that if a
However, there is broad agreement about certain basic anatomic and neural features
of the human visual processing system. The key findings give support to the claim
that human vision is inherently selective and discontinuous. Nonetheless, recent
studies by Raphael Rosenberg and Christoph Klein have yielded some surprising
results that, while in accord with other work in the field, offer an alternative way of
approaching the claim that some works of graphic art have an identifiable rhythmic
structure.
Visual acuity is determined, at the most basic level, by the anatomy of the human
eye. Light entering the pupil passes through the lens and is absorbed by photorecep-
tive rods and cones in the retina, where electromagnetic waves in the visible spec-
trum are converted or “transduced” into electrochemical charges that are transmitted
to the visual cortex in the brain. The receptor cells, identified as rods and cones due
to their distinctive shape when viewed through a microscope, are sensitive to dif-
ferent wavelengths: rods detect the intensity of black, grey, and white stimuli, while
cones are sensitive to color and bright light. The rods are distributed across the sur-
face of the retina with the exception of a small indented area, less than 2mm in diam-
eter, termed the “fovea,” in which the cones are densely concentrated. The number of
cones falls away steeply outside of this region. As a consequence, it is only within fo-
veal vision that we see with any sharpness. Although foveal vision only encompasses
a visual angle of about 1 or 2 degrees, anything that falls within parafoveal (10
degrees), near peripheral (60 degrees) or peripheral vision (180 degrees) is poorly
resolved.21 To compensate for the fact that visual acuity is restricted to the small fo-
veal area, human visual perception is highly dynamic, characterized by discontin-
uous step-wise movements termed “saccades” (from the French “jerk”) and brief
“fixations,” which typically last around 200–300 milliseconds before the eye moves
again to a new fixation. The valuable resource of foveal vision is allocated to discrete
locations, at an average of three to four locations each second.22
Rosenberg and Klein note that the definition of a “fixation” has proved hard to de-
termine, because even during periods of relative stationary gaze the eye carries out
“micro-saccades” or what are termed “fixation-saccades” plus “drifts.”23 The human
eye is thus in almost constant motion, controlled by six extraocular muscles, as well
as by head and body movements. We do not take in a scene or an object in detail all
at once: rather, the eye jumps from one area to another, gathering high-level infor-
mation that enables the mind to build up a composite picture.24 Saccadic movements
“exact a significant cost” since the perceptual system must cope with this rapidly
changing flow of information. Nonetheless, as Eileen Kowler emphasizes,
painting depicts a human figure, attention is focused mostly on the face area, whereas if a painting depicts a
natural environment, attention tends to be more evenly distributed.
21 Solso, Visual Arts, 23–4, diagrams the “visual field” and the “cone of vision.”
22 Tatler, “Eye Guidance,” 777.
23 Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 84.
24 Solso, Visual Arts, 26.

Perceptual experience is seamless despite saccades, and the world appears clear and
stable. The chaos on the retina does not reach awareness, nor does it impair our ability
to perceive the objects around us.25
The allocation of visual attention is guided both by bottom-up and top-down factors.
Bottom-up factors are stimulus driven and include contributors to visual saliency
(segmentation and grouping) such as “contrast of luminance, curves, corners and
occlusions, as well as color, edges, lines and orientation.”26 Top-down factors in-
clude knowledge possessed by the viewer—such as the ability to identify an object—
and volitional influences such as the completion of specified tasks during viewing.27
Summarizing the results of numerous attention studies, Massaro et al. conclude that
eye movements are an index of overt selection and, as a consequence, they are
the expression of the relation between what is observed and its relevance to the
viewer’s interest.28
The recognition that eye movements have cognitive significance is one of the reasons
why the visual processing system is of such interest to psychologists. However, the
relation between bottom-up and top-down factors, which has primacy, and the
ways in which they interact, if at all, remains a source of controversy.29
The fact that “visual attention unfolds in space and time as a continual alter-
nation between fixations and saccades” allows gaze movements to be experimen-
tally investigated.30 Although saccades have been studied since the late nineteenth
century, the first comprehensive attempt to analyze gaze movements during the
viewing of pictures was carried out in the 1930s by the American psychologist Guy
T. Buswell.31 Many of the limitations imposed by Buswell’s reliance on rather cum-
bersome equipment have been overcome by advances in technology and the avail-
ability of electronic data processing. However, it is important to acknowledge that
the vast majority of eye-tracking studies still take place in a laboratory environ-
ment, with the artworks viewed as reduced scale high-resolution images on com-
puter screens. It is only recently that lighter, more portable equipment has begun
to permit studies to take place in situ in galleries and museums.32 A second ad-
vantage that contemporary researchers possess over the pioneering work carried
out by Buswell is the development of software for the statistical analysis of eye-
tracking data and for presenting the results in readily apprehensible visual form.
25 Kowler, “Eye Movements,” 1472.

26 Massaro et al., “Eye-Tracking Study,” 1.
27 Yarbus, Eye Movement, showed that gaze movements varied when a viewer was asked to complete a “high-
level task” such as estimating how long the “unexpected visitor” had been away from the family while viewing
Ilya Repin’s painting They Did Not Expect Him (1884). See also DeAngelus and Pelz, “Yarbus Revisited.”
28 Massaro et al., “Eye-Tracking Study,” 1.
29 Tatler, “Eye Guidance”; Kowler, “Eye Movements.”
31 See Buswell, Perception in Art; Wade and Tatler, The Moving Tablet.
32 E.g. Brieber et al., “Art in Time.”
For example, a “heat map,” which uses color coding to show the locations that re-
ceive the largest number of fixations, or the use of arrows of different thicknesses to
represent the most frequently repeated saccadic transitions, can be overlain on the
image itself to visualize the results obtained from individual or multiple viewers.
A pioneering series of studies carried out by Raphael Rosenberg and his
colleagues at the Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History at the University
of Vienna set out to test the claim that certain paintings possess a compositional
structure that enables viewers to follow a specific sequence or pathway.33 They took
as their starting point the eighteenth-century French philosopher Denis Diderot’s
argument that “A well-ordered composition will always have but one line of liaison;
and it will serve as a guide to anyone looking at it as well as anyone attempting to
describe it.”34 Diderot identifies Joseph-Marie Vien’s altarpiece St. Denis Preaching
in Gaul (Figure 19.5), painted in 1767 for the Église Saint-Roche in Paris, as an ex-
ample of a painting that possesses “a line of liaison that clearly, crisply, and effort-
lessly links the composition’s principal features.”35 By contrast, he maintains that
Gabriel François Doyen’s The Miracle of St. Anthony’s Fire (1767), painted for the
same chapel of the Église Saint-Roche, has a line of liaison that is “fractured, bent,
folded and twisted” such that “the eye, wandering at random through a labyrinth,
bewildered, will find it difficult to grasp the connections.”36 Diderot’s use of the
term ligne de liaison bears comparison with Clark’s description of The Miraculous
Draught of Fishes: it identifies a compositional line that connects the different parts
of a painting in such a way that, when successful, the viewer’s eye is led in a contin-
uous sequence from one part to another.
Whereas many eye-tracking studies are restricted to the first few seconds of
viewing,37 Rosenberg and his colleagues investigated longer periods of viewing
time, ranging from two to fifteen minutes. The initial results of their investigations
are shown in Figure 19.6, which superimposes the saccades of forty expert and non-
expert viewers looking at Vien’s painting for two minutes each, with a reduction
to 10 percent of all saccades to reduce confusion. This visualization confirms the
discovery, already made by Buswell, that “the eye hardly ever moves systematically
along a composition line from one end to the other.”38 During picture viewing the
eye fixates for a very brief period on a location of the painting before rapidly moving
off to another location. These movements are discontinuous and their ordering
does not correspond to the ligne de liaison identified by Diderot. Rosenberg and
Klein conclude that
33 Rosenberg, “Dem Auge”; Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye.”

34 Diderot, Salon of 1767, 152, cited at Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 80, and Rosenberg, “Dem
Auge,”  78–9.
35 Diderot, Salon of 1767, 29.
36 Diderot, Salon of 1767, 152.
37 E.g. Massaro et al., “Eye-Tracking Study,” investigated viewing where stimulus is presented for just three
seconds. By contrast, Klein et al., “Describing Art,” studied “the effects of speaking on gaze movements during
the beholding of paintings” over a viewing period of fifteen minutes.
The visualizations of gaze movements show that Diderot’s analyses—as well as

similar claims recurring in the art historical literature—do not match the real
dynamic of the eye. The gaze jumps from fixation to fixation, moving back and
forth. Eyes do not follow any line of composition in a continuous manner, nor do
beholders scan paintings from top to bottom or left to right continuously.39
Recast in terms of our earlier discussion, we can say that the temporal ordering of
saccades and fixations does not correspond to the spatial ordering of the parts of the
painting. At least as far as gaze-movements are concerned, there does not seem to
be any evidence to support the claim that spatial patterns can be designed in such
a way that they are apprehended by the viewer in a temporally ordered sequence.
There is, however, an alternative way of approaching Diderot’s claims concerning
the ligne de liaison that links the different parts of a painting together. The analysis
of extended viewing times enabled Rosenberg and his colleagues to confirm an-
other of Buswell’s findings, which was that although gaze movements do not follow
a temporally ordered sequence, both fixations and saccades tend to repeat identifi-
able patterns: most paintings have specific “areas of interest” that attract a significantly
higher density of fixations, and saccades frequently traverse the same pathways. As
Rosenberg and Klein observe,
For a significant number of paintings and despite major differences between

subjects, not only fixations but also saccades build patterns that are specific to each
painting: beholders tend to reiterate particular paths with their eyes.40
Crucially, these patterns “do not only occur for single subjects but are very similar
for different subjects viewing the same painting as long as they do so for longer
stretches of time.”41
Evidence for this finding in relation to Vien’s altarpiece is provided by the graph
reproduced as Figure 19.7. This visualizes the most frequent saccadic transitions
between fixations clusters, using the relative thickness of the line to represent the
frequency with which a particular pathway is followed. Once the least frequent
saccades are filtered out, a clear pattern emerges, revealing that over time the eye
tends to repeat certain saccadic transitions far more often than others. It is striking
that the resulting graphic representation closely corresponds to Diderot’s descrip-
tion of the ligne de liaison that links the different parts of the painting, a finding
that Rosenberg rightly describes as “astonishing [verblüffend]” in one of the first
published reports of his research.42 The contrast to the painting by Doyen is equally
informative, for the corresponding graph, reproduced as Figure 19.8, reveals a
broken or discontinuous line of connection between the principal parts.
40 Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye.”
41 Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye.”
42 Rosenberg, “Dem Auge,” 83.

Figure 19.5 Joseph-Marie Vien, St. Denis Preaching in Gaul (1767), oil on canvas, 660
x 393cm, Église Saint-Roche, Paris. © The Art Archive
Figure 19.6 Ten percent of all saccades of forty viewers (twenty art experts and twenty
non-experts) beholding Vien’s painting for two minutes each. Adapted version ©
Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History, University of Vienna
Figure 19.7 Visualization of frequent saccadic transitions between fixation clusters
for Vien’s St. Denis Preaching in Gaul (average of forty viewers, twenty art experts and
twenty non-experts, whilst viewing for two minutes each). Adapted version
© Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History, University of Vienna
Figure 19.8 Visualization of frequent saccadic transitions between fixation clusters for
Doyen’s The Miracle of St. Anthony’s Fire (average of forty viewers, twenty art experts
and twenty non-experts, whilst viewing for two minutes each). Adapted version
© Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History, University of Vienna
Rosenberg and Klein conclude that Diderot’s “description of the line of com-
position in Vien’s altarpiece is correct as long as we consider the frequently re-
peated saccades and not the actual course of the movement of the eye. The line he
describes matches the graph of the most frequent saccadic transitions between
clusters of fixations.”43 The paintings by Vien and Doyen have particular signifi-
cance because of their discussion by Diderot. However, similar results have been
confirmed for “a wide range of paintings” for which “the fixations and saccades of
almost all beholders repeat patterns that are specific to the composition of each
painting.”44 There are some important exceptions, such as portraits, for example,
since gaze movements are almost always concentrated on the eyes and the mouth
of the face.45 Of particular relevance for our discussion here is the discovery that
some abstract paintings, such as Jackson Pollock’s Convergence (1952), do not have
areas of interest that are sufficiently strong to show up as red in heat maps: instead
fixations are almost equally distributed across the canvas.46 It would be highly re-
warding to carry out eye-tracking studies on other examples of abstract art which,
unlike Pollock’s “all-over” compositions, have a more clearly structured form of
spatial organization. A future direction for empirical research might be to examine
whether repeated patterns emerge in gaze movements when viewing works such as
Delaunay’s Rhythm Colour no 1076 and perhaps also more simple graphic designs
with repeated motifs.47
5. Conclusion
As Rosenberg and Klein emphasize, eye-tracking studies show that the “real dy-
namic” of gaze movements does not match the compositional structure of paintings
and other works of graphic art: the eye does not “follow” the ligne de liaison in a
temporally ordered sequence. Nonetheless, the most frequent saccadic transitions
do, in many cases, repeat an identifiable pattern and this is something that emerges
or takes shape over an extended period of viewing time.
Might this pattern be characterized in terms of rhythm? Clearly it is not a tem-
poral rhythm, a “pattern in time,” in the sense in which I have been using this
term. However, insofar as it identifies an empirically verifiable formal feature
that is distinctive to an individual work of art, it can be distinguished from the
generalized appeal to rhythm that is to be found, for example, in the writings of
43 Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 94–5.

44 Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 95–7.
45 Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 95–7. See, too, Massaro et al., “Eye-Tracking Study.”
46 Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 91–2, 95.
47 Further advances in technology might also allow a comparative study of gaze movements when viewing
architecture. Intriguingly, it seems less problematic to describe architectural features such as fenestration and
intercolumniation as possessing a “rhythm.” It may be that this is connected to bodily movement, whether
physical or imaginary, and thus to the different ways in which viewers respond to three-dimensional objects
in circumambient space.
Roger Fry. Not only does it appear to guide the allocation of visual attention by
the individual viewer as this take place over time, the same pattern of allocation is
also shared by other viewers. The pattern is spatial not temporal, but it does give
structure to pictorial experience as something inherently durational. This recog-
nition perhaps goes some way to meeting our intuition that there can be spatial as
well as temporal rhythms and that certain works of graphic art have a pronounced
rhythmic structure or rhythmic line that connects the different parts. The felt ex-
perience, or what we might term the subjective awareness, of viewing a painting
is informed by—and in turn informs—the movements of the eye, but these do not
directly correspond. Since saccadic eye movements take place below the level of
conscious awareness there remains an unexplained gap between the pattern that
emerges in eye-tracking studies and what is directly apprehended in “pictorial
experience.”48
It is worth pausing to reflect on the curious status of the “line of liaison” that is
revealed in Rosenberg and Klein’s studies. The graph reproduced in Figure 19.7 is a
visualization of a statistical regularity, identified by combining the eye movements
of forty different viewers: the pattern that emerges does not correspond to any-
thing that any person has ever actually experienced or to a real viewing sequence
that took place over time. It is as if Diderot, writing in the eighteenth century, and
Rosenberg and Klein working in our own, land upon the same shape or pattern,
but by radically dissimilar pathways. Despite the remarkable congruence, it is not
clear that they are actually describing the same thing. We might express this by
saying that the phenomena they seek to capture possess a different kind of being
or existence.
I noted at the outset of this chapter that in some cases the attribution of rhythm
to a work of graphic art is connected to our awareness of the movement through
which the mark or marks were made. A sweeping or twisting drawn line invites us
to imagine the impulse of the hand that guided the brush or the pen, just as short,
hatched marks invite us to imagine the repetitive motion through which they were
inscribed. Sometimes the motility of a line is also used to convey the motility of the
figure it represents. Our sense of the rhythm of a work of graphic art can be guided
by our awareness of the marks out of which the work is made as well as by the con-
tent those marks serve to represent. Nonetheless, there are many cases in which
such forms of imaginative engagement are misleading or deliberately impeded.
Here we might think of the high level of fini achieved by nineteenth-century French
academic painters, such as Ingres and Bouguereau, who aspired to achieve a léché
or “licked finish” in which no individual brushstrokes are visible. At the other ex-
treme, the use of bold, vigorous mark-making to communicate a sense of agitation,
such as in the work of the German Expressionists, is often achieved through careful
48 If it is correct, as Scruton (“Thoughts on Rhythm,” 231) and others have argued, that “rhythm is a phe-
nomenal, not a mathematical property of a sequence,” and that a rhythm is therefore something that has to be
felt by the listener or the viewer, then the pattern that emerges in eye-tracking studies possesses a regularity
that is not experienced as a rhythm.
reworking, thereby breaking the apparent correlation between the movement of the
hand and the marks on the surface of the canvas.
More fruitful, perhaps, for an account of rhythm that is applicable across the
graphic arts rather than just some instances, is the appeal to the role of the imagina-
tion in pictorial experience. Consider, for example, Scruton’s proposal:
Musical experience . . . involves the importation of a spatial framework, and the

organization of the musical field in terms of position, movement and distance.
Those spatial concepts do not literally apply to the sounds we hear. Rather they
describe what we hear in sequential sounds, when we hear them as music. In other
words the concepts that provide the fundamental framework for musical percep-
tion are applied metaphorically.49
Scruton’s argument suggests the possibility of a neat reversal: If spatial concepts

are applied metaphorically to provide the fundamental framework for musical
experience, perhaps temporal concepts are applied metaphorically to provide the
fundamental framework for pictorial experience? This proposal is undeniably
thought-provoking, but it is clear that a great deal of work needs to be done before
we can grasp what it would mean for temporal concepts to apply metaphorically to
the experience of looking at a picture.
In this chapter I have sought to show that although pictorial experience is dura-
tional it is not temporally structured and that the graphic arts therefore cannot sus-
tain the kind of attentional focus required for the experience of rhythm. Sensitivity
to spatial or configurational patterns, including those that link the parts of the
painting together in a specific order, does not correlate with the dynamic of picto-
rial experience, which seems to be inhospitable to rhythmic organization. Whether
or not this claim is accepted, I hope to have established that the issues are more
complex than is normally recognized and to have challenged the pervasive assump-
tion that the concept of rhythm—as this is standardly understood—can directly be
applied to works of graphic art. It may be that what is required is a sui generis ac-
count of visual rhythm as distinct from the time-based conception of rhythm that
is familiar from other art forms such as music, poetry and dance, but it would be an
achievement of this chapter to have shown that such an account is needed rather
than lying ready to hand.50

50 An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Can a Painting have a Rhythm?,” British Journal of
Aesthetics, Vol. 58 (3), 2018. I would like to record my thanks to Raphael Rosenberg for permission to repro-
duce the visualizations made by the Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History at the University of
Vienna.
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20
Soundless Rhythm
Víctor Durà-Vilà
1. Introduction
This chapter has three goals; first and foremost, to establish the idea that rhythm
does not require sound. I maintain that a universe without creatures with aural
capacities, or a universe without the physics that make sound possible, would still
potentially be a universe with rhythm. Although the case seems straightforward, the
overwhelming influence of discussions of rhythm in relation to music and poetry
may, perhaps unreflectively, create a state of opinion where, for some people, this is
not so obvious and its consequences not so evident. Dance is crucial for my argu-
ment here. Second, I develop a defence of rhythm in painting, but the lessons are
transferable to photography, sculpture, and architecture. Finally, I advance the view
that we can readily conceive of rhythm in relation to senses other than sight and
hearing.1 The upshot is that the very notion of soundless rhythm can encourage the
creative aesthetic explorations of these sense modalities, and that awareness of what
rhythm may achieve in the traditional art forms can motivate these explorations,
without limiting them or downplaying their original nature.
2. Rhythm without Sound
This section argues that neither music nor sound are necessary for the existence of
rhythm.2 I begin by confronting what, in my opinion, is the strongest challenge to
my position, namely, Andy Hamilton’s account of rhythm. I then put forward the
positive case for soundless rhythm and chiefly use dance to motivate and exemplify
my proposal. Finally, I build on Peter Simons’ work in this volume to elaborate a
1 Throughout this chapter, for the sake of simplicity, I confine my discussion to the traditional five senses.
Obviously, such a view of the senses is no longer tenable in light of the current understanding of the senses.
However, for the purposes of this chapter, it is acceptable to restrict ourselves to the traditional division.
Furthermore, I use the terms “sense,” “sense modality,” and “sensory system” as synonymous. Likewise,
I will write the following pairs interchangeably: “sight” and “vision,” “smell” and “olfaction,” and “taste” and
“gustation.”
2 In what follows, it becomes apparent why I need to refer to both music and sound, as opposed to
sound only.
definition of rhythm that is neutral regarding the sensorial input required for the
production and experience of rhythm.
Hamilton’s work on rhythm does not focus narrowly on the concept, but is
rather part of a broader project which attempts to challenge, among other targets,
the influential metaphorical interpretation of the notion of movement as applied
to music.3 Therefore, it must be admitted from the outset that there are theoret-
ical pressures and ambitions in Hamilton’s work with which I will not engage even
though they contribute to the aspect of his theory of rhythm that is of interest to
me in this chapter. However, I am persuaded that I can discuss the relevant ideas
of his work, if not to their full potential, at least in such a way that is useful for my
own purposes here, without distorting their meaning and implications in relation
to rhythm.
Some of Hamilton’s formulations might seem to point to a rather ecumenical
strategy regarding rhythm, one that could be consistent with the notion of sound-
less rhythm (as will be explained below) by dint of not prioritizing music or sound
over dance or movement. So, for example, Hamilton writes that “Producing music
is not more primitive or basic than moving rhythmically, or dancing.”4 Indeed, his
definition of rhythm could be read as allowing its existence through senses other
than hearing and, consequently, as being sympathetic to the idea of soundless
rhythm, i.e., rhythm existing independently of music or sound:
rhythm is order within human-bodily-movement or movement-in-sound that is

perceivable through one or more of the senses, and achieved when accents are
imposed on a sequence of sounds or movement.5
Nevertheless, Hamilton does not really espouse a view that puts music and dance
on the same footing with respect to his conceptualization of rhythm. The following
quotation effectively captures the position antithetical to mine:
Rhythm is essential to music, and—a stronger claim—rhythm and music cannot

be defined independently of each other. They are internally related and form a
conceptual circle or holism.6
The conceptual hegemony of music with regard to rhythm is compatible with the
role of movement in Hamilton’s definition because his view of what counts as mu-
sical (or incipiently musical) is very broad, perhaps uniquely so. For instance, he
3 I will focus on Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, and “Rhythm and Stasis,” rather than on his own contri-
bution to this volume (see Chapter 1), since those texts are fixed and it is easier to engage with and quote from
them. However, I do so while being aware that his text in the present collection is continuous with his earlier
writings.
4 Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 127. In fact, he argues that “Dance, poetry and music are conceptually
inseparable in that rhythm is essential to each, and none can be understood independently of it” (Hamilton,
“Rhythm and Stasis,” 39). The same formulation appears in Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 119; see also 144.
Soundless Rhythm 333
maintains that “Rhythm is an essentially musical feature of apparently non-musical,

but incipiently musical, events or processes [e.g., human bodily movements].”7
Hence, even when rhythm is ascribed to human movement, it is in a musical
sense that it is so ascribed.8 Even more tellingly in relation to my wider thesis of
soundless rhythm in this chapter, Hamilton is very skeptical of the possibility of
creating rhythm through light and unambiguously rejects the idea of rhythm being
produced through olfaction.9 I discuss senses other than vision and hearing in
Section 4. In what immediately follows, I defend the idea that we can have a per-
fectly good understanding of rhythm without recourse to music or sound.
I start by pointing out the numerous works in contemporary dance where there
is no music or sound and yet in which there is undoubtedly rhythm. There are other
cases where the dance was created independently of the music to be played during
the performance, with the only exception being an agreement on the length of the
piece; this way of creating dance was famously exemplified by Merce Cunningham.
Nobody would deny that, while witnessing the rehearsal of a piece by Cunningham,
one could experience the rhythm of a given choreographic phrase or a segment of
the dance work despite there being no music played. I fail to see how one could de-
scribe the rhythm found in a soundless piece of dance as musical without invoking
a stipulative and ad hoc concept of the musical (or incipiently musical). One could
perfectly well conceive of a universe without sound, or a human species without
hearing, where dance would still be an art form and rhythm an important aspect
of our experience of dance. It seems a reductio to maintain that in that soundless
universe, the dance would be musical (or incipiently musical), since it would lead
to accepting that in a universe without sound there would be musical phenomena,
even if only of a minimal kind.
However, my contention is not only that there is rhythm that can be ascribed
solely to dance in cases of choreographies created with no input from music, but
that this is true of all dance works. It is an unjustifiable oversimplification to argue
that the rhythm of a dance is a musical rhythm because the dance is choreographed
to music. There are many dance works in which the rhythm of the choreography
follows, in one way or another, the rhythm of the music; it is also true that in other
cases the rhythm of the music is either subverted by the dance or completely
ignored. However, those considerations are beside the point, since my position is
that in every case rhythm can be ascribed to dance without conceptualizing it as
musical or incipiently musical analogously to the cases in which there is no music
or sound.
Moreover, against Hamilton’s skepticism about experiencing rhythm through
light, it seems to me plain that the opposite is true. Prestigious choreographers
whose works do not sit on the fringes of the art form, but are widely performed

9 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 26–8.
and have enjoyed great critical acclaim (e.g., Jiří Kylián and Russell Maliphant) have
created works where light is used in a clearly rhythmic fashion. The same would be
true of the rhythm found in fireworks. To make my point even more salient, one can
imagine being so far away from the fireworks that the sound is not heard, but the
light effects are fully visible: one could perceive, analyze, and describe the rhythm
of the fireworks, without reference to music or sound. As in the case of dance, to re-
gard such displays of rhythm as musical appears unjustified and ad hoc.
Roger Scruton’s views on rhythm seem to be compatible with my defence of
soundless rhythm in dance. Scruton does emphasize the close connection be-
tween music and dance, a connection not limited to rhythm, but related to musical
movement more generally.10 Nonetheless, he asserts that “Rhythm is a property
of dancing and also of speech.”11 In the absence of any commitment to the idea
that rhythm in dance has to be understood as musical or that there is some sort of
conceptual priority of music over dance, I believe that the natural interpretation of
Scruton is that rhythm can exist in dance simpliciter.
After having brought out the idea of soundless rhythm, I deem it appropriate
to posit a definition that is inclusive of other senses besides hearing. I find Peter
Simons’ definitional approach to rhythm very much in sync with my overall view
and theoretical needs in this essay.12 He explicitly admits to prioritizing music over
other art forms in his discussion of rhythm, but at the same time makes it clear that
his notion of rhythm is not exclusively musical or, indeed, sound related. This is
rather obvious when he provides unproblematic examples of processes that exhibit
rhythm, such as
the swinging of a leg or a pendulum, the jiggling of a foot in time to music, the steps
of a dance. They do not have to be musical: the walking of a person, the breathing
of a fish and the galloping of a horse are also rhythmical, and not just in sound.13
At this point we must pay attention to Simons’ definition of rhythm: “It is a repeat-

able (and typically repeated) pattern of sounds and silences [in time].”14 Given the
earlier quotation from Simons, I believe that I can remain loyal to the spirit of his
definition while constructively amending its letter to suit my purposes. In short,
I propose that the idea of repeatable pattern can be expanded beyond “sounds and
silences” to other sensorial inputs. I do not think that this modification does any
violence to Simons’ proposal, but simply expands it by taking a cue from his own
examples. At the same time, I am fully sympathetic to Simons’ strategy of focusing

11 Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 250; see also 234.
12 He does not seem to agree with the view I put forward in this section in relation to rhythm in painting,
given his remark about rhythm in graphic patterns: see Simons, Chapter 3, “Ontology of Rhythm,” this
volume, 63; but it seems misguided to make much of this potential disagreement owing to the brevity of the
comment.
13 Simons, “Ontology of Rhythm,” 63 (my emphasis).
14 Simons, “Ontology of Rhythm,” 69–70.
on music: given the dimension of the challenge that a definitional and ontolog-

ical project such as his faces, it does seem advisable to concentrate on the paradig-
matic art form as far as rhythm is concerned. I can now benefit from the outcome
of his work in order to explore the concept of rhythm in relation to art forms other
than music.
Hence, I contend that rhythm is a repeatable (and typically repeated) pattern
of sensorial inputs in time, it being well understood that by “inputs” I mean pos-
itive sensorial stimuli and their absence (the wider sensorial analogue to Simons’
“sounds and silences”). Once this definition has been accepted, the examples
of soundless rhythm alluded to above cease to present any particular theoretical
problem.
3. Rhythm in Painting
I would now like to extend the idea of soundless rhythm into art forms such as
painting, photography, sculpture, and architecture. I begin with two preliminary
remarks. First, the success of the notion of soundless rhythm explained in the pre-
vious section in relation to dance (in addition to lighting and fireworks) does not
depend on its being applicable to other art forms, such as painting or architecture.
The reverse is true as well: it could be that my proposal in this section is received
sympathetically by someone who disagrees with the argument advanced earlier. Of
course, in both cases I endeavor to support a broad conception of rhythm as not
manifested exclusively in sound, but recognizable through the different art forms.
I discuss the importance of a relevant continuity in the concept of rhythm across
different art forms in this section and the next.
Second, I find it most useful to engage with Jason Gaiger’s contribution to this
volume in order to establish the existence of rhythm in painting, since he precisely
rejects my contention. In fact, Gaiger’s chapter allows for a very effective develop-
ment of my position because of the deft structure of his text and the careful consid-
eration he gives to the potential criticisms of his own view. While my focus here is,
following Gaiger’s lead, on painting, I hope that it will be relatively uncontentious
that the lessons learnt from reflecting on painting can be readily applied to photog-
raphy, most obviously, but also to sculpture and architecture.15
There is much that I find congenial in the way Gaiger sets up the enquiry con-
cerning the possibility of there being genuine rhythm in painting. I take it that, in
line with current musicological trends, we are not concerned with the properties of
the painting itself, but with what is perceived by the viewer.16 Moreover, all parties
15 See “Pictorial Experience and the Perception of Rhythm,” Chapter 19 in this volume. Hence, when I use
the word “painting” referring to the art form rather than an object, it should also be understood as applicable
to photography, sculpture, and architecture, unless I am discussing something specific to painting itself.
16 Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 307–8. Here, as in the rest of the paragraph, I follow Gaiger’s text very
closely.
agree about the temporal nature of rhythm. Hence, any meaningful ascription of
rhythm to a painting will require showing that an array of lines and brushstrokes
can sustain a durational experience that can be recognized as containing rhythm.
Merely considering the non-durational nature of a painting might make the pre-
vious proposition seem implausible, but we soon realize that “the process of
looking at a painting is something that takes place over time.”17 It follows that, at
least in principle, viewers can attend to temporal phenomena and, consequently,
to rhythmic structures in paintings. With this much agreed on, the crucial point of
contention presents itself: for there to be rhythm in painting, we need to elucidate
whether or not the elements of paintings (i.e., the marks on the canvas, in which-
ever way one wants to conceptualize them: lines, colors, shapes, figures, etc.) are
to be perceived over time in a rhythmic fashion.18 In the remainder of this section,
I examine Gaiger’s rejection of this possibility and submit my defence of it.
Let me take up first what I consider to be the most serious challenge to my pro-
posal here and look at lesser threats later. Gaiger writes:
The position I shall defend is that pictorial experience takes place in time, and thus
is successive, but that it cannot be temporally structured in a sufficiently determi-
nate manner to sustain the kind of attentional focus required for the communica-
tion of even simple rhythmic patterns.19
It seems clear that Gaiger would accept the existence of rhythm in painting if there
were requirements on viewers that resulted in their pictorial experience being struc-
tured in such a way that the experience of rhythm was included. This is, therefore,
the crux of my contention: making use of what I take to be the most popular theories
of interpretation on offer in current anglophone aesthetics, the requirements neces-
sary for viewers to experience rhythm in paintings can be established.
The sustained research effort of the last few decades has taken us away from, as
we may judge them now, rather crude and radical views that either maintained a
naive authorial intentionalism or proclaimed the absolute disregard of authorial
intentions along the lines of the well-known thesis of the death of the author. For
the most part, participants in the contemporary debate tend to gravitate toward
three different positions: moderate actual intentionalism, hypothetical intention-
alism, and weak or moderate anti-intentionalism.20 My task here is to explain how
we can posit a requirement to experience rhythm in painting that is consistent with
any of these three mainstream theories of interpretation.
17 Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 307–8.

18 I use advisedly the phrase “are to be perceived” instead of “are designed,” “are organized,” or “are required
to be perceived” in order to maintain neutrality with regard to matters that soon will become critical to devel-
oping my argument.
19 Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 308.
20 Although some contributors to this debate admittedly focus on literature or other narrative art forms,
I believe, as do other authors, that these positions can (and should) be extended to all art forms regardless of
whether their works have literary or narrative content.
Sensible varieties of anti-intentionalism do not suggest that interpretative efforts

discard what we can learn about the intentions of the author of a given work of art,
but neither do they limit or restrict interpretation to the meaning intended by the
author. An attractive version of anti-intentionalism, the value maximizing theory,
advocates that the goal of interpretation is to maximize the artistic value of each
work of art within certain constraints having to do with each work’s identity.21
Let us take Gaiger’s own example, Raphael’s The Miraculous Draught of Fishes.22
I would submit that our aesthetic experience23 of Raphael’s painting is more satis-
fying if we subscribe to an interpretation that follows Kenneth Clark’s elucidation of
the rhythm exhibited by the group of heroic fishermen, which is quoted by Gaiger.24
Indeed, one can perceive other instances of rhythm in the painting beyond what
is alluded to in Clark’s quotation, for instance, by noticing the groupings of dif-
ferent birds, from those in the foreground of the painting to those in the distant
background. Perhaps the most conspicuous example is that of the four birds flying
above the river, the first two getting relatively close to the fishermen. The notion of
rhythm can be used not only to focus the viewers’ attention on the internal dynamic
of these bird groupings (analogously to Clark’s description focusing on the internal
dynamic of the fishermen), but also to underscore the potential connection be-
tween the groupings themselves, where the pictorial motif repeats itself as it reduces
in size and impact while changing, much as a musical rhythmic motif that dies out
as it repeats itself while effecting certain variations. The inter-group rhythmic con-
nection could be posited as well for the groups of people other than the fishermen,
from those who are close to the river to those that recede into the background.
Therefore, those subscribing to the value maximizing theory need only point to
any of the many examples throughout art history in which rhythm is salient, such
as the Raphael painting just discussed. An interpretation of the painting including
rhythm is to be preferred to an alternative which does not since the experience de-
rived from and the value ascribed to the painting will be superior with than without
rhythm. Evidently, the value-maximizing theorist will support an interpretation
containing rhythm regardless of any considerations involving the intentions of the
painter.
We may wonder, on Gaiger’s behalf, whether the interpretation of paintings
might guide the direction of the viewer’s experience of rhythm. Should the group of
heroic fishermen be viewed from right to left or vice versa? I do not think that this
presents much of a problem. First of all, we should allow that, due to the dramatic
differences between art forms at many levels, it is perfectly reasonable for rhythm
21 Davies, “Author’s Intentions, Literary Interpretations.” For other useful texts on anti-intentionalism, see
Dickie and Wilson, “The Intentional Fallacy”; Gaut, “Interpreting the Arts,” and “Understanding Cinema”;
and Lamarque, “Death of the Author.”
22 Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 316f.
23 Insofar as it is usually understood that aesthetic value contributes to artistic value, and as long as we think
of aesthetic value as the value afforded by our aesthetic experience, we honor the commitment of the value-
maximizing theory as explained earlier in relation to artistic value. For those who think that non-aesthetic
artistic value does not exist, the problem is solved by reformulating the value-maximizing theory accordingly.
24 Clark, Looking at Pictures, 64–5, quoted in Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 314.
in painting not to have the normative directionality encountered in music, dance,

or poetry. But, secondly, in some (perhaps many) cases, it will be obvious what the
most aesthetically satisfying way of viewing a given composition is. For instance,
if we draw our attention to the birds flying over the river and getting closer to the
fishermen, it would seem very counterintuitive and even unpleasant to view them
against the direction of their flight, i.e., from the one closest to the fishermen to the
one most removed.
According to hypothetical intentionalism, the interpretation of a work of art
should not correspond with the actual intentions of its author, but with the hypo-
thetical intentions that people, when interpreting and focusing on the work itself,
ascribe to the author as being most likely, their having made or been given certain
contextual and background assumptions about said author.25 Hence, documentary
evidence that might illuminate what the author actually intended is of no use for
those endorsing hypothetical intentionalism.
I maintain that any judicious hypothetical intentionalist would want to postulate,
merely on the basis of the analysis of the composition of the painting, that Raphael
intended that rhythm be perceived by those looking at his painting along the
lines, broadly speaking, of Clark’s description. Of course, we are thinking here of
“Raphael” as the hypothetical or postulated author or, in this case, painter. Whether
or not Raphael actually thought in terms of the concept of rhythm (and if so, how
similar his conception might have been to our own notion) is of no consequence.
The crucial contention is that we can justifiably hypothesize Raphael’s intention
that the viewer undergo the type of experience captured by Clark’s remarks on the
painting. To resist positing said intention would appear to run contrary to a salient
aspect of our experience of the painting and its critical appraisal. Therefore, one
would need good reasons to resist such an interpretation.
For those favouring moderate actual intentionalism, the actual intentions of an
author should at least dictate the contours or limits of the correct interpretation of
a work of art, as long as those intentions are successfully realized.26 At this point we
face one of the standard problems of any version of actual intentionalism, namely,
that often the actual intentions of an author are not accessible, nor is there any hope
that they will be. One way to get around this problem is to emphasize the negative
aspect of actual intentionalism: the commitment of this theory of interpretation is
to avoid interpretations that are incompatible with the known intentions of the au-
thor, but not to require explicit, positive proof of every aspect of the interpretation
of a work of art. Despite actual intentionalism being perhaps less forthcoming than
either its hypothetical counterpart or the value maximizing theory in sanctioning
25 Currie, “Interpretation and Objectivity,” and “Interpretation and Pragmatics”; Levinson “Hypothetical
Intentionalism,” and “Defending Hypothetical Intentionalism”; and Nehamas “The Postulated Author.”
Versions of hypothetical intentionalism may differ with respect to the degree to which assumptions about the
author (e.g., cultural background or context of creation) restrict the freedom of interpretation.
26 Carroll, “Interpretation and Intention,” and “Art Interpretation”; Livingston, Art and Intention; and
Stecker, Interpretation and Construction, and “Moderate Actual Intentionalism Defended.”
the ascription of rhythm to Raphael’s The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, if it were de-
cided that it did not have the capacity to do so, I would argue that it would run into
serious trouble beyond any consideration of rhythm, given the ubiquitous potential
occurrence of interpretative dilemmas of this kind, which hypothetical intention-
alism and anti-intentionalism can standardly avoid.
I conclude then that in contemporary aesthetics we have the theoretical tools
to meet Gaiger’s challenge along the lines that viewers should be required to ex-
perience rhythm in paintings. I believe that this is particularly evident in any ver-
sion of anti-intentionalism that is chiefly motivated by the maximization of artistic
value. But I also contend that this should be accepted rather straightforwardly
by the proponents of hypothetical intentionalism. Finally, I argue that moderate
versions of actual intentionalism have the conceptual resources to endorse rhythm
in paintings such as the one by Raphael discussed here.
Although I submit that the plausibility of my proposal concerning rhythm in
painting lies on what I have developed so far in this section, I turn now, rather
briefly, to two other worries that Gaiger considers. He devotes some effort to
discussing the literature on eye-tracking.27 There is empirical evidence that the
human eye is not fixed on any given spot for more than 0.2–0.3 seconds, jumping
from one point of the painting (or any other object for that matter) to another in a
way that does not follow in a continuous fashion what we would think of as the most
important features of the painting. Hence, there is no relationship between the way
gaze movements are temporally ordered and the spatial disposition of the relevant
elements of paintings. To be fair, Gaiger does not claim to establish this as a positive
reason to discard rhythm in paintings;28 nonetheless, he arguably finds some merit
in the skepticism emanating from the empirical work on gaze movement. However,
I remain unpersuaded for a very simple reason: as is well known, our perceptual ex-
perience does not correspond in any way with the reality of our gaze-movements,
but rather with the experience of a continuous, seamless gaze.29 Since, as mentioned
earlier, Gaiger and I agree that the focus is on what is experienced by the viewer, I do
not think that the empirical data derived from gaze-tracking experiments (inter-
esting though it may be in its own right) provides any significant input regarding
the topic under scrutiny here. Intriguingly, as commented on by Gaiger, the empir-
ical findings to the effect that there are “areas of interest” in paintings, in the sense
that “beholders tend to reiterate particular paths with their eyes,”30 could plausibly
help my cause in this chapter, as long as we may purport a pertinent connection be-
tween the repeated patterns and our experience of the painting. As Gaiger admits:
27 Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 317.

28 Gaiger is quite subtle in the wording of his view with regards to the meaning of the empirical work on
gaze-movements. He writes: “At least as far as gaze-movements are concerned, there does not seem to be any
evidence to support the claim that spatial patterns can be designed in such a way that they are apprehended by
the viewer in a temporally ordered sequence” (“Pictorial Experience,” 321).
29 Kowler, “Eye Movements,” 1472, quoted in Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 319.
30 Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 92, quoted in Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 321.
The pattern is spatial not temporal but it does give structure to pictorial experi-
ence as something inherently durational. This recognition perhaps goes some
way to meeting our intuition that there can be spatial as well as temporal rhythms
and that certain works of graphic art have a pronounced rhythmic structure or
rhythmic line that connects the different parts.31
While this is an exciting possibility, I need not explore it any further for present
purposes, since I rest my case on what I have explained above in relation to what is
required or demanded from viewers attending to paintings with rhythmic elements.
A different worry, according to Gaiger, is that we cannot find entrainment (or an
analogue of it) in painting. I would be happy to bite the bullet here and accept that
generally we do not have entrainment in the case of rhythm in painting. Given the
vast differences between art forms, it would be surprising if every prominent aspect
of rhythm in music and dance could be maintained in painting. I merely note that
entrainment is not usually a definitional aspect of rhythm and for good reason: it
would be problematic since, despite the fact that we often find entrainment in music
and dance, there are cases where it is not an option, and yet no one contends that
rhythm is not perceived. To give a clear example, many of Conlon Nancarrow’s
compositions (both the humanly and non-humanly playable) cannot produce an-
ything by way of entrainment; nonetheless, they are perceived as highly rhythmic.
The same is true of other examples of virtuoso music and dance. In the case of vir-
tuoso dance, skilled professionals are able to entrain, but most members of the au-
dience are not, though they often perceive the virtuoso dance as rich with rhythm.
Even though engaging with art forms other than painting is beyond the scope of
my contribution to this volume, it should be apparent that the very same strategy
deployed in painting can be successful in photography, sculpture, and architecture,
allowing for the particular characteristics of each art form. It is not hard to imagine
a photograph similar to Raphael’s The Miraculous Draught of Fishes or a complex
sculptural group with features that can require the viewer to appreciate rhythm. As
for architecture, precisely because of the fact that repeated motifs are used very fre-
quently in many styles, I believe that the notion of rhythm should be, if anything,
easier to accept in this art form than in painting or sculpture.
After having articulated my proposal, I would like to highlight some of its
benefits. To begin with, it is advantageous to preserve the notion of rhythm in
painting: a great deal of critical commentary and scholarly work will not need to be
reinterpreted, but can instead be taken at face value. Furthermore, there is another
important gain to be had if the existence of rhythm in painting is admitted. Let
us ponder the fundamental role that rhythm plays in the creation, experience, and
critical reception and analysis of works of music, dance, and poetry. I maintain that
31 Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 326–7.

meaningful connections can be established among different and seemingly distant

art forms if a notion of rhythm continuous with that of music, dance, and poetry
can be successfully preserved in painting, photography, sculpture, and architec-
ture. I would then propose that such connections among distant art forms may
(and sometimes do) play a positive role in art creation and experience by way of
fostering conceptualizations and modes of appreciation which benefit from being
inspired, motivated or, perhaps simply, colored by one’s acquaintance with a dif-
ferent art form.
Finally, I would like to turn to a methodological matter which, beyond capturing
a potential contrast between Gaiger’s and my own approach, underscores a point
that affects the very motivation and scope of our respective inquiries. In this
chapter, I have argued for a normative thesis in relation to the notion of rhythm
in painting to the effect that the experience of rhythm is required for the correct
appreciation of certain kinds of paintings, namely, those which exhibit the right
features for being so experienced. Gaiger’s article may be interpreted as defending
a descriptive thesis rather than a normative one. On this reading, Gaiger is con-
cerned with the psychological possibility of experiencing rhythm when looking at a
painting.32 It is true that my normative approach presupposes an affirmative answer
to the descriptive or psychological question. Nevertheless, barring empirical evi-
dence to the contrary, which I do not think likely to be forthcoming, I believe that
it is entirely possible to engage with paintings in a temporarily structured fashion
that satisfies the definitional requirements of rhythm. One need only reflect on the
therapeutic exercises recommended for several eye disorders where, in a very reg-
imented manner, a person has to look at different spots on a wall or card board, in
a precise order, at fixed time intervals, and so on. Given that the descriptive ques-
tion seems unproblematic to me, I have naturally taken Gaiger’s views to directly
challenge my normative position. An alternative descriptive focus could be on the
ways that people actually engage with paintings in relation to rhythm. Here, as in so
many other matters concerning aesthetic appreciation, people will exhibit all kinds
of behavior. This, if anything, will only incentivize paying attention to a normative
approach, which will require exploring whether it is the right one and whether it
can be plausibly developed. I hope to have made some progress on both related
matters in this section.33
32 Here, I am using the phrase “psychological possibility” very broadly and ecumenically. Depending on
one’s terminological preferences, the same thought could be conveyed with “cognitive possibility” or “experi-
ential possibility.”
33 Of course, if one accepts that the perception of rhythm in paintings is psychologically possible, as argued
above, then a normative thesis could be supported even if most people did not experience paintings in the
prescribed way. It would make the defense of the normative thesis perhaps harder, but certainly not impos-
sible. Throughout history, a majority of people have engaged wrongly with art for a wide variety of reasons: it
was novel, subtle, unfamiliar, obscure, and so on. For instance, the fact that most people today might approach
a Latin poem expecting rhyme and in ignorance of its rhythm should have no influence on how one ought to
appreciate it.
4. Rhythm outside Sight and Hearing
In this final section, I examine artistic practices that may exhibit rhythm in sense
modalities other than vision and hearing. Although a defence of soundless rhythm
can be independently motivated for the reasons discussed in Sections 2 and 3, an
exciting aspect of an enquiry such as this one is that it allows us to think about
(and potentially motivate) new art practices. Considering these uncharted creative
avenues fulfills a dual function in the context of the present chapter. First, reflecting
on these options will help us to further refine and clarify the notion of soundless
rhythm. In this respect, much of what I propose in what follows can be regarded as
thought experiments. Second, it will also allow us to contemplate in what ways new
art practices and, perhaps, art forms can be explored. Therefore, I am fully aware
that the nature of this section is both speculative and ambitious, but I am satisfied
that this is only to be expected given what I endeavor to investigate here.
At this point, it is necessary to revisit my modification of Simons’ definition of
rhythm: rhythm is a repeatable (and typically repeated) pattern of sensorial inputs
in time. Next, I put forward a few examples to show that this expanded definition of
rhythm is both sound and eminently accessible. My hope is that readers will relate
to these examples simply by recourse to their own experiences of rhythm and of the
different sensory systems invoked.
Let us take olfaction first, which has recently been the object of study in relation
to the potential emergence of an art form centered around it.34 I argue that it is
perfectly conceivable that we could perceive rhythm through smell, that is to say,
that rhythm can be created by using perfumes or scents. There are different ways
of implementing the idea; for example, a device to be put on one’s nose (it would
not need to be a full mask covering the whole face) that discharges different scents
in a very precise, sharp fashion.35 The device would be controlled by software ei-
ther in real time or through a preprogrammed routine. Given the current state of
software development, for use both in the arts and elsewhere, the actual technical
aspects of the program do not seem to pose any significant difficulty. That such a
set-up could produce sensorial inputs in repeated patterns seems uncontroversial
to me. Owing to the sophistication and breadth of already existing scent databases,
the possibilities would be endless, not only in relation to the mere formal contrasts
and connections that can be established among scents, but also to their associations
with different aspects of human experience.36 This final point is relevant to putting
34 Shiner, “Art Scents.” For a novel that explores the idea of an olfactory art, see Huysmans, À rebours
([1884] 1998).
35 My point here is independent of (and, indeed, would adapt itself to) any empirical findings about the
speed at which our sense of smell can experience different odors. In order to make sense of what I am trying to
convey, one simply needs to reflect on how we register different scents during an activity in which we particu-
larly focus on olfaction, such as, for instance, when cooking or enjoying an elaborate dish, or walking through
a garden or forest heavily populated with aromatic plants.
36 Shiner, “Art Scents,” 380–1.
the rhythm generated through smell in the context of a more ambitious artistic en-
terprise, one that goes beyond simply creating rhythmic patterns.
As far as touch is concerned, no hypothetical scenario involving technology
is necessary, although, naturally, such a possibility would always be an option.
Without downplaying the ingenuity involved in giving massages in different
cultures, one need only envision an approach that puts a greater focus on producing
repeated patterns of touches. The amount of variation regarding the length and
type of pressures that can be applied to one’s skin, not to mention their different
locations over one’s body, speaks to the complexities of potential rhythmic patterns
and the scope for the use of this sense modality. Of course, limitations on the re-
peatability of this kind of “artistic” massage and the fact that a massage calls for
one “performer” per “spectator” could be readily overcome by using devices that
resemble massage chairs, the only difference being that they would be more sophis-
ticated and versatile, as required by the artistic ambitions of the project in question.
By analogy with the proposal for smell rhythm above, one can imagine how gus-
tatory rhythm might be created. The idea of a device rhythmically discharging dif-
ferent types of flavors to different parts of the tongue is meant to make as intuitively
accessible as possible the notion of gustatory rhythm. Two brief points of clarifi-
cation are in order. One, given what we know about the mechanisms for sensing
flavor, I am dramatically simplifying matters for the sake of ease of engagement
with the thought experiment in a way that still renders it perfectly useful for my
purposes here. In all likelihood, for this idea to work efficiently, the tongue would
not be the only part of our sensorial make-up under consideration: as people who
cannot taste their food on account of having a cold know all too well, there is more
to taste than one’s taste buds. Two, even though it is beyond the scope of this chapter
to consider this matter, one may posit the existence of rhythm in the degustation
menus of high-end restaurants. I refer to high-end restaurants because it is typically
in those settings that a great deal of attention is paid to matters of order and timing
of the different foods that are being consumed.
We could think of smoking cigars as, at least potentially, displaying rhythm in
relation to olfaction and gustation. A viable notion of rhythm readily presents itself
involving the frequency and sharpness (or, conversely, smoothness) of the smoke
intake, the length of retention of the smoke in the vocal cavity and the manner of
the exhalation. Indeed, there is a sense in which different people smoke cigars at dif-
ferent rhythms, where such sense of variation has to do with the aspects of smoking
a cigar just mentioned. Other fictional scenarios are conceivable, including ones
that involve a simultaneous plurality of sensorial inputs, a sort of multi-modal
rhythmic structure, but I believe that the examples provided so far sufficiently es-
tablish what I propose in this section.
I finish with a reflection on the importance of postulating a viable notion of
rhythm for those senses that, up until now, have been largely ignored in art creation
and art practices. First of all, my hope is that the thought experiments described
above further support the contention that soundless rhythm is a perfectly plausible
notion. In this respect, it is immaterial whether readers think that any of the fic-
tional scenarios explained in this section will ever come to pass.
Second, I contend that there is no contradiction in maintaining that it is theo-
retically irrelevant whether or not a fictional scenario will become actual (in the
tradition of the philosophical methodology on thought experiments), while at the
same time positing that it is worth considering the role of soundless rhythm in the
emergence of new art practices and, perhaps, art forms. Here, I simply wish to de-
ploy the very same idea elaborated upon at the end of Section 3: a notion of rhythm
that is continuous through different art forms or practices can lead to mean-
ingful connections. However, this point is of vastly more consequence for new art
practices than it is for traditional art forms, since novel art practices stand to benefit
more from connections to conventional art forms in order to facilitate engagement,
acquire status, and so on. Of course, points of contact between a novel art prac-
tice and a traditional one, while helping to consolidate the status of the former in
the arts world, would not take away any of the originality of the newly explored
art practice. In this respect, the influences between the traditional art forms and
novel ones would not be any different from the influences among the traditional art
forms themselves. Therefore, the acceptance or awareness that a robust experience
of rhythm can be sustained by smell, taste, and touch could be significant for the
very viability of artistic enterprises focused on these senses.
I was initially motivated to write this chapter by the opportunity to argue for
soundless rhythm, an aspect of the broader concept of rhythm such as can be found
in dance, that is often ignored or downplayed. I subsequently sought to establish the
same notion in the more controversial realm of painting, photography, sculpture,
and architecture. But here again I was defending what I believe exists and what we
by and large recognize in our aesthetic experiences and critical practices. However,
in the final part of this chapter, I have endeavored to propose some hypothetical
scenarios, both as a way to additionally sustain the idea of soundless rhythm and as
a means to perhaps motivate further developments in our art practices.37
Works Cited
Carroll, Noël, “Interpretation and Intention: The Debate between Hypothetical and Actual
Intentionalism,” Metaphilosophy, 31 (2000), 75–95.
Carroll, Noël, “Art Interpretation,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 51 (2011), 117–35.
Clark, Kenneth, Looking at Pictures (London, 1960).
Currie, Gregory, “Interpretation and Objectivity,” Mind, 102 (1993), 413–28.
Currie, Gregory, “Interpretation and Pragmatics,” in Arts and Minds (Oxford, 2004), 107–33.
Davies, Stephen, “Author’s Intentions, Literary Interpretations, and Literary Value,” British
Journal of Aesthetics, 46 (2006), 223–47.
Dickie, George and W. Kent Wilson, “The Intentional Fallacy: Defending Beardsley,” Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53 (1995), 233–50.
37 I am grateful to Jason Gaiger, Ted Gracyk, Andy Hamilton, and Peter Simons for their comments on
earlier versions of this chapter.
Gaiger, Jason, “Pictorial Experience and the Perception of Rhythm,” in Peter Cheyne, Andy
Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics
(Oxford, 2019), C19.
Gaut, Berys, “Interpreting the Arts: The Patchwork Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 51 (1993), 597–609.
Gaut, Berys, “Understanding Cinema,” in A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge, 2010),
152–96.
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, Against Nature [À rebours], tr. Margaret Mauldon, ed. Nicholas White
([1884]; Oxford, 1998).
Kowler, Eileen, “Eye Movements: The Past 25 Years,” Vision Research, 51 (2011), 1457–83.
Lamarque, Peter, “The Death of the Author: An Analytical Autopsy,” British Journal of Aesthetics,
30 (1990), 319–31.
Levinson, Jerrold, “Hypothetical Intentionalism: Statement, Objections, and Replies,” in Michael
Krausz, ed., Is There a Single Right Interpretation? (University Park, PA, 2002), 309–18.
Levinson, Jerrold, “Defending Hypothetical Intentionalism,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 50
(2010), 139–50.
Livingston, Paisley, Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study (Oxford, 2005).
Nehamas, Alexander, “The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal,” Critical
Inquiry, 8 (1981), 133–49.
Rosenberg, Raphael and Cristoph Klein, “The Moving Eye of the Beholder: Eye Tracking and the
Perception of Paintings,” in Joseph P. Huston, Marcos Nadal, Francisco Mora, Luigi F. Agnati,
and Camilo J. Cela-Conde, eds, Art, Aesthetics and the Brain (Oxford, 2015), 79–108.
Shiner, Larry, “Art Scents: Perfume, Design and Olfactory Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 55
(2015), 375–92.
Stecker, Robert, Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech, and the Law (Oxford, 2003).
Stecker, Robert, “Moderate Actual Intentionalism Defended,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 64 (2006), 429–38.
PART V
R E A DING  R H Y T H M
21
Rhythm, Meter, and the Poetics of Abstraction
Jason David Hall
1. How to Articulate Sweet Sounds?
W. B. Yeats’s 1902 poem “Adam’s Curse” is sometimes cited as an example of how

the regular pattern of meter can be modulated by the irregular particularities of
speech rhythm. The poem, the opening lines of which are excerpted below, is about
the careful and time-consuming craftsmanship that goes into making a “fine thing”
like verse:
We sat together at one summer’s end,

That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, “A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.”1
Good poetry, the speaker goes on to say, “needs much laboring.” While the poem
might sound conversational and off-the-cuff, it is in fact designed on a strict formal
template: its lines are not only set to the regular dip and drive of iambic pentameters
(we SAT toGETHer AT one SUMmer’s END) but also linked in heroic couplets
(end/friend, thought/nought, stones/bones). But given that the poem is about
making what is really intricate and studied appear effortless, this strict patterning is
rightly counterbalanced by deformalizing touches. As David Holdeman observes,
1 Yeats, Selected Poems,  28–9.

Speechlike rhythms roughen its iambic pentameter meter, and its sentences often
strengthen the impression of spontaneous, colloquial speech by extending them-
selves over several lines, sometimes by means of enjambment.2
So we might say that “Adam’s Curse” is a poem designed to exhibit the heuristic
possibilities afforded by exploiting the tension between meter, on the one hand, and
rhythm, on the other—between a poem’s notional structure and variations on it,
which a voicing of Yeats’s verses confirms. As one reads with an awareness of meter,
with every voicing there is a new permutation of meaning as the chosen rhythmic
reading interacts with the “fixed” metrical pattern.
Such a tension in metered verse has long been discussed as forming an essential
component of prosodic art and is thus much debated by theorists of versification
and literary critics. Some will call it modulation, others syncopation, or counter-
point, or polyrhythmia.3 Whatever the name, however, it amounts to much the same
thing: delighting in departures from and returns to a fixed pattern and to the real-
time interplay between patterns. Hence the old chestnut: To what extent should an
awareness of the similarities and differences between patterns inform the reading
of metered poetry out loud? Yeats’s poem seems at once to invite and disavow at-
tention to its metrical artifice. I think we are supposed to notice that the poem has
an iambic pentameter form, but discouraged from giving definite expression to its
meter in our voicing. If anything, we are encouraged to read against meter, shifting
emphasis from a metrical stress for rhetorical effect and passing from one line to
the next with, in some instances, complete disregard for line breaks and the echo of
rhyme words.
Whether or not Yeats intended us to read the poem one way or another—a sub-
ject of much speculation among Yeatsians—is overshadowed, for me, by another
question: How much is our willingness as modern-day readers to participate in the
invitation that the poem seems to extend (whether intended by Yeats or not)—that
is, to go against the grain of meter—formed by an accretive process of thinking
about meter and rhythm and the relationship between them? My answer, in brief, is
that whether or not one reads verse (i.e., metered poetry) as verse or in such a way as
to de-emphasize its metrical constitution has been, during the last century or more,
the subject of much disagreement, and our own responses today are to a certain de-
gree framed by a pervasive metrical orthodoxy that began coalescing in the middle
decades of the nineteenth century, persisting into and refining its principles during
the twentieth. That metrical orthodoxy, which is even today a default position in
much classroom instruction on versification, upheld a distinction between meter as
a kind of patterned abstraction and rhythm as an embodied instantiation.
The present chapter presents a (necessarily abbreviated) genealogy of the impulse
toward metrical abstraction, concentrating on a period of roughly one hundred
2 Holdeman, Introduction to W. B. Yeats, 50.

3 Armstrong, “Meter and Meaning.”
Rhythm, Meter, and the Poetics of Abstraction 351
years (fifty years either side of the publication of “Adam’s Curse”), during which time
debates about measurement and the “facts” of poetic meter and rhythm became
focused on producing an agreed “standard” by which to judge a poem’s periods,
pauses, and other prosodic values. I’ll say a few words about Coventry Patmore’s
mid-Victorian “law” of meter, where an enduring, though under-appreciated, tem-
poral theory of metrics found expression, before moving on to examine a contra-
puntal movement in the direction of concrete, measureable data. I conclude by
describing a return, in the first half of the twentieth century, to theories of metrical
abstraction that attempt to sidestep the complications introduced by emphasizing
voiced particularities of rhythm. While in disagreement on many points of prin-
ciple and practice, the verse theorists that I discuss were more or less united in their
desire to establish a clear basis for analysis. Whether what one attempted to define
was fundamentally material or immaterial, it was nonetheless important to conduct
an “objective” study of it, with clear points of reference and rules for prohibiting
“subjective” scansion.
2. Establishing the Law of Meter
Let’s come back to the question I posed above: How has this meter–rhythm dynamic
impinged upon the reading of poems aloud? Throughout the nineteenth century (and
for some time before then), one prosodic discussion that captivated the imagination
not only of poets and verse theorists but also of professional elocutionists, and readers
and reciters more generally, was the place and function of pause in metered lines: not
only mid-line or caesural pause but also a pause at the end of a line; it’s the latter I want
to focus on right now. On the one hand, there were a number of proponents of final
pause. Lindley Murray, author of a number of books on grammar, asserted in his 1825
English Reader that we “ought to read” not only rhymed but also blank verse
so as to make every line sensible to the ear: for, what is the use of melody or for
what end has the poet composed in verse, if in reading his lines, we suppress his
numbers, by omitting the final pause; and degrade them, by our pronunciation,
into mere prose?4
Noah Webster, in his 1843 Improved Grammar of the English Language, concurred:
final pause marks the close of a line or verse, whether there is a pause in the sense
or not. . . . the final pause, when the close of one line is intimately connected with
the beginning of the next, should be merely a suspension of the voice without ele-
vation or depression.5
4 Murray, English Reader, 12.

5 Webster, An Improved Grammar, 164.
Figure 21.1 Opening lines of John Milton’s Paradise Lost displayed as prose in David
Charles Bell and Alexander Melville Bell’s Standard Elocutionist (London, 1878), 426
Yet in making every line sensible to the ear, the reader ran the risk of falling into
a wooden “sing-song” rhythm that sounded like an attempt at spoken scansion.
Wilkie Collins parodies such a reading by having one of his characters recite the
opening verses of John Milton’s Paradise Lost so that he “ended every line inexo-
rably with a full stop”—each of which Collins deliberately prints.6 What this hu-
morous example implies is a correlation between how we see poetry and how we
are likely to sound it. Collins’s reader sees lines as discrete units, and in his reading
he gives voice to the line as end-stopped, self-contained segment, even if the sense
of what he’s reading does not conform to Milton’s pentameter lineation. Some of
Collins’s contemporaries were making similar points about the visual display of
verse. According to the “visible speech” popularizer Alexander Melville Bell, for ex-
ample, a reader too mindful of the structure of meter is unduly inclined toward
“sing-song,” hypermetrical recitation. To guard against a pupil’s “too rhythmical
[for which read too metrical] delivery,” Bell experimented with a way of printing
verse so that it didn’t look like verse at all. If we could get beyond seeing meter
asserted by “metrically printed lines,” he argued, then there would be less chance
of our pronouncing poems in an artificially metrical manner. The authors of Bell’s
Standard Elocutionist (1878) preferred to display many poems—including extracts
from Milton’s epic—“prosaically” (Figure 21.1).7
Theories relating to final pause circulated widely, in grammar and elocution
manuals for use in schools or for the purposes of self-improvement, and the var-
ious “systems” exemplified in the extracts just mentioned indicate the nineteenth-
century’s drive to establish a code not only for metrical rules but also for their
interpretation by readers of metered verse. Among the more enduring contributions
6 Collins, Man and Wife, 195.

7 Bell and Bell, Bell’s Standard Elocutionist, 139.
to this systematizing impetus, particularly in relation to the dialectic of meter and

rhythm, is Coventry Patmore’s 1857 Essay on English Metrical Law. Patmore goes as
far as to make final pause a central feature of his mid-century verse theory, insisting
that “every pentameter line should have an extra silent foot.” Speakers of verse who
are unmindful of the final pause will confound what Patmore calls a “right reading”
of verse; by moving along too quickly from one line to the next they run the risk of
losing all the effect of the poem’s metrical movement, of compromising the “law”
of meter. Patmore believed strongly that meter was a kind of idealist abstraction
that we hear in the mind’s ear—a grid against which we measure a line’s rhetorical,
dramatic possibilities. More specifically, meter, as Patmore sees it, is properly an
immaterial indication of the measurement of “the time occupied in the delivery of a
series of words,” and his metrical “law” was based on the division of lines into units
of equal time or “isochronous intervals,” marked by what he regards as an “imagi-
nary” time-keeping beat, the ictus. The ictus
has no material and external existence at all, but has its place in the mind,
which craves measure in everything, and, wherever the idea of a measure is
uncontradicted, delights in marking it with an imaginary beat.
Patmore’s Essay underscores the ideal nature of the “modulus” of meter, which he
distinguishes from the concrete patterning of syllable-duration or stress in a line.8
Patmore was not alone. This abstracting of meter, often in conjunction with
attempts to set out a systematic temporal metrics based on isochrony, figures cen-
trally in an emergent strain of idealism in mid-Victorian prosody. In his 1852 book
Poetics, E. S. Dallas described meter as a mental phenomenon that is “intended to
produce pleasure in the reader’s mind.”9 One result of this “mentalizing of meter”
was to decouple prosody from corporeal experience. Meter had less to do with
“what you actually hear or say aloud”; it became more of “an abstract idea in your
mind against which you measure how the line would actually be spoken if it were
spoken.”10 The theories of Patmore and Dallas, as well as influential successors such
as T. S. Omond, demonstrate “a growing consensus about the abstract nature of
metrical form.”11 Omond exhibits his affiliation with Patmore through his insist-
ence the abstraction of “time-spaces” in verse from actual syllables, promoting a
theory of isochronous periods as the fundamental organizing feature of the English
line. Fittingly, it is Omond who gives a name to the tradition of prosody running
from Patmore and Dallas through his own work. He calls it the “New Prosody,”12
and its central feature is meter as a means of measurement that need not coincide
with the fluctuating nature of actual syllable duration or spoken emphasis.
8 Patmore, English Metrical Law, 11, 15.
9 Dallas, Poetics, 12.
10 Pinch, “Love Thinking,” 391.
11 Taylor, Hardy’s Metres, 22.
12 Omond, English Metrists, 171.

One curiosity—something of a paradox, really—of the tradition of the New

Prosody from Patmore to Omond is the difficulty it has explaining away the
materialities of rhythm and related questions of embodiment. The putatively idealist
New Prosody cannot fully abandon its indebtedness to the materialist imperatives
of the nineteenth century. Patmore’s ictus may well be “imaginary,” but to describe it
he falls back on the metaphor of a “post in a chain railing.”13 Likewise, Dallas admits
that an awareness of the mental measurement of meter may well inspire the body
to beat out similar rhythms: “if [the reader’s] thoughts are . . . engaged, he will beat
time with his fingers or with his feet.”14 Omond himself seems torn between the
abstraction of metrical periods and a reluctance to abandon meter as the “body”
of verse. As we will see, the material embodiment of meter came under more scru-
tiny at the turn of the century, when an unlikely group of prosodists focused their
attention—and instruments—on answering questions obtaining to the “science” of
rhythms.
3. Rhythm Science in the Lab
We move now from idealist to materialist metrics. From the 1880s—when ana-
lytical research methods from German universities began to inform the study of
psychology—topics situated at “the borderland of the physical and the æsthetic
enquiry”15 attracted the attention of experimental scientists. In their state-of-the-
art laboratories, they lent the study of rhythm and meter a new degree of scien-
tific specialization, drawing on the methods of laboratory physiology, as pioneered
by figures such as Hermann von Helmholtz, who had already helped to redefine
the study of music in relation the science of physiology.16 Asserting a positivistic
psychology grounded in empirical observation, scientists elaborated detailed
measurement practices using sensitive recording apparatuses that could, for the
first time, quantify to the hundredth of a second data pertaining to the rhythms of
music and poetry. Many of the instruments used in psychological experimentation
were inherited directly from physiology. German physiologists, according to W. F.
Bynum, developed many new instruments to record and analyze data. Kymographs
recorded pressure fluctuations; tuning forks registered vibrations; chronographs
assessed reaction-time; phonautographs made graphic recordings and aided in the
measuring of speech patterns.17 Such instruments were central to the advances of
not only experimental physiology and psychology but also the emerging sciences of
phonetics, acoustics, and prosody. They played a key role in how the debate about
13 Patmore, English Metrical Law, 15.

14 Dallas, Poetics, 171, 159.
15 Gurney, Power of Sound, xviii.
16 Helmholtz’s two major contributions to the physiology of music are “Physiological Causes of Harmony,”
published the same year as Patmore’s Essay, and Sensations of Tone.
17 Bynum, Science,  98–9.
poetic abstraction would evolve, forming an important midway point between

the nineteenth-century theories of abstraction advanced by Patmore and other
proponents of the New Prosody, and the twentieth-century emphasis on abstrac-
tion that we find in works of “practical” or “new” criticism, as advocated by I. A.
Richards, W. K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks, among others.
A number of scientists brought their materialist methodologies and machines to
bear on the study of rhythms. Among the most influential were Thaddeus L. Bolton,
Ernst Meumann, Jean Pierre Rousselot, Henry Sweet, and Edward Wheeler
Scripture. As Bolton suggested in 1894,
The experimental study of rhythm . . . is an attempt to push the lines of exact sci-
ence a little farther forward into a field that borders more closely upon the field of
æsthetics than any other that experimental psychologists have tried.18
For these “rhythmists,” speech and poetry could be harmonized by the developing
science of experimental phonetics. In The Elements of Experimental Phonetics
(1902), published the same year as Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse,” Scripture, who pioneered
work in this area at his laboratory at Yale University, scrutinized rhythm in relation
to such vocal factors as melody, duration, loudness, and accent. His data formed the
basis for his hypothesis about the relationship between the “actual concrete rhythm”
of poetry and “abstract rhythm.”19 Scripture’s findings and the methods he used to
obtain them established “laboratory methods” as a way of “settling the controversy”
about some of the temporal characteristics of English poetry, including questions
about whether or not its correct measurement was indeed time or, in Classical ter-
minology, quantity.20 Here his work entered dialogue with the theories of earlier
metrists such as Patmore. By using his finely tuned instruments, Scripture, like
some of his prosodically minded colleagues, sought to establish an objective truth
about meter—one based on irrefutable data supplied by the graphing technology of
machines such as kymographs.
Attempting to add rigor to previous studies of rhythm, which he regarded as im-
precise and subjective because they had been based on mere sense impressions (i.e.,
using the unaided ear as a means of registering rhythmical properties), Scripture
asserted the objectivity of his laboratory apparatuses. With its graphs and tables of
data made using recording, amplifying, and measurement machines, Elements is a
testament to Scripture’s belief in the infallibility of his experimental procedures and
the “truth” of their results (Figure 21.2). He satisfied himself, for example, of certain
relationships among duration, pitch, and stress—”in English . . . increase in duration
and rise in pitch are ordinarily associated with increased stress”—and posited a dis-
tinction between the “essentially mental” nature of these correlations and “physical
18 Bolton, “Rhythm,” 146, discussed at Golston, Rhythm and Race,  12–17.
19 Scripture, Experimental Phonetics, 509, 552.
20 Cook, “Prosody,” 28.
Figure 21.2 Graphic record of various rhythmical sounds, from Edward Wheeler

Scripture, Elements of Experimental Phonetics (New York, 1902), 509
or physiological phenomena.”21 Though his machines were designed to give a more

reliable and material reading of the properties of rhythm in English poetry, setting
them apart from the abstract metrical theorizing of Patmore, Scripture’s analyses
suggest curious affinities with this earlier, more idealist strain of metrical inquiry.
It turns out that Patmore’s suggestion about the essentially “imaginary” nature
of meter gains support from the materialist experiments of turn-of-the-century
rhythm scientists. While we may “associate,” to borrow Scripture’s term, the struc-
ture of a line with embodied phenomena, it might be that duration and pitch—
points of reference in the ongoing accentual versus temporal debates about English
meter—are not necessarily related. In other words, there may well be, as Patmore
had posited without the help of a kymograph, something like a mental marking of
verse that more or less corresponds to the measureable facts of physical experience
but that can never be finally reduced to it. In presenting his findings on syllable
length, Scripture’s laboratory data did, in fact, suggest a vindication of Patmore’s
insistence on the “conflict between the law of verse and the freedom of the lan-
guage.”22 He asserted quite straightforwardly a “compromise” between syllables’
“natural lengths” and the lengths attributed to them by “abstract rhythm.”23
In the end, the positivist prosody that emerged from Scripture’s laboratory
and similar institutions between roughly 1880 and 1935 did not settle the meter–
rhythm debate once and for all. As Calvin Brown remarked in 1965, looking back
on this brief period of experimental prosody,
though the objective facts of the laboratory analysis are always relevant and in-
teresting, they are never decisive. If the technician says, “What you say you hear
21 Scripture, Experimental Phonetics, 513.
22 Patmore, English Metrical Law, 9.
23 Scripture, Experimental Phonetics, 552.

simply isn’t there,” we can justifiably answer, “It is there—in my mind, and out of
reach of your instruments.”24
Such a rejection of data-driven metrical analysis in favor of an abstraction of meter

as, once again, a principally mental phenomenon would underpin theories of met-
rical abstraction that have become associated with advocates of the so-called prac-
tical criticism. There was still a lingering question, though, about whether the meter
I might hear “in my mind” could be explained in terms that were less open to assault
on grounds of subjectivity.
4. The Resurgence of Abstraction and “Practical”

Methodology
I. A. Richards had reservations about technological assessments of meter, such as

those outlined above. In his landmark Practical Criticism (1929), Richards denied
that a kymograph could resolve the contest between the abstract pattern of meter
and what he called the “actual sounds in verse.”25 Richards’s dissatisfaction with
the fantasy of accurate measurement and the promise of machines to disclose the
“truths” of meter is indicative of his general inclination toward a pragmatic and
less “scientific” approach to prosody, and also of the emergence of a new chapter in
theories of metrical abstraction. Richards’s work was instrumental in articulating
an “art of responding to the form of poetry,”26 laying the groundwork for the cen-
tral metrical claims of the American New Critics and provided the classroom prac-
tice for generations of scholastic metrists. Poetry, for Richards, is first and foremost
about a dialogue between poet and reader, and the dialectic between meter and
rhythm is merely a subordinate means of establishing clear lines of communica-
tion. Positions regarding meter were inseparable from larger questions regarding
textual stability and the determinability of “meaning.” The fundamentals of met-
rical patterning, in such a context, and in particular the idea that meter provides
“support” or “orientation” for poets and readers alike, are extensions of Richards’s
belief that clear, unequivocal communication is not only desirable but possible. In
his prosody, this goal manifests itself as a “love affair with the idea of system,” set-
ting what Donald Westling has called the “received paradigm” of meter in opposi-
tion to the potentially confusing “nonsystem” represented by free verse. In Practical
Criticism Richards gives coherent expression to the concept of metrical “orien-
tation,” made possible by a poet’s adoption and a reader’s recognition of abstract
metrical patterning.27 For Richards, meter constitutes a “pattern” (perhaps “only
24 Brown, “Musical Notation,” 331.

25 Richards, Practical Criticism, 219.
27 Richards’s views on metrical “orientation” can be read in relation to other theories of metrical variation
(e.g., the “iconic theory”), as well as to theories regarding “the importance of the knowledge and previous
associations a reader brings to the meter of a poem” (Finch, Ghost of Meter,  6–12).
a convenience, though an invaluable one”) that is at once “inherent in” the sounds
and rhythms of verses themselves and “ascribed to verses” by readers.28 Meter, as
Richards imagines it in a distorted echo of Omond, is
the skeleton upon which the reader casts flesh and clothing. . . . it gives both poet
and reader a firm support, a fixed point of orientation in the indefinitely vast world
of possible rhythms . . .29
This concept of metrical “orientation,” which explains a poem’s rhythm in terms of

a given line’s vacillation between “departures from and returns to the [poem’s pre-
vailing metrical] pattern,” is integral not only to Richards’s verse theory but also to
many mainstream twentieth-century prosodies.30 Sometimes articulated in terms
of “expectation-based tension” or “expressive variation,” it forms the bedrock of con-
ventional post-1900 Anglo-American metrics, though its roots reach back much
further, and it enjoyed “pedagogic perpetuation”31 throughout the twentieth cen-
tury, becoming, in some prosodists’ estimation, a hegemonic metrical doctrine.32
As Alan Holder observes, influential textbooks—for example, Cleanth Brooks and
Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry (1938) and Karl Shapiro and Robert
Beum’s A Prosody Handbook (1965), among others—followed Richards’s lead in
promoting a “compromise” between metrical pattern and rhythm, conceived of in
terms of “rhetorical variation.” Shapiro and Beum went so far as to set out a “right
way to read English verse,” which stressed the give and take between “a ‘natural’
reading in which one delivers the verse as if it were prose or ordinary speech, simply
observing conventional phrasing and logical emphases; and a metrical reading,”
which pays attention to “the general metrical pattern.”33
Probably the most enduring expression of the extent to which New Critics at
the mid-century espoused theories of metrical abstraction is an essay titled “The
Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction” (1959), by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe
C. Beardsley—scholars probably better known today for their collaborations on
the seminal essays “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy” from the
1954 book The Verbal Icon. Wimsatt and Beardsley shared Richards’s insistence
on limiting, on the one hand, arcanely scientific critiques of meter—New Critics
were quick to stress that literary criticism was not properly a branch of linguis-
tics, much less experimental rhythm science as practiced by psychologists—and,
on the other hand, overly subjective interpretations. Linguistics-based criticism
they deemed too “needlessly contrived,” and mechanically aided studies of meter—
they cite an “analysis of eight tape-recorded readings of a short poem by Robert
29 Richards, Practical Criticism, 218–19.
30 See also Cureton, Rhythmic Phrasing,  8–9.
31 Holder, Rethinking Meter, 23.
32 Finch, Ghost of Meter,  6–10.
33 Shapiro and Beum, A Prosody Handbook, 30.

Frost”—are rejected for focusing too much on “the stress-pitch-juncture elements

in spoken English” at the expense of “the normative fact of the poem’s meter.”
Where researchers such as Scripture had looked to empirically demonstrable facts
(the data of their kymographs), the New Critics invested the abstraction of meter
with its own inviolable factual status. A variety of Richards’s “orientating” metrics
was, for them too, a more productive way of thinking about meter. One didn’t need
to know the poet’s intentions when the “contract” of meter was evident in the poem
itself and acted as a guide against which to test interpretations of its rhythmical
modulations. Likewise, one couldn’t simply suggest wildly idiosyncratic rhythmical
readings, because the abstract pattern of meter was there to limit the extent of li-
cense possible. The abstraction of meter is the “truth” of the poem and authorizes
(or not) possible performances of it. As Wimsatt and Beardsley write,
Each performance of the poem is an actualization of it, and no doubt in the end
everything we say about the poem ought to be translatable into a statement about
an actual or possible performance of it. But not everything which is true of some
particular performance will be necessarily true of the poem. There are many
performances of the same poem—differing among themselves in many ways.
A performance is an event, but the poem itself, if there is any poem, must be some
kind of enduring object.34
Only the unchanging, abstract pattern of meter can underwrite the many pos-
sible performances, and form a basis for rhythmical interpretations. Meter, in
other words, is the structure that enables the poem to function. In a nod toward
Richards’s metrics of “orientation,” Wimsatt and Beardsley uphold the metrical
poem as “a public linguistic object, something that can be examined by various per-
sons, studied, disputed—univocally.”35
5. Conclusion
This chapter has attempted to offer a brief survey of some meditations on metrical
abstraction that have shaped the modern metrical imagination. Though there are
significant differences in practice and some disagreements on points of principle,
the variety of theories and approaches I’ve outlined share a desire to establish an
agreed starting point for the examination of poetic rhythms, and that starting point
is abstract meter. Even the laboratory scientists, who were in the end more interested
in the graphic realities of spoken rhythm (which they could measure), admitted that
there might be sense in acknowledging something immaterial and not measureable
going on as well. One curiosity that stands out to me, however, is that the resurgence
34 Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Concept of Meter,” 587.

of theories of abstraction in the twentieth century, though they have much in

common with the abstract grid of meter as theorized by Patmore and Omond,
resist their predecessors’ attempts to unite poetic meter with music, and their en-
dorsement of isochrony. While Wimsatt and Beardsley concede that musical scores
are similar to poetic meter in that both “are prescriptions, or directions, for per-
formance,” they are adamant that “they are different prescriptions.”36 Determining
a line’s time-notation is, similarly, “not scanning verse,” which involves attention
to linguistic, rather than musical, “facts.” “Scanning a line,” according to Wimsatt
and Beardsley, “is reading it in a special, more or less forced, way, to bring out the
meter and any definite deviations or substitutions.”37 The dominance of this view of
meter, so influential in classrooms during the twentieth century (when meter was
still a subject of study), means that, however Yeats intended for us to read “Adam’s
Curse” (and he may well have had in mind elements of the history I’ve sketched
here), we are likely to choose our own reading—and to appreciate what Beardsley
and Wimsatt term its “interplay” between meter and “speech-feeling” because that’s
what we’ve been taught to do. An awareness of the abstract meter that forms a blue-
print for Yeats’s lines will guide one’s reading but doesn’t wholly determine it. For
the New Critics, at least, the reader is in “a better position” to offer a rhythmically
“meaningful” reading if he or she “recognizes the meter.”38
Works Cited
Armstrong, Isobel, “Meter and Meaning,” in Jason David Hall, ed., Meter Matters: Verse Cultures
of the Long Nineteenth Century (Athens, OH, 2011), 26–52.
Bell, David Charles and Alexander Melville Bell, Bell’s Standard Elocutionist (London, 1878).
Bolton, Thaddeus L., “Rhythm,” The American Journal of Psychology, 6.2 (1894), 145–238.
Brooks, Cleanth and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry ([1938]; 4th edn,
New York, 1976).
Brown, Calvin S., “Can Musical Notation Help English Scansion?,” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism, 23.3 (1965), 329–34.
Bynum, W. F., Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1994).
Collins, Wilkie, Man and Wife, ed. Norman Page ([1870]; Oxford, 1995).
Cook, Albert S., “Prosody,” Review of Studies from the Yale Psychological Laboratory, ed. Edward
Wheeler Scripture, Modern Language Notes, 16.1 (1901), 27–9.
Cureton, Richard, Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse (London, 1992).
Dallas, E. S., Poetics: An Essay on Poetry (London, 1852).
Finch, Annie, The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse (Ann Arbor,
MI, 1993).
Golston, Michael, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (New York, 2008).
Gurney, Edmund, The Power of Sound ([1880]; New York, 1966).
Helmholtz, Hermann von, “On the Physiological Causes of Harmony in Music,” in Science and
Culture: Popular and Scientific Essays, tr. and ed. David Cahan ([1857]; Chicago, 1995), 46–75.

Helmholtz, Hermann von, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of
Music (1863; 3rd edn, 1870), tr. Alexander J. Ellis ([1875]; Cambridge, 2011).
Holdeman, David, The Cambridge Introduction to W. B. Yeats (Cambridge, 2006).
Holder, Alan, Rethinking Meter: A New Approach to the Verse Line (Cranbury, NJ, 1995).
Murray, Lindley, English Reader (New York, 1825).
Omond, T. S., The English Metrists: Being a Sketch of English Prosodical Criticism from Elizabethan
Times to the Present Day ([1906]; New York, 1968).
Patmore, Coventry, “Essay on English Metrical Law [1857]”: A Critical Edition with a Commentary,
ed. Mary Augustine Roth (Washington, DC, 1961).
Pinch, Adela, “Love Thinking,” Victorian Studies, 50.3 (2008), 379–97.
Richards, I. A., Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment ([1929]; New Brunswick, 2004).
Scripture, Edward Wheeler, Elements of Experimental Phonetics (New York, 1902).
Shapiro, Karl and Robert Beum, A Prosody Handbook (New York, 1965).
Taylor, Dennis, Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody with a Metrical Appendix of Hardy’s Stanza
Forms (Oxford, 1988).
Webster, Noah, An Improved Grammar of the English Language (New York, 1843).
Wimsatt, W. K. and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction,”
PMLA, 74.5 (1959), 585–98.
Yeats, W. B., William Butler Yeats: Selected Poems and Four Plays, ed. M. L. Rosenthal
(New York, 1996).
22
The Not-So-Silent Reading
What Does It Mean to Say that We Appreciate Rhythm in
Literature?
Rebecca Wallbank
What does it mean to say that we appreciate rhythm in literature? By raising this
question, my aim is two-fold: to shed light on our understanding of the ways we at-
tend to rhythm in literature, and to call for a re-evaluation of certain assumptions
concerning literary aesthetic experience and appreciation. My primary literary
focus here is on non-dramatic written narratives in forms such as novels, short
stories, and poems.1
By asking the main question at the heart of this chapter one is forced to address
a multitude of closely related concerns, including: What exactly is the nature of
rhythm in literature?; How and when do we appreciate rhythm in literature?; How
and when should we appreciate rhythm in literature?; What is the precise target
of this appreciation (literature or the rhythm itself)?; and finally: In what sense, if
indeed any, is the appreciation under scrutiny aesthetic? I do not aim to reply ex-
haustively to all five; I aim rather to use these questions to guide an analysis of our
attention to rhythm in literary aesthetic experiences.
Although some philosophers, including Peter Kivy, have discussed the sonic qual-
ities of literary works, John Holliday is one of the few contemporary commentators
to have explicitly discussed the rhythm of literature more specifically. His account
has explicit bearing on some of the above questions so, I shall start by assessing his
work.2 Next, I shall argue (against certain challenges) that the experience of rhythm
can be coherently described as a candidate for part of an aesthetic experience. I shall
nevertheless highlight that Holliday’s account cannot capture the full potential of
rhythm within literature, and I argue that he goes too far in ascribing a requirement
for literary rhythmic appreciation.
Let us begin by examining what rhythm in a literary work actually is.Holliday
argues that the rhythm of the literary work depends on consecutive sonic qualities,
1 By “non-dramatic” I do not rule out the argument that such works are ontologically performative by na-
ture; I simply restrict my focus away from scripted and improvised plays and toward rhythms of literature that
are primarily experienced through reading.
2 Holliday, “Hearing it Right: Rhythm and Reading,” Chapter 24 in this volume; Kivy, Performance of
Reading.
The Not-So-Silent Reading 363
as produced through the (appropriate) sounding of words.3 Here Holliday follows,

as do I, the general consensus that rhythm need not have a regular meter. Features of
the literary work such as punctuation, alliteration, stress, phrases and rests all serve
to create the rhythm; they alter the rhythmic pace and flow of the work and such
pace and flow need not pertain to a periodic (metric) pattern. Works of Virginia
Woolf offer perfect examples of the above used as rhythmic literary techniques.
Take the following passage from Mrs Dalloway:
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little
squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French
windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller
than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss
of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn,
feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was
about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off
them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said,
‘Musing among the vegetables’—was that it?—‘I prefer men to cauliflowers’—was
that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to
the terrace—Peter Walsh.4
Note here how Woolf uses asyndeton, the deliberate omission of conjunctions be-
tween a series of clauses; the use of parenthesis; and short clauses to quicken and
regulate the pace. The result is the creation of distinctive, non-metric rhythmic
patterns, which—as I will later argue in more detail—can shape the tone and mood
of the text, altering what might be called an aesthetic experience.
In accepting Holliday’s account so far as broadly correct, an interesting conse-
quence is that each literary work is a possible candidate for rhythmic apprecia-
tion. In which case a discussion of how we (should) appreciate rhythm in literature
becomes particularly pertinent.
In turning to these issues, we discern that the above example is of a novel which
is not often publicly performed or read aloud. Indeed, the assumption here is that
the rhythm of literary works can be equally attributed to literary works whether
or not they are read aloud. In which case one might be wondering where all the
rhythm is. What is postulated here is an internal, non-oral, auditory experience of
the sound of the words: a form of auditory mental imagery produced by a “sub-
vocalization” of the text.5 As captured by Peter Kivy and Barbara Herrnstein Smith
the act of “reading in one’s head,” or “silent reading,” need not be so silent.6 The kind
3 Note, as will become apparent, the term “sounding” here does not necessarily refer to a publicly audible
sound, measurable in decibels.
4 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 3.
5 Where, following current philosophical debate, “mental imagery” is not restricted to visual imagery, but is
also applicable to olfactory, tactile, and auditory experience (Nanay, “Imagination and Perception,” 125).
6 Smith, “Literature, as Performance,” 536; Kivy, Performance of Reading, 49.
of auditory-imagery described here is of the same kind as when we state that we

have a sub-vocal “song stuck in our heads,” or an internal monologue.
But we need to know more. When it does occur, how present is it, and should it
be, in our conscious attention?
Holliday only discusses consciously foregrounded auditory imagining, and
does so in performative and deliberative terms.7 For Holliday, foregrounded sub-
vocalization while reading is something that often should occur. To clarify, this
is meant as a fairly weak normative claim. He suggests that some works (such as
thrilling airport novels) might not be amenable to this kind of deliberative expe-
rience of rhythm (an issue to which we shall return), but nevertheless emphasizes
that the works which are amenable to this experience are particularly rewarding,
and these are works whose rhythms “require” and “deserve” attending to. Note that
deliberation, consideration, and reflection on choices pertaining to an appropriate
articulation of words is key, for Holliday, even if—as he later acknowledges—the
“reasons” that motivate one’s articulatory decisions might be unarticulated and
more implicitly felt.
In addressing this position, my first query concerns whether foregrounded, de-
liberative attention is the only means in which rhythm can feature in a rewarding
literary experience. My second is practical: if as Holiday argues, there is reason to
doubt that this kind of foregrounded experience is always rewarding and appro-
priate for certain novels, how are we, as readers, to know how to engage with each
work appropriately? What, if anything, are the signals and clues that we can pick
up as a reader? For Holliday, we should read certain texts in a certain deliberative
manner, with sub-vocalisations at the forefront of our attention. But if that is so,
then this practical question should be easy to answer. For surely it is unfair to say
that we should do something that is near impossible or very difficult to adequately
fulfil. My third query highlights the unusual nature of the idea that artworks “re-
quire” or “deserve” anything, surely strictly speaking this is something that is owed
to the artist or oneself. My final query concerns the nature of the aesthetic: where
does an “aesthetic” experience lie amongst all of this?
The view I shall defend is that: (a) it is true that one may have a foregrounded,
deliberative, and “considered” experience of rhythm in literature through an artic-
ulated sub-vocalization of words. I further want to allow that (b) when we do have
this experience it can serve as part of an aesthetic experience and appreciation of a
literary work. I will be operating on the assumption that the object of appreciation
in question is the literary work.
Nevertheless, I shall also stress the importance of allowing for (c): the role of
rhythmic sub-vocalization within our aesthetic experience and appreciation of
such works is not exhausted by the foregrounded way it has been captured in (a).
And, finally, I hold that (d), the work neither requires nor demands specific forms
of attention.
7 Holliday, “Hearing it Right.” See also Smith, “Literature, as Performance”; Kivy, Performance of Reading.
On first approaching (a) and (b), one may be struck with the thought that a de-
liberative, performative articulation of words whilst reading is not commonly
described as part of our literary experience, at least of many novels.
When reading such works, people rather more often describe being “immersed”
within the narratives and lives of the fictional characters, and this phenomenon
applies equally to thrilling page-turners and canonical texts. Consider the following
account from an unsigned review in Fraser’s Magazine (December 1849):
we took up Jane Eyre one winter’s evening, somewhat piqued at the extravagant
commendations we had heard, and sternly resolved to be as critical as Croker. But
as we read on we forgot both commendations and criticism, identified ourselves
with Jane in all her troubles, and finally married Mr Rochester about four in the
morning.8
The reviewer describes an immersive absorption in a literary narrative to such a

degree that self-identity is regarded as compromised. George Poulet similarly
states: “Whenever I read, I mentally pronounce an ‘I’, and yet the ‘I’ which I pro-
nounce is not myself.”9 Literary criticism is replete with such descriptions of imag-
inative and often empathetic engagement with fictional characters and events. The
kind of imaginative experience here pertains to visualization of the fictional world,
stimulating of other sensory faculties. Significantly, compared to such immersion,
one might find that a description of an intellectualized articulation of words with
the deliberate and considered intention of producing an eloquent sound-event
is not commonly captured as part of our reading experience, at least not of many
novels. Let us call this “the Observation.”10
As a first response to the Observation, one might worry that it is indicative
of something substantial about the nature of novels. Here one might take the
Observation to be the revealing consequence of a distinction between novels and
other literary art forms such as poetry. Indeed, in elaborating upon Jesse Prinz and
Erik Mandelbaum’s work one might argue that the deliberative attention to words,
and their articulation, is not only uncommon but also inappropriate for our lit-
erary experience of novels, whilst it is particularly appropriate for poetry. On this
line of thought it is only in reading poetry and not the novel that “words are sup-
posed to be primary objects of the reader’s attention.” Only when reading poetry in
which “words are intended to be noticed as objects unto themselves—they are no
longer mere vessels for delivering content but are an integral constituent in their
8 Allot, The Brontës, 152. Miriam Allot relates F. J. A. Hort’s suggestion that the reviewer is probably Hort’s
former tutor, the Shakespearean scholar W. G. Clark.
9 Poulet, “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority” (1966), quoted in Iser, “The Reading Process,” 297.
10 One might draw from the Observation in several ways. One approach, beyond the scope of this chapter
to discuss, combines the Observation with a further assumption, to conclude that novels as an artform are
particularly non-aesthetic. The assumption in question would be that a consideration of form and structure
serving the content is essential to aesthetic experience; since novels are not prevalently experienced in this
manner, but are rather experienced “for the story,” novels are therefore prevalently non-aesthetic.
own right.”11 The idea seems to be that while reading poetry one should attend to
the words themselves, and their articulation, but with novels we should look past
the text and the words to attend to their meaning, in the manner of the immersive
experience described above.
I will not dwell on this concern since I regard it to be a reductive over-estimation
of the role of “immersive” experience in reading novels, at the expense of
recognizing the importance (and indeed occurrence) of other kinds of literary ex-
perience. What I do want to focus on is the assumption within the above quotes that
words are sometimes not “noticed as objects unto themselves.”
If the claim is that when “immersed” in reading one becomes so fully absorbed
that one is no longer attentive to present surroundings or even the material of the
text which one is reading, it would entail that not only is the deliberative, reflective
attention to the words themselves a less common experience—as indicated by the
Observation—but more worryingly, it is in fact incompatible with our more com-
monly described, immersive, experience. Deliberative, intellectualized sounding
of words and the immersive experience would only be attended to in the manner
of a gestalt switch; one can attend to either one or the other but not both at the
same time. The foregrounded, deliberative act of sounding out words could then
be interpreted as a barrier to engaging with the work in this manner and vice versa.
If this is correct then how do we balance and learn where to switch between these
two kinds of experiences? Is one experience better than the other? Is one of these
experiences an aesthetic appreciation proper?
Different theorists suggest different answers. Clive Bell, for example, argues that
“Art transports us from a world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation . . .
we are lifted above the steam of life.” Similarly, Alan Goldman remarks how “when
we are so fully and satisfyingly involved in appreciating an artwork, we can be said
to lose our ordinary, practically oriented selves in the work.”12 Extrapolating from
such notions, one might worry that far from being a part of our literary aesthetic
appreciation—as held by (b)—a foregrounded, deliberative act of sounding out
words detracts from and undermines it.
On the other hand,many others emphasize that attention to the “how” of the
work—how its structure serves certain artistic affects—is a necessary feature
(among others) of our experience of aesthetic value in the work. Jerrold Levinson,
for example, argues that aesthetic experience requires attention to “its forms, quali-
ties and meanings for their own sake and to their interrelations, but also to the way
all such things emerge from [a]‌particular set of low-level perceptual features.”13
But in facing this apparent opposition, we should highlight that this is only an
opposition if we accept two things: first that there is only one kind of aesthetic expe-
rience of literary work; second, that we cannot have two incompatible experiences
11 Prinz and Mandelbaum, “Poetic Opacity,” 71–2.
12 Bell, Art, 27; Goldman, Aesthetic Value, 151.
13 Levinson, Pleasures of Aesthetics, 6.

(experiences which one cannot have simultaneously) which achieve one and the
same end (that of producing a rewarding overall aesthetic experience). Yet it is not
clear why we need to accept either of these, and I have not seen any arguments for
these. I therefore propose a diverse account upon which it is perfectly plausible to
say that one mode of attention can valuably undermine one kind of aesthetic expe-
rience of literature whilst enhancing another to produce a nonetheless rewarding
overall aesthetic experience.
Finally, in facing this apparent opposition, we should question whetherthis “fully
absorbed” experience ever does occur. Here one can maintain that when reading we
are always, to some degree, aware of the “two-fold” nature of literary experience: re-
flectively aware of both the literary text and the imaginative experience of the words
that they portray. Since these experiences admit of degrees of being foregrounded
in our attention, sometimes one will gain prevalence and sometimes the other. This
would not be to deny that at times a very foregrounded, deliberative act of sounding
out words can detract from the more immersive literary experience; it is again
rather to say that such a detraction is not necessarily experienced as a hindrance.
The structure of this account poses no problem to the plausibility of maintaining
(a) and (b). In light of the discussion of degrees of attention, I would like to turn to
my commitment (c).
In pursuit of (c), I argue that a non-foregrounded (sub-personal) experience
of rhythm can be part of our aesthetic appreciation of literature. The claim is not
that rhythm itself is an object of aesthetic experience. Yet even this minimal claim
is controversial, for it involves broadening the ways we attend to qualities in aes-
thetic experience. It also involves postulating non-conscious sensory-imaginative
experiences, a concept which, whilst accepted by those such as Bence Nanay, has
only recently started to be discussed in literature on the philosophy of imagination.14
Although it is hard to find consensus on the nature of an aesthetic experience,
most theorists operate on the simple assumption that we are consciously aware of
the object of appreciation:
I. Aesthetic experiences involve foregrounded, conscious attention to the

object of experience and its aesthetic qualities.
The expression “object of experience” does not simply connote things within a per-
ceptual field—a specific spatio-temporal object, landscape, or features of these—
but may also be non-perceptual, more cognitive, affective, or imaginative in nature.
“Aesthetic qualities” connotes features of the object of experience which fundamen-
tally shape our aesthetic experiences of it.15 For example, this might exclude the
frame of a painting, and perhaps cracks in the surface of the paint, whilst including
14 Nanay, “Imagination and Perception.”

15 The term is used to capture the possibility that rhythmic qualities may be either aesthetic or non-aesthetic
whilst either way they play a fundamental role in our aesthetic experience.
color composition, balance, expression and art-historical techniques. This assump-

tion may in fact be harmless in itself, but it can, at times, slip into the premise that:
I*. Aesthetic experience is a kind of foregrounded, conscious, attention to

the object of experience and its aesthetic qualities.
This subtle shift to I* is made to varying degrees, but can be seen in the work of
Jerome Stolnitz who describes aesthetic experience as so “rigorously object cen-
tered” that one can “miss nothing of the structural and physiognomic detail.”16
Similarly Eliseo Viva describes aesthetic experience as “an experience of rapt at-
tention which involves . . . apprehension of an object’s immanent meanings and
values in their full presentational immediacy.”17 The danger of I* is that two further
commitments may be assumed:
II If objects of experience are attended to in a non-foregrounded manner,

they cannot be aesthetically appreciated.
III If relevant qualities of objects are experienced in a non-foregrounded
manner, they cannot form part of our aesthetic appreciation.
Assumption III will be the prime focus here given that it would hereby eliminate
the possibility for a non-foregrounded feature of our experience (such as a non-
foregrounded experience of rhythm) to have a role in aesthetic experience. This
assumption relates to the idea that, as Robert Hopkins puts it, “aesthetically relevant
properties of a work are manifest to the sense, or senses appropriate to it.”18 Similarly,
Malcolm Budd holds that “for you to experience a work with full understanding,
your experience must be imbued with an awareness of (all) the . . . properties that
ground the attribution of artistic value” to it.19 Of course, whether anyone strictly
holds (III) will depend on what might be meant by terms such as “awareness” and
“attention.” An appeal to perceptual psychology can help here.
According to William James:
Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind in clear
and vivid form, of the use of what seem several simultaneous possible objects
for trains of thought . . . Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its
essence.20
On this apparently intuitive conception, attention structures consciousness

into the foreground and background. It is selective and contrastive; attention is
16 Stolnitz, “Artistic Values,” 15.
17 Vivas, “Contextualism Reconsidered,” 227.
18 Hopkins, “Aesthetics, Experience, and Discrimination,” 119.
19 Budd, Values of Art, 4.
20 James, Principles of Psychology,  403–4.

“consciousness concentrated”21 and “phenomenal salience.”22 That is to say, atten-

tion is toward that which is foregrounded in our consciousness. Some further argue
that attention as phenomenal salience is a form of voluntary agency, dependent
upon one’s will.23 Most significantly on all these accounts attention is seen as a mode
of consciousness: consciousness is necessary for attention, but attention is not nec-
essary for consciousness. Let’s call this the “intuitive” conception of attention.
Yet, empirical research challenges this intuitive conception.24 Studies relating to
inattentional blindness suggest that one cannot be conscious or aware of an object
without attending to it. One of the best known demonstrations of this is Daniel
Simons and Christopher Chabris’ 1999 study where participants were asked
to watch a short film and count the number of ball passes made between people
wearing white t-shirts.25 At some point in the film a man wearing a gorilla suit walks
from one end of the screen, lingers in the middle looking right at the camera, then
gives a little wave before walking off. A proportion of participants fail to notice the
gorilla. It is often concluded, though not universally, that they were not attentive to
the gorilla and so were not conscious of it.
Here, it is at least arguable that one cannot be conscious without attending; even if
one can be attentive without consciousness. Indeed empirical research concerning
blindsight patients and subliminal perception seems to show that one can have an
attentive experience of something of which one is not consciously aware. So, for
example, participants who are exposed to an image of a corn stalk that is too brief
to process consciously, when later asked to describe the word “stalk,” are far more
likely to describe it in relation to corn as opposed to the more common usage of the
term relating to the action of surreptitiously following somebody in an unrequited
manner.26 Interestingly these unconscious perceptual states can still prime us in
various ways and influence our actions and judgments.
These studies suggest that one can have multiple kinds of attentive experience, of
which conscious perception may be necessary for some kinds of attention but not
others.27 What has been submitted here is a more complex understanding of the
term “attention” than is commonly described. This has considerable implications
for my contention that we can have a non-foregrounded aesthetic experience of
rhythmic, auditory-imagery. Discussion of subliminal perception gives us the
21 Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics, 1: 238.

22 Wu, “What is Conscious Attention?”
23 e.g. Reid, The Active Powers, 61 (Essay 2, “Of the Will,” Ch. 3): “Every man knows that he can turn his at-
tention to this subject or to that, for a longer or shorter time . . . It is a voluntary act and depends on his will.”
See also Wu “What is Conscious Attention?”
24 De Brigard, “Attention and Commonsense”; Kentridge et al., “Spatial Attention”; Koch and Tsuchiya,
“Response to Mole.”
25 Simons and Chabris, “Gorillas in our Midst.”
26 Mack, “Perceptual Consciousness,” 577.
27 We can have focal and distributed attention; we can further have degrees of attention, higher or lower
attentional-load; our attention might be voluntary or involuntary; and it might be controlled by external
stimulus (exogenous) or internally controlled (endogenous). In relation to this it has been argued that whilst
the objects of high-load, focal, voluntary attention are consciously perceived, other objects or properties
of distributed, low-load attention may not be (Van Boxtel et al., “Consciousness and Attention”; Marchetti,
“Consciousness and Attention”).
conceptual resources to acknowledge a role for low-level, non-foregrounded,

and perhaps non-conscious attentive-imaginative experiences of rhythmic sub-
vocalizations.28 Indeed, I want to argue that there are non-foregrounded rhythmic
auditory experiences that similarly prime us in various ways. They prime the mood,
atmosphere, and flow of the text. Consider the following example from Silvia Plath,
The Bell Jar:
Doctor Gordon’s waiting room was hushed and beige. The walls were beige, and
the carpets were beige, and the upholstered chairs and sofas were beige. There
were no mirrors or pictures, only certificates from different medical schools, with
Doctor Gordon’s name in Latin, hung about the walls. Pale green loopy ferns and
spiked leaves of a much darker green filled the ceramic pots on the end-table and
the coffee-table and the magazine table.29
Here the technique of polysyndeton—the use of many conjunctions—adds to our

imaginative experience of the dull setting. In the first three lines the rhythm seems
particularly plodding. Other literary devices here trigger a sense of banality, notably
the repetition to the words “beige” and “green.” The rhythmic structure enhances
the mood of the text, and one does not have to attend in a self-aware, deliberative
manner to the rhythm, tone, and audible feel of these words for them to be part of
our aesthetic appreciation of the work.
An experience of something that is non-foregrounded in our attention is certainly
hard to pinpoint by example, but consider the following passage (author’s own):
He had arrived, exhausted and relieved. ‘Finally, I am home’, he said to himself,
and with a sigh stumbled to take his shoes off before collapsing for a well-earned
rest upon the sofa. He kicked up his feet and lay back, attempting to sink deeper
and deeper into the furniture’s softness. ‘Finally, I am home’, he repeated and noted
with surprise the seeping sound of anger and pain entering his voice. The sentence
had not been spat out, rather it was like the bitter whining of wounded animal.
He sat up, in attempt to collect himself and took one long deep breath. ‘Next time,
next time’, he said, pleasantly chuckling now as he leaned back, tilting his head and
smiling; ‘I will show no mercy’.
It strikes me that at certain points of this passage one would feel the need for pause,
to correct oneself and read again with different articulation, particularly the dia-
logue. Most interestingly, it is possible that the articulatory act was not foregrounded
in one’s attention until the conscious need for pause and correction; it is at such
moments that non-foregrounded, auditory-imagery becomes foregrounded. This
28 Mack, “Perceptual Consciousness”; Manson, “Consciousness and the Unconscious”; Tye, “Change
Blindness.”
29 Plath, The Bell Jar, 122.
experience of stopping to correct oneself is not overly frequent given that it is an ex-
perience that many authors tend to avoid; the fluent reader is often well prepared for
the manner in which one has to—often non-consciously—articulate a character’s
voice, and shift the rhythm and tone of a passage.
For these reasons, I argue that rhythmic auditory-imagery is prevalent within
one’s experience of literature, even if one is not attentive to it, and it can alter the
tone, tenor, and mood of an author’s writings in a non-voluntary, non-foregrounded
manner. Moreover, through altering these things, it can play a fundamental role in
how we experience the value of the literary work.
In drawing from all of this, let us turn now to (d). It seems that as a reader we
naturally find ourselves reading in a multitude of ways and here our modes of en-
gagement will be automatically guided by the text. But so far we have identified
no clear signals or clues that we can actively pinpoint which determine how we
should be attending to the text at any particular moment in time. Sometimes we
will be primed to focus primarily on form, othertimes we will be immersed in the
narrative or contemplating the social ramifications, othertimes our attention may
be scattered between these. But there seem to be no set or preordained moments
where we should switch between these. And to say that we should be reading in a
certain manner because an inanimate work deserves it adds unrealistic and unusual
pressure for the reader.
At most we can say that we find certain modes of reading particularly enjoyable,
and we might owe it to ourselves to maximize on this enjoyment. Or we might say
that as a matter of respect for the artist we should try to approach literature in a
frame of mind that is open to all the kinds of experiences that it can afford. And
so Holliday’s point can be seen as a valuable call for all readers to engage with the
text whilst acknowledging the often overlooked potential of literary rhythm. But
to require that we are successful for the sake of the work seems like a very strong
claim. Perhaps Holliday will be happy to bite this bullet, and simply argue that
artworks are an unusal kind of entity which although inanimate can still require
attention, loyalty, preservation, even love etc. But in which case Holliday needs to
say much more.
Let’s finally turn now to a different focus. In the above examples the literary
works themselves have been the objects of experience. I have argued that rhythm
can play a role whether it is foregrounded or non-foregrounded in our experience;
but one may ask: What about an appreciation of rhythm as an object of appreciation
in itself?
First, I want to emphasize that when a foregrounded appreciation of the rhythm
alone occurs, this is rare; it is not often that we turn to literature for pure rhythmic
appreciation. As seen in discussion of the passage from The Bell Jar, we often ap-
preciate the role of rhythm in terms of it’s instrumental value, among other literary
devices, for the role it serves in enhancing the literary work. Moreover, even if we
appreciate a rhythm’s buoyancy or joviality itself, this would often be made in con-
nection to other sonic qualities, such as the pitch, timbre, and melody of the words.
For example, we may appreciate how the harsh jarring and dissonant-sounding
words have been used to create a disconcerting atmosphere, or how the repeated
sibilance might soften and slow the mood down. In such cases, rhythm is not doing
all the work; it is rarely as valuable in isolation within a literary context.
Further, in relation to whether the object of appreciation—rhythm—can it-
self be appreciated in a non-foregrounded way, I want to emphasize that, just as it
would sound strange to say “I have aesthetically appreciated this painting, sculp-
ture, or architectural building itself, but I have never noticed it,” it would sound
equally strange to say “I have aesthetically appreciated the rhythm itself, but I have
never noticed it.” However, for the purposes of this chapter I would like to leave that
particular question open, whilst I defend the claim that it can plausibly feature as
part of our aesthetic appreciation when it itself is not the sole or primary object.30
Through pursuing this, I have shed light on the ways we experience and appreciate
rhythm in literature, and have also called into question various assumptions con-
cerning literary aesthetic experiences, their compatibility, and the various ways we
might attend to them.
Works Cited
Allot, Miriam, ed., The Brontës: The Critical Heritage (London, 1974).
Bell, Clive, Art (London, 1914).
Budd, Malcolm, Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music (London, 1995).
De Brigard, Felipe, “Consciousness, Attention and Commonsense,” Journal of Consciousness
Studies, 17.9–10 (2010), 189–201.
Goldman, Alan H., Aesthetic Value (Boulder, 1995).
Goldman, Alan H., “The Experiential Account of Aesthetic Value,” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism, 64.3 (2006), 333–42.
Hamilton, William, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, vol. 1 (of 4), ed. H. L. Mansel and John
Veitch (Edinburgh, 1859).
Holliday, John, “Hearing it Right: Rhythm and Reading,” in Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and
Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (Oxford, 2019), C24.
Hopkins, Robert, “Aesthetics, Experience, and Discrimination,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 63.2 (2005), 119–33.
Iser, Wolfgang, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” New Literary History, 3.2
(1972), 279–99.
James, William, The Principles of Psychology ([1890]; Cambridge, MA, 1981).
Kentridge, R. W., L. H. de-Wit, and C. A. Heywood, “What is Attended in Spatial Attention?,”
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15.4 (2008), 105–11.
Kivy, Peter, The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature (Oxford, 2006).
Koch, Christof and Naotsugu Tsuchiya, “Response to Mole: Subjects Can Attend to Completely
Invisible Objects,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12.2 (2008), 44–5.
Levinson, Jerrold, The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Ithaca, 1996).
Mack, Arien, “Perceptual Consciousness and Attention,” in Harold Pashler, ed., Encyclopedia of
the Mind, vol. 2 (London, 2009), 577–9.
Manson, Neil C., “Consciousness and the Unconscious,” in Harold Pashler, ed., Encyclopedia of
the Mind, vol. 1 (London, 2009), 199–202.
30 Many thanks to Elisabeth Schellekens and Andy Hamilton for their helpful comments.
Marchetti, Giorgiom “Against the View that Consciousness and Attention are Fully Dissociable,”
Frontiers in Psychology, 3.36 (2012): doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00036.
Nanay, Bence, “Imagination and Perception,” in Amy Kind, ed., The Routledge Handbook of
Philosophy of Imagination (London, 2016).
Plath, Slyvia, The Bell Jar ([1963]; London, 2005).
Prinz, Jesse and Eric Mandelbaum, “Poetic Opacity: How to Paint Things with Words,” in John
Gibson, ed., The Philosophy of Poetry (Oxford, 2015).
Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Active Powers in Man, ed. Knud Haakonsen and James A. Harris
([1788]; Edinburgh, 2010).
Simons, Daniel J. and Christopher F. Chabris, “Gorillas in our Midst: Sustained Inattentional
Blindness for Dynamic Events,” Perception, 28 (1999), 1059–74.
Smith, Barbara Hernstein, “Literature, as Performance, Fiction and Art,” Journal of Philosophy,
67.16 (1970), 553–63.
Stecker, Robert, “Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Value,” Philosophy Compass, 1.1
(2006),  1–10.
Stolnitz, Jerome, “The Artistic Values in Aesthetic Experience,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 32.1 (1973), 5–15.
Tye, Michael, “Attention, Seeing, and Change Blindness,” Philosophical Issues, 20.1 (2010), 410–37.
Van Boxtel, Jeroen J. A., Naotsugu Tsuchiya, and Christof Koch, “Consciousness and
Attention: On Sufficiency and Necessity,” Frontiers in Psychology, 1 (2010), 217: doi.org/
10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00217.
Vivas, Eliseo, “Contextualism Reconsidered,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 18.2
(1959), 222–40.
Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway ([1925]; Oxford, 2008).
Wu, Wayne, “What is Conscious Attention?,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 82.1
(2011), 93–120.
23
Leaving It Out
Rhythm and Short Form in the Modernist Poetic Tradition
Will Montgomery
But most by Numbers judge a Poet’s Song,

And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong
Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” 1711
As Alexander Pope suggested in 1711, poetry is, for many, a numbers game.1
Rhythm has typically been measured through patterns of stress in lines of a de-
terminate number of syllables. The dominant meter of anglophone verse from the
Renaissance until the arrival of modernism in the 1910s was iambic pentameter—
a line composed of five two-syllable feet, each with a weak–strong stress pattern.2
This line is the vehicle of Shakespearean drama, the Renaissance sonnet, Paradise
Lost, and The Prelude. When the English literary critic George Saintsbury published
the first volume of his monumental A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth
Century to the Present Day in 1908, he remained convinced that the juxtaposition
of stressed and unstressed sound values “constitutes what most people call po-
etry, and what all who use the terms call rhythmical and metrical writing.”3 There
were alternatives to iambic pentameter—shorter lines, different stress patterns—
but poetry has, for most of English literary history, generally been held to be not
only loosely rhythmic (like spoken English itself), but metrical (rhythmic in a
consistent pattern). Deviations from this ideal metrical pattern within specific
lines were common, and often corresponded to moments of heightened intensity.
1 Pope himself is skeptical about rigid systems: “Those rules of old discovered, not devised, | Are nature still
but nature methodized; | Nature, like liberty, is but restrained | By the same laws that first herself ordained”
(“Essay on Criticism,” 21).
2 The foot is a basic unit of prosody. Each line in metrical verse can be divided into smaller rhythmic units
that function independently of word boundaries and punctuation. A regular iambic pentameter line, for ex-
ample, contains five two-syllable feet, each containing an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
3 Saintsbury, History of English Prosody, 4.
Rhythm and Short Form in the Modernist Poetic Tradition 375
However, the ideal remained a guiding template. An elaborate terminology based

on the prosody of ancient Greek and Latin verse was developed, and is still taught
to students in more traditional institutions. It includes terms such as spondee, tro-
chee, dactyl, and anapaest, which are rarely used in the articles written by the pro-
fessional academic critics who feel compelled to teach scansion to undergraduates.4
In 1908 and 1909, T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, and others were meeting in London to
develop a new form of poetry that would acknowledge the development of vers libre
in nineteenth-century France and of East Asian models such as haiku. However,
it wasn’t until the arrival of the young American expatriate Ezra Pound that mod-
ernist poetics took shape.5 From 1913 and the appearance of what Pound called
“imagisme” in British and American magazines, it would no longer be possible to
write with Saintsbury’s assurance, for the rhythm of anglophone poetry was now
entirely reconceived. I will discuss this development, not through such long-form
modernist monuments as Ezra Pound’s Cantos or T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, but
through the short-form techniques with which anglophone poetic modernism
began. My focus will be on a Poundian line of influence, with particular emphasis on
the writing of the American poet Robert Creeley, whose ideas of measure within a
poetic architecture predicated on effects of compression communicate a profoundly
modern sense of rhythm. While his verse is not “musical” in the tightly patterned
sense of balladry, his precise and economical use of language encourages rhythmic
innovations comparable to those of twentieth-century musical pioneers such as the
composer Anton Webern or the bebop drummer Max Roach. The discontinuities,
rhythmic and otherwise, of modernist poetry are amplified in short-form writing.
So, in what follows, I argue that brevity and ellipsis are integral to a modernism that
is best approached through Basil Bunting’s formula “Dichten = condensare” (to po-
etize is to condense), cited in Pound’s ABC of Reading as “Mr. Bunting’s discovery,”
made while “fumbling about with a German–Italian dictionary,” though the idea is
“far from new.”6
Poetry grows out of a lyric tradition that has never quite laid the ghost of song.
While we do not typically pay any attention to the rhythms that animate ordinary
English prose or speech, poetry provides a space in which linguistic rhythms can
make themselves felt. Such writing need not be metrical for rhythm to emerge.
Meter, the precise organization of the poetic line within successive stanzas, is a way
of regularizing the irregular but nonetheless rhythmic patterning of the spoken lan-
guage. Rhythm itself is a less fixed concept, and can vary with idiom, register, or per-
formance, or by following guidance offered by the layout of the printed text—line
4 There have, nonetheless, been attempts to rethink poetic rhythm and meter: e.g. Cureton, Rhythmic
Phrasing in English Verse. Cureton, “Analysis” is an exhaustive account of William Carlos Williams’ “To a
Solitary Disciple.” (Thinking Verse is the most vibrant forum for the discussion of contemporary anglophone
prosody: see http://www.thinkingverse.org/.) See also Attridge, Rhythms of English Poetry and Poetic Rhythm;
and Attridge and Carper, Meter and Meaning.
5 For a contemporaneous account of events, see Flint, “History of Imagism,” 70–1.
6 Pound, ABC of Reading, 36, 92, 97. Pound, 97, credits two prose-writers, Stendhal and Flaubert, with pio-
neering a mode of writing that privileged “clarity” above “poetic ornament.”
and stanza breaks, for example. For many early modernist poets, the rhythmic axis
of poetry is found in an expressive relationship to literary form that can (partially)
dispense with the stricter demands of meter.
Pound wrote extensively on poetic form. He was the theorist and propagandist
who facilitated imagism as a poetic movement; the editor whose enthusiastic cut-
ting made his friend T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land the poem it is; and the ferocious
advocate of non-English verse who opened anglophone culture to influences in-
cluding classical Oriental, and medieval Provençal and Italian poetry.
For Pound, who favored poetry’s acoustic properties over its more reasoned, dis-
cursive ones, rhythm was an essential expressive force. However, it urgently needed
rescuing from what he called the “ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum” of iambic pen-
tameter.7 In one of his early imagist statements, he stipulates to the poet:
As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in se-
quence of a metronome.8
Looking back years later, he would write, “To break the pentameter, that was the
first heave.”9
Although there were notable pre-modernist exponents of free verse in English—
the translators of the Psalms for the King James Version of the Bible, Christopher
Smart, William Blake, Walt Whitman—it was Pound’s dynamism and vision that
put the vers libre techniques of imagism on the poetic map.10 Pound was committed
to a fundamentally musical model of poetic language. However, he often wrote his
critical prose in haste, and his remarks on musicality and the primacy of sound in
poetry resist systemization. What does it really mean, for example, to “compose in
the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome”? Or to sug-
gest, as he did in his “Treatise on Metre,” that melody is rhythm:
A melody is a rhythm in which the pitch of each element is fixed by the composer.
(Pitch: the number of vibrations per second.)?11
Such questions are difficult to articulate clearly, partly because Pound’s references
to “music” often meant a commitment to the non-discursive dimensions of lan-
guage. Nonetheless, Pound was instrumental in developing expanded conceptions
of rhythm and musicality. In poetic language, for him, “words are charged, over and
above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing

8 Pound, “A Retrospect,” 3.
9 Pound, The Cantos, 518.
10 Vers libre was a late nineteenth-century French critical coinage. For the importance of T. E. Hulme and
F. S. Flint in preparing the way for imagism before Pound’s arrival in London, see Carr, Verse Revolutionaries.
11 Pound, ABC of Reading, 199. Moody, Ezra Pound, 23, notes that the Pound–Antheil version of Pound’s
opera Le Testament de Villon uses such complex micro-rhythms that it is almost unplayable. Pound devel-
oped a radical musical theory grounded in subsonic bass tones that he entitled the “Great Bass” (Moody, Ezra
Pound, 217–28).
or trend of that meaning.”12 The finely tuned acoustic sensibility of the poet adds
an additional aesthetic layer to language, which complicates or enriches the com-
munication of meaning. Writing of this element of musical excess, David Ayers
comments,
Pound does not merely celebrate the melliﬂuousness of wonderful-sounding

poetry—far from it. His notion is that the sound of verse corresponds to a certain
type of meaning quite as deﬁnitely as does its semantic content.13
Clearly, then, Pound was at pains to distance himself from traditional prosody.
Poetry, he insists, is “an art WITH LAWS,” but “they are not laws to be learnt by rule
of thumb.”14 The law is thus immanent, not external, to the artwork, remade by each
artist, for each particular occasion. Moreover, poems needed to be seen as systems
comprising many inter-related elements: Pound defined prosody as “the articula-
tion of the total sound of a poem.”15 Any rule, any poetic system, will sooner or later
be co-opted by the dead hand of the institution (“professorial documentation or
the aspiring thesis on prosody”).16 Rhythm, therefore, must be a subjectively deter-
mined feature operating within the acoustic economy of the poem. In his “Treatise
on Meter” (the title is ironical) Pound dismisses academic prosody:
you learn painting by eye, not by algebra. Prosody and melody are attained by the
listening ear, not by an index of nomenclatures, or by learning that such and such
a foot is called spondee.17
Pound believed that the “listening ear” would allow an appropriate pattern of
stresses to emerge in relation to vowel and consonant sounds and meanings.
Rhythm emerges in configurations determined by the particular personal, his-
torical, and literary consciousness of the poet. Meter is not to be viewed as a hidden
machine whirring in the background, part of a commonly held stock of off-the-peg
alternatives. In “A Retrospect” Pound argues as follows:
I believe in an ‘absolute rhythm,’ a rhythm, that is, in poetry which corresponds

exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed. A man’s rhythm
must be interpretative, it will be, therefore, in the end, his own, uncounterfeiting,
uncounterfeitable.18
12 Pound, “How to Read,” 25, defining “Melopœia.”

13 David Ayers, Modernism, 6. Pound, “Affirmations,” 377, argues that energy can find artistic expression in
three ways: in pure form (painting or sculpture); pure sound (music); and through the image, which “may find
adequate expression in words.” Rhythm may bolster the communication of energy in words, but it should not
be too regular.
15 Pound, “T. S. Eliot,” 421. The remark is a footnote added in 1940 to a review of Prufrock and Other
Observations published in The Egoist in 1917.
18 Pound, “A Retrospect,” 9.
In this view, the rhythmic axis of poetry is an index of both originality and authen-
ticity. This is a position that, variously inflected, would become enormously influ-
ential on twentieth-century poetry, informing the thinking of such diverse writers
as William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Allen Ginsberg. This highly subjec-
tive mode led in the work of Charles Olson to a privileging of the poet’s breath—a
bodily experience that could only be felt by Olson himself. In Ginsberg’s version,
spontaneity and immediacy were markers of “uncounterfeitable” authenticity.
It is important to note at this point, however, that for none of the key figures of
early modernist poetry did free verse mean the wholesale abandonment of rhythm.
Eliot, for example, argued in 1917 that meter and the deviation from it were both
implicated in the best poetry: “It is [the] contrast between fixity and flux, [the] un-
perceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.”19 Williams, from a
more social and demotic perspective, viewed “measure” as a means of reflecting
rhythmic qualities intrinsic to everyday American speech. He argued, with a far
less individualistic emphasis than Pound’s, for a poetry that “will be commensu-
rate with the social, economic world in which we are living as contrasted with the
past.”20 In Pound’s own view, free verse was a broad and endlessly flexible category,
opening up a spectrum of rhythmic possibility that ranged from “heavily accented”
rhythms to highly “tenuous and imperceptible” ones. What was to be avoided in the
composition of poetry was “carelessness.”21 As early as 1918, he was warning that
vers libre could be as “verbose” or “flaccid” as more formal verse.22
Yet, for Pound, there were circumstances for which only free verse would do:
one should write vers libre only when one ‘must’, that is to say, only when the
‘thing’ builds up a rhythm more beautiful than that of set meters, or more real,
more a part of the emotion of the ‘thing’, more germane, intimate, interpretative
than the measure of regular accentual verse; a rhythm which discontents one with
set iambic or set anapaestic.23
These century-old developments in modernist poetics allow us to view the rhythmic

movement of a poem as dependent on its occasion. It cannot be reduced to an ab-
stract grid, a march of numbers. It is grounded in the interplay of stress and syllable
sounds—quantitative and qualitative apprehended at once—and intricately bound
up with line-length, syntax, and stanza form.
The imagist moment was short-lived: Pound quit the movement in 1915, only two
years after he had caused his friend H. D.’s poems to be published in Poetry magazine
under the name “H. D., imagiste.”24 Although the movement continued under the
19 Eliot, “Vers Libre,” 33.

20 Williams, “The Poem,” 283.
21 Pound, ABC of Reading,  12–13.
24 H. D.’s poems were published in the January 1913 issue of Poetry. Two brief prose texts by Pound on im-
agism appeared in the March issue, and Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro” in the April issue.
stewardship of Amy Lowell, it was an old friend of Pound, William Carlos Williams,
who in the 1920s and 1930s would develop the short-form mode of imagism into a
powerful spare style that was governed by a commitment to “measure.”25
When Williams, introducing his 1944 volume The Wedge, writes of the poem as
“a machine made of words,” he is referring to an ideal economy of movement:
When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no
part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.26
Williams’ writing is clearly marked by the Poundian drive toward economy and
condensation. However, Williams had little time for Pound and Eliot’s interest in
classical antiquity. While he was inspired by developments in the artistic avant-
garde such as Cubism and Dada, he sought in his poetry to capture the dynamism
of a colloquial American English. Asked where this speech came from, he replied
“From the mouths of Polish mothers.”27 And, in his long poem Paterson (1963):
We poets have to talk in a language that is not English. It is the American idiom.
Rhythmically it is organized as a sample of the American idiom. It has as much
originality as jazz . . . Anything is good material for poetry. Anything.28
His repeated claim “No ideas but in things” continued Pound’s commitment to a
poetry that was neither discursive nor abstract—in other words, poetry that had a
distinct and privileged cognitive status, that could not be reduced to paraphrase in
prose. Williams’ compact dictum “the poet thinks with his poem” made the point
that the valuable intellectual labor of a poem lay within the literary text itself, and
was not external to it.29 Poetic language could enframe a self-sufficient intellectual
project on its own terms, and need not be seen as a merely ornamental aesthetic ob-
ject.30 All this has clear implications for rhythm, as Williams’ espousal of measure
comes to mean a poetry that is capacious enough to get the measure of the culture
from which it emerges.31
Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow,” poem XII of his epochal, anti-Eliotic Spring and
All (1923; the title added in subsequent editions), is a manifesto-like anti-poem be-
cause it apparently confines itself to bald statement, eschewing the lyrical, expres-
sive, ornamental qualities commonly held to constitute the “poetic”:
25 A Williams poem appeared in the first anthology of imagist poetry, Des Imagistes, which was edited by
Pound and published in 1914.
26 Williams, Collected Poems, 2: 54.
27 Williams, Paterson, 311. Williams’ mother was Puerto Rican.
28 Williams, Paterson, 225.
29 Williams, Paterson, iii. Creeley, Collected Essays, passim, cites this precept.
30 Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, credits Wordsworth with inaugurating a new way of thinking in
poetic language.
31 In his later writing, Williams developed a flexible three-line stanza form that he called the “variable foot.”
However, his writings on it are not systematic and it is generally seen as a form of structured free verse.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.32
There is an obdurate facticity to these lines. Interpretation may be flung at them: one

can talk about artifice and nature; perceptual immediacy; effects of color; typo-
graphical mimesis of the wheelbarrow; or the suspense created by the first stanza’s
“depends,” for example. But the most powerful effect is achieved by the very thisness
of the poem. It is sufficient to itself as a statement of a perception. Yet that percep-
tion is not immediate, as it is framed by the opening “So much | depends,” which
gestures at a host of unstated complications that attend the expression of phenom-
enal experience.
The meaning-bearing potential of form is intensified by such compression. To
relineate “A Red Wheelbarrow” might leave us with “so much depends upon a
red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens” or, in another
construction,
so much depends
upon a red wheelbarrow
glazed with rainwater

beside the white chickens.
Each of these examples produces a quite different effect to that achieved by the
poem as published. Applying scansion to these lines does not get the reader far. Yet,
the lines have a rhythmic quality that is experienced in a quite different way to ordi-
nary speech. This expanded sense of rhythm derives not from meter as conceived in
traditional prosody, but from the interplay between the distinct units of which the
poem is composed: phrase, sentence, line, stanza, and whole.33
With such poetry, it is clear that the linear, quantitative meter of conventional
prosody has little to say. Rhythm makes itself felt in modernist poetry through
32 Williams, Collected Poems, 1: 224.

33 In an early unpublished essay, “Speech Rhythm” (1913), cited in Weaver, William Carlos Williams,
Williams argues that all the constituent parts of the poem function together as “an assembly of tides, waves
and ripples” that partake “of the essential nature of the whole” (82).
breaks in sequence—through rupture. In Pound’s words, “Rhythm is a form cut into

TIME.”34 The short-form writing of poets such Williams and Creeley emphasizes the
disjunctive qualities of that “cut.” Instead of the regular pulse of the iambic foot—an
echo of the heartbeat, of dance or the ballad—rhythm makes itself felt through ab-
sence and truncation. Moreover, in their writing, rhythm can no longer be thought
of separately from other effects. If “the poet thinks with his poem” then there is no
distance between thought and its vehicle. Rhythm, in this view, is integral to the
overall effect of the poem, not an accompanying drum-beat. Thought is held not to
be external to language, as if the same conceptual content could be communicated
with different words. Williams was an admirer of Gertrude Stein, whose pains-
taking differential shifts laid bare the significance of minute alterations to a phrase.
Such writing stresses language as a shaping medium rather than a neutral vehicle.
If thought happens in language rather than being translated into language, the
rhythmic shape of the utterance will be part of that thought. Poetry can allow an
exploration of the meaning-bearing properties of the rhythmic and acoustic axes of
language, as well as such print-culture phenomena as the mise-en-page.
The most significant postwar follower of the Dichten = condensare Pound–
Williams line (as distinct from the mandarin pessimism of Eliot or the last-gasp
romanticism in Stevens), was Robert Creeley, whose volume For Love was written
in the 1950s. It was Pound’s example that led Creeley to his preoccupation with the
acoustic dimension of poetry. He tells one interviewer,
I guess if I needed to choose one precept that most served my senses of poetry over
the years, it would be Pound’s injunction: ‘Listen to the sound it makes!’35
In the same interview he remarks, “For my company, one rule of thumb was Pound’s
proposal of melopoiea, phanopoeia, and logopoeia—and the melos or melody of
poetry has occupied me much over the years.”36
The critic Tom Jones, discussing violence and measure in Creeley’s poem
“The Hole,” draws attention to the relationship between meaning and the overall
rhythmic movement of the poem:
The poem’s lineation, its promotion of unmarked parts of speech by means of their
position in lines, the shifting of syntax within one phrase, the threat posed by the
blank page to the short lines: these rhythmic features are not operating against the
symbolic import of the poem, but in ensemble with it.37
34 Pound, ABC of Reading, 198, 202.

35 Creeley and Kane, What Is Poetry, 64, quoting Pound, “Treatise on Metre,” 201.
36 Creeley and Kane, What Is Poetry, 61. To summarize brutally, the three Poundian categories refer to
the sonic, visual, and verbal capacities of the poem. By “company,” we can take Creeley to mean such
contemporaries as Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, both of whom are associated with the Black Mountain
school of poetry. Creeley maintained a prodigious correspondence with Olson.
37 Jones, Poetic Language, 212.
In the modernist tradition in which Creeley played such a prominent part, rhythm
is expanded from its metrical, temporal sense to encompass spatial and syntactical
effects. This is poetry that is attentive to the mechanics of typewriting and to the
movement of the reading eye down the page. It considers how a thought is formed
by syntax. And, scrupulously aware of the power of condensation, it pays great at-
tention to the many breaks within discontinuous systems that are contained in
the poem.
Creeley cites approvingly Pound’s phrase “the articulation of the total sound of
a poem.”38 This total effect encompasses the shifting relationships between sense,
sound, rhythm, phrase, line, sentence, stanza, and the line break. All these effects
are typically deployed in Creeley’s writing in irregular, unpredictable ways, com-
bining to produce an unstable poetic melos. Creeley’s use of short form allows for
an intensification of the principle of discontinuity: a rhythmic environment that
is marked by repeated breaks, and that is loosely analogous to developments in
rhythm in certain twentieth-century musical environments.
While Creeley’s interest in the rhythmic uncertainty of bebop is well known, in
his interview with Kane, Creeley opens up less familiar musical analogies, each of
which is significant:
[Satie’s] ‘loops’ were fascinating to me, as were Anton Webern’s ‘reductions’—i.e.,

his interest in duration and structure—the question of how long a composition
had to be to work as such. Music and poetry have the obvious parallel of being
forms cut in time, of being serial patterns, consisting of sounds and rhythms in
relation to time.39
Satiesque repetition and Webernian concentration are distinctly rhythmic methods

of working with the resources of duration and structure. Creeley transposes the
work of condensation in the imagist moment from the instantaneous and visual
to the temporal and sonic, using repetition, abrupt concision, and rhythmic insta-
bility. Compression is felt less as an instantaneous effect than as an irregular pattern
of suggestion, implication, and withdrawal.
To describe the total effect he achieves, Creeley adopts Williams’ term “measure.”
The poet is no longer a craftsperson shaping linguistic material. Instead articula-
tion and being articulated are, he argues, combined in ways that exceed conscious
control:
I am deeply interested in the act of such measure, and I feel it to involve much more
than an academic sense of metric. There can no longer be a significant discus-
sion of the meter of a poem in relation to iambs and like terms because linguistics
38 Creeley, “Poems are a Complex,” 489.
39 Creeley and Kane, What Is Poetry, 62.

has offered a much more detailed and sensitive register of this part of a poem’s
activity. . . .
I want to give witness not to the thought of myself—that specious concept
of identity—but, rather, to what I am as simple agency, a thing evidently alive
by virtue of such activity. I want, as Charles Olson says, to come into the world.
Measure, then, is my testament. What uses me is what I use and in that complex
measure is the issue. I cannot cut down trees with my bare hand, which is measure
of both tree and hand. In that way I feel that poetry, in the very subtlety of its re-
lation to image and rhythm, offers an intensely various record of such facts. It is
equally one of them.40
With “what uses me is what I use,” Creeley envisages the poet as both linguistic re-
ceptor and shaper. Measure is understood an aestheticized form of language use
that spans both public and private. It is not amenable to the metrical grid because
what is “measured,” whether individually or collectively, is too various to reduce to
an on-off pattern of stress. The individual’s social being is necessarily imprinted in
measure, which captures the local variations of a language that is understood to be
always somehow rhythmic. A fundamentally Romantic experience of poetic self-
hood persists in Pound’s sensitized “listening ear,” which implies a reliance on the
discriminations of the expressive individual. In Creeley’s view the poet’s role is far
less elevated: there is “simple agency.” This bare existence in the world, formed by
and forming language, needs to be tracked on the page. This is a distinct advance
on Pound’s cultivated but ultimately hieratic ear: Creeley, through Williams, arrives
at a much more social understanding of the poet’s embeddedness in the linguistic
collective.
Yet elsewhere Creeley seeks to mark the distance between himself and Williams.
In his review of Williams’ Selected Essays, Creeley praises Williams’ poem “The
World Narrowed to a Point,” singling out the play of variation in the second stanza.
However, he also attacks Williams’ idea of measure on the grounds that any use of
the term will lead the poet to a generalized metrics of pattern:
So, then, what does it all come to . . . ‘measure,’ bitterly enough, has most usually
been that means by which lesser men made patterns from the work of better—so
to perpetuate their own failure. . . .
It all goes around and around. That I suppose would hold as true of the world as
anything else would. Let’s measure that?41
In 1954, Creeley wrote to Williams about this review. He is keen, again, to reject a
rigid notion of measure as a governing feature of poetic composition. Creeley cites
Thomas Campion’s “Kind are her Answers,” remarking,
40 Creeley, “Sense of Measure,” 487–8.
41 Creeley, “William Carlos Williams,” 39.

I don’t think one could ‘measure’ it, to begin with—nor granted some ‘flexible’
system might allow that, for what purpose? The ‘length’ of anything is such a
variable—and doesn’t it too involve us in all this horror of time.42
Creeley thus construes “measure” as a means of registering the experience of the poet
as a social being—to this extent, Williams’ ideas hold good. However, the term itself
is burdensome because of its long poetic history and its tendency to reduce poems to
number. Poetry should—like the intensive repetition of Satie, the austere ellipsis of
Webern, or the supple accents of Max Roach—be a means of reconceiving the vari-
ousness of the human experience of temporality, not an art form locked to a pattern.
II
In the remainder of this chapter I use some examples from Creeley’s work to il-
lustrate my thesis, first that poetic rhythm is integral to the thinking that a poem
performs, and second that short-form poetry offers particularly powerful examples
of the rhythmic potential of modernist disjunction. His first major collection
For Love, written during the 1950s, amply illustrates a specific understanding
of rhythm’s role in the overall architecture of the poem. In much of this writing,
the foreshortened quality of the lines and the frequent uncertainties about the
relationships between the component parts of the poem bring a distinctive kind
of movement to it. Evenness of flow was a sine qua non of traditional prosody, not-
withstanding significant departures from the underlying grid. In Creeley’s poetry,
it is hard to detect any kind of metrical pattern. Although there are, particularly
in the early work, gestures at older forms and some pointed archaisms, the po-
etry achieves its rhythmic effects through a particularly disjunctive application of
Pound’s “form cut into TIME.” The forward movement of spoken language in time
is set in a relationship with the typographical and syntactical marks of uncertainty
in the writing.43 Sentences are broken across several lines. The relationship between
the groups of words on separate lines is unclear. Sometimes such clusters of words
seem to run across lines, sometimes the line groups coincide with actual phrases,
sometimes both are possible.
Creeley’s broken utterances attempt to follow discontinuous cognitive processes.
Sound is central to the unfolding of these processes, throwing up trains of similarity
and dissonance that work across the patterns of syntax and sense-making. In “After
Mallarmé,” from For Love, a stone is the object of contemplation—a particularly
bald presentation of the post-Romantic poet encountering the natural world.
Stone,
like stillness
42 Creeley, Letters, 134.
43 When reading his work aloud, Creeley adopted a hesitant style that emphasized the crisis of the line break.
around you my
mind sits, it is
a proper form
for it, like
stone, like
compression itself,
fixed fast,
grey,
without a sound.44
The poem is a sharply drawn example of the Creeleyesque condensare poem. The
gray stone comes to seem like the brain that contemplates it and forms words around
it. The successive likes set up a pared-down series of analogies: the mind is like still-
ness; the stillness is like stone; and stillness is like “compression itself.” The word
“it”—“it is || a proper form | for it”—is the silent degree zero of the poem. Creeley’s
handing of “it” through a process of “compression” is in ironic counterpoint with the
breadth and suggestiveness of the mental processes that it seeks to enact. While the
poem seems to want to reduce mind to materiality, its complicated unfolding is a re-
assertion of linguistic and cognitive energy. The concluding “without a sound” leads
out of the poem to silence, but the very sounding of the poem indicates how in the
encounter between the silent stone and the silent organ of the brain, a form of per-
ceptual making is enacted: through measure, Creeley’s voice comes into the world in
language.
Creeley’s next collection, Words, is more aware of its own processes. Several poems
explicitly meditate on poetic production. “The Language” is among them (others in-
clude the book’s title poem; “The Pattern”; “The Measure;” and “The Hole”):
Locate I
love you some-
where in
teeth and
eyes, bite
it but
take care not
to hurt, you
want so
much so
little. Words
say everything.
44 Creeley, Collected Poems, 250.

I
love you
again,
then what
is emptiness
for. To
fill, fill.
I heard words
and words full
of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.45
This is a poem that, in quite unsparing ways, wants to “give witness not to the
thought of myself—that specious concept of identity—but, rather, to what I am
as simple agency.” The opening challenge, “Locate I,” immediately spills into
cliché over the line break—and a reflection on lyric address. This “I love you” both
preserves and stands at a distance from the emotion it enacts. The poem considers
how embodied speech navigates the paradox of a lyric address that is both full and
empty (“so || much so | little”) of meaning. The contention “Words | say everything,”
midway through the poem, leads to the Beckettian reduction of “speech is a mouth.”
Emptiness is merely a space to fill. A schematized version of coitus hovers between
the empty and the full. And speech is equated to the primal desiring apparatus of
the mouth, the point at which, following Freud, hunger and desire are co-located in
the infant. In this context the earlier “bite it” combines the voracious desire for in-
corporation with eroticism.
The poem’s lines extend, on the whole, to only one or two words and the line
breaks are violent: “some-| where.” Yet the poem is marked by patterns of close
half-rhyme. These patterns intensify the poem’s compression by restricting the
sound palette: “bite | it but”; “but || . . . not | . . . hurt”; “so || . . . so”; “fill, fill | . . . full
|| . . . holes”; “heard words | . . . words.” Here, the repeated and half-repeated sounds
threaten the blanking out of sense by sound, raising the possibility that speech,
like love, might be nothing more than a compulsion, like the words that flood the
brain of Beckett’s speaker in Not I. This would be a fiercely reductive proposition,
yet the poem’s specifically linguistic being complicates the suggestion. Transposed
to prose, the poem’s first three clauses might follow one another smoothly, but the
final one (“you | want so | much so | little”) is made syntactically awkward through
ellipsis. The mirroring of the poem’s beginning midway through the poem, “I | love
you | again, || then what | is emptiness | for,” similarly sets two phrases into a call-
and-response relationship. Echo, another side effect of condensation, is integral to
45 Creeley, Collected Poems, 283

the poem’s workings. The poem’s interlocutor is shadowy at best, leaving open the
possibility that the poem might be self-addressed.
The poem almost consumes itself as it anxiously progresses. Sense-making is ten-
uously supported by the near-functioning syntax, but this sense-making potential
is pulled this way and that by the cross-weave of sound-play, repetition, and jagged
line breaks. The resulting slim procession of words enacts the self-consuming, self-
doubting speculation that the poem preserves. Yet the poem does not posit a neg-
ative theology of regress towards an unsayable nothingness. Instead it performs a
wary, processual encounter with language that succumbs to neither of the alluring
fantasies of fullness or emptiness that it sketches. A stuttering rhythm, experienced
as the total effect of the multiple discontinuities of the poem, pervades the act of
communication, in both its fullness and its emptiness.
As he moved towards the increasingly self-reflexive work of Pieces (1968), the
question of “content” became bracketed off in Creeley’s writing. Indeed, in 1965
he writes baldly that “poems are not referential—at least not importantly so.”46
Although some of the poems in Pieces are looser and more prosaic than the im-
pacted lyrics of For Love, the most challenging poems in the collection divert the
reader’s attention toward their formal arrangements. The poems sometimes seem
to scrutinize nothing so much as their own unfolding.
The first poem of Pieces, “As Real as Thinking,” lays the foundation for a book that
would prove highly influential on the language writers of the 1970s and 1980s.47
The first of the poem’s three sections runs as follows:
As real as thinking
wonders created
by the possibility—
forms. A period
at the end of a sentence
which
began it was
into a present,
a presence
saying
something
as it goes.48
46 Creeley, “Poems are a Complex,” 490.

47 Language writing was an avant-garde literary movement that was particularly active between the early
1970s and the early 1990s, though many language writers are still publishing. The key anthology is In the
American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1986); various critical and creative-
critical texts are gathered in The ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’ Book, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles
Bernstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).
The poem begins with a hypothetical “as.” However, it is not clear what is being
compared to what—what, in the end, is “as real as thinking”? The “forms,” perhaps,
of the following stanza. But what, in that case, is meant by forms—does it carry a
Platonic weight, or is Creeley, perhaps, thinking about poetic forms? The imme-
diate friction in the poem is in that phrase, as it appears to claim a greater reality for
thinking than for the material world. The poem then discusses the way a sentence
set in the past (“it was”) emerges into the present, but must end in a full stop.
The bland phrase “saying | something | as it goes” is worth considering. After all,
the poem may be “saying” something about the volubility of language’s incessant
self-staging. But the point is not in the philosophical import of such lines. It lies in
the peculiar rhythm through which a thought is encountered as part of the poetic
artifact.
Creeley thinks about the strangely elusive temporality of the present, and how
that is encountered in the language of a poem. The poem goes on to indicate an in-
terest in portrait and spectator—the face that is looked at that appears to reflect that
of the viewer. Are we internal or external to the perceptual or linguistic events in
which we participate?
The third and final section of the poem appears to discount both inner and outer
as “impossible | locations,” postulating a transaction between the two that is imaged
in the figure of the hand:
Inside
and out
impossible
locations—
reaching in
from out-
side, out
from in-
side—as
middle:
one
hand.49
The “one hand” is a strangely solitary thing in a poem that is peopled (“Everyone |
here” and the face of the penultimate section). The poem comes to rest on the bord-
erline between internal and external, a “middle” that is only half explained by “one
hand.” Indeed much of the poem—the “forms,” the speaking self, the “thinking” of

the first line, the supposed reflection with its “vague glove” of skin, the observer—is
uncertain.
The monosyllables “out” and “in” are counterposed. As the poem reaches its
ending, each forms part of a word—”inside,” “outside”—that is broken across a
stanza break. As with “After Mallarmé,” Creeley appears to focus on how the trans-
action between poet and world gives rise to the “wonders created” by thinking. The
even balance between inner and outer is not the same as that between the broken
“in || side” and “out || side.” Hyphens, comma, dash, colon—the concentration of
distinct punctuation marks strews the lines with different qualities of pause. The
poem appears to move towards a larger synthesis between inner and outer, but this
is undercut by the inscrutability of “one | hand.”
The verbal echo of “in | from out || side” and “out || from in || side” creates a de-
ceptive parallelism based on expectation and linguistic habit. But the line breaks
give rise to an effect of compression, and syllables play an important part in creating
this effect as the poem concludes. There are three syllables in “reaching in” and the
two previous lines, two in each of the next five lines and just one in each of the two
concluding lines. This is not to say that the poem is “about” linguistic austerity or
impoverishment. Rather, the lines indicate the centrality of hesitation to the move-
ment of language in time. It is this ability to putting the pause, the break, the syn-
tactical obstacle, at the heart of enunciation, that makes Creeley such a powerful
rhythmic technician. Much as the epithet “musical” has connotations of mellif-
luousness that are utterly out of keeping with much of the most characteristically
twentieth-century music, so our conceptions of rhythm can be complicated by the
stop-start play set in motion in Creeley’s work, which is non-metrical but nonethe-
less acutely rhythmic.
III
Poetic rhythm underwent profound changes early in the twentieth century. While
none of the high modernists espoused a doctrinaire commitment to free verse, it is
clear that the new rhythmic dispensation cleared the ground for the varied practices
of the twentieth century and our own.
No longer a more-or-less stable background pattern, rhythm became part of the
overall acoustic texture of the poem. I have argued that short-form poetry has been
the most powerful vehicle for rhythmic innovation. There had been no precedent
in the anglophone verse tradition for the minimalism of the most radical work of
Creeley, or poets who followed him, such as Larry Eigner or Robert Grenier, or the
work of Objectivists such as Lorine Niedecker or George Oppen.
Rhythm in the short-form modernist mode exemplifies the “cutting” in time
prescribed by Pound, as it is heavily dependent on the intervention of the line break
and on the breaking-up of the poem’s constituent units. What emerges is, paradox-
ically, a verse style in which repetition plays a part but which continually disrupts
the micro-patterns it sets up. While musicality continues to be encountered in “the

total articulation of the poem,” it is a musicality that embraces dissonance and dis-
continuity as well as the reassurance of rhyme. Yet, however jagged or even prosaic
the poetic text, rhythm, which is integral to human utterance, continues to be a
critical category for contemporary poetry. Only we now feel it as part of the global
effect of the overlapping units of measure, syntax, and versification within a text.
Contemporary poets such as Thomas A. Clark, Joseph Massey, and Craig
Dworkin have all, in very different ways, developed the tradition discussed in
this chapter. However, the poet who has done most to explore this vein has been
Rae Armantrout.50 Since the 1970s, her writing has compressed dense thought-
patterns into short poems that embrace reverie, aphorism, TV listings, song lyrics,
popular science, overheard speech, and phrases embodying corporate or political
imperatives. In her writing, brevity conditions the halting movement of a wittily
speculative form of poetic speech:
Is a short time
circular?
Practiced?
Loops
on ruled paper.
What is supervised
has meaning.
A brow-beating
pulse . . .51
Works Cited
Armantrout, Rae, Veil: New and Selected Poems (Middletown, CT, 2001).
Armantrout, Rae, Versed (Middletown, CT, 2009).
Attridge, Derek, The Rhythms of English Poetry (London, 1992).
Attridge, Derek, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge, 1995).
Attridge, Derek and Thomas Carper, Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry
(London, 2003).
Ayers, David, Modernism: A Short Introduction (Oxford, 2004).
Carr, Helen, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H. D. and the Imagists (London, 2009).
Creeley, Robert, The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975 (Berkeley, 1982).
Creeley, Robert, “A Sense of Measure” [1964], in Collected Essays (Berkeley, 1989), 486–8.
Creeley, Robert, “Poems are a Complex” [1966], Collected Essays (Berkeley, 1989), 489–90.
50 Long neglected, Armantrout won the Pulitzer prize in 2010 for her book Versed.
51 Armantrout, “Rehearsal,” in Veil, 130.

Creeley, Robert, “William Carlos Williams: Selected Essays” [1954], in Collected Essays (Berkeley,
1989),  34–9.
Creeley, Robert, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, ed. Rod Smith, Peter Baker, and Kaplan
Harris (Berkeley, 2014).
Creeley, Robert and Daniel Kane, What Is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde
(New York, 2003), 50–64.
Cureton, Richard, Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse (London, 1992).
Cureton, Richard, “Analysis of William Carlos Williams, ‘To a Solitary Disciple,’” Thinking Verse, 3
(2013), 51–107: http://www.thinkingverse.org/issue03/RichardCureton_SolitaryDisciple.pdf.
Eliot, T. S., “Reflections on Vers Libre” [1917], in Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London,
1975),  31–6.
Flint, F. S., “The History of Imagism,” The Egoist, 2.5 (1915), 70–1.
Jarvis, Simon, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge, 2007).
Jones, Tom, Poetic Language (Edinburgh, 2012).
Moody, Anthony D., Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man & His Work (Oxford, 2014).
Pope, Alexander, “An Essay on Criticism” [1711], in Alexander Pope: The Major Works, ed. Pat
Rogers (Oxford, 2006), 17–39.
Pound, Ezra, “A Retrospect” [1913], in Literary Essays (London, 1954), 3–14.
Pound, Ezra, “How to Read” [1931], in Literary Essays (London, 1954), 15–40.
Pound, Ezra, “T. S. Eliot” [1917], in Literary Essays (London, 1954), 418–22.
Pound, Ezra, ABC of Reading ([1934]; London, 1961).
Pound, Ezra, “Affirmations: As for Imagisme” [1915], Selected Prose 1909–1965 (New York, 1973).
Pound, Ezra, The Cantos (London, 1975).
Saintsbury, George, A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, vol.
1 ([1906]; 2nd edn, London, 1923).
Weaver, Mike, William Carlos Williams: The American Background (Cambridge, 1971).
Williams, William Carlos, Autobiography (New York, 1951).
Williams, William Carlos, “The Poem as a Field of Action” [1954], in Selected Essays (New York,
1969), 280–91.
Williams, William Carlos, Paterson ([1963]; Harmondsworth, 1983).
Williams, William Carlos, Collected Poems, 2 vols, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan
(Manchester, 2000).
24
Hearing It Right
Rhythm and Reading
John Holliday
While literary theorists have long been concerned with rhythm, within the philos-
ophy of literature, the matter of sound, let alone rhythm, has been neglected. This
chapter addresses that gap. First, it establishes a working account of rhythm as it
pertains to literature. It does not address the metaphysical or conceptual question
of what rhythm really is. Rather, it provides a foundation for questions of value,
arguing that poetry is not more rhythmic than prose. Second, it argues that rhythm
in prose is not a rarefied thing, but worth attending to more generally.
Poetry is generally considered musical, and prose is not. But as Gass notes,
prose has a pace; it is dotted with stops and pauses, frequent rests; inflections rise
and fall like a low range of hills; certain tones are prolonged; there are patterns of
stress and harmonious measures; there is a proper method of pronunciation, even
if it is rarely observed.1
This chapter bolsters Gass’s claim. I argue that like works of music and poetry,
works of prose have rhythm, to which the pauses, inflections, stresses, and pronun-
ciation of its language all contribute. As such, like poetry, prose literature should be
considered musical. It may be that poetry is somehow more musical. For instance,
Hamilton argues that “Dance, poetry and music are conceptually interdependent in
that rhythm is essential to each, and none can be understood independently of it.”2
One might be reluctant to extend the same status to prose literature. But while po-
etry is distinct from prose, in that the former is lineated and the latter is not, I argue
that this distinction does not result in poetry being more rhythmic.3
The chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2 sketches a working account of rhythm.
Whatever constitutes rhythm in a work of literature, the rhythm itself is a feature
to be experienced, and one in need of explanation and analysis. If literature has
1 Gass, “Music of Prose,” 314.

2 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 39. See also Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 144.
3 The hybrid form prose poetry is so designated because it lacks lineation. Though the distinction between
prose and prose poetry is highly contested and often elusive.
Hearing It Right 393
rhythm, literally so, then we should be able to gain understanding of that feature by
appealing to discussions of rhythm in philosophy of music. Section 3 establishes a
working account of rhythm as it pertains to literature, according to which poetry
is in no sense more rhythmic than prose. Section 4 reflects on the interpretative
demands of attending to rhythm in literature. Finally, Section 5 argues that rhythm
in prose literature is generally worth attending to, for rhythm plays various impor-
tant roles in prose.
1. Rhythm
Minimally, rhythm is organized sound. A continuous, undifferentiated stream of

sound does not have rhythm. For there to be rhythm, sound must be organized
or differentiated in some fashion. The simplest way to conceive of this organiza-
tion is in terms of grouping. If we take a series of continuous, acoustically identical
sounds and stress every fourth iteration, we will hear the sound as grouped—and
thus organized—into fours. Beyond this minimal account, there is not a great
deal of agreement as to what rhythm is. There are two main issues around which
disagreements cluster. The first is the distinction between rhythm and meter. The
second is whether movement is essential to rhythm. It is not the business of this
chapter to resolve these questions; but it must say something about them.
The general consensus among musicians, musicologists, and philosophers of
music is that rhythm is distinct from meter, and conceiving of rhythm as mere
grouping does not recognize this distinction. Rhythmic organization appears to be
less codified than periodic sound. The rhythm of a piece of music often plays with or
against a periodic beat, a grouping of sound that serves as the backdrop for rhythm.
A paradigm example of this phenomenon is Ravel’s Bolero.4 Conversely, rhythm
might exist without regularity or periodic backdrop, as is the case in the “Sacrificial
Dance” of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.5 Thus is the traditional distinction between
rhythm and meter justified. Meter (or beat) is periodic, organized sound. Rhythm is
organized, non-periodic sound; it is something less constrained. As Roger Scruton
puts it, “Meter is the frame; rhythm the life that grows on it.”6 There are some, how-
ever, who see no distinction in kind, but rather, a matter of degree; meter is a par-
ticular, even if rigid, expression of rhythm.7 Hamilton strikes a middle ground,
arguing that though there is distinction in kind, rhythm cannot be understood in-
dependently of meter.8 Though the nature of this distinction is interesting and im-
portant, to consider questions of rhythm and value we need only to recognize that
rhythm does not reduce to meter.
4 Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 136; Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 236.
7 Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 136, sketches these positions.

Less agreed upon is the relationship between rhythm and movement. Our expe-
rience of rhythm seems to involve a sense of movement, a feeling often bound to
actual or imagined bodily movement—foot-tapping or head-nodding, for instance.
With our bodily movements it is as if we are tracking the movement in rhythm
itself. This much seems uncontroversial. But what this characteristic experience
of rhythm demonstrates about rhythm itself is debated. There are three possible
positions.
(1) Movement is an inessential, eliminable feature of experiencing rhythm.9
While we may hear movement in rhythm, as if each note is brought about by the one
before it, this is not an essential phenomenological component of rhythm. All that
hearing rhythm requires is noticing patterns of stress and accent and the groupings
of sounds that form as a result, and this does not involve experiencing movement.
(2) Movement is an essential, but metaphorical, feature of experiencing rhythm.
To hear rhythm is to hear movement, a “virtual causality” among sounds, each
bringing the next into being.10 It is not simply that we may hear movement, but
we must; otherwise, we are not experiencing rhythm. Though rhythm does not
have the physical property of movement, it has the phenomenological property of
movement.
(3) Movement is an essential, non-metaphorical feature of rhythm.11 To hear
rhythm is to hear movement, but this movement is not a metaphorical projection.
This does not mean that sounds literally bring each other into being or that sounds
actually move through space. Such a position seems untenable. Nevertheless, the
concept of rhythm is inseparable from movement. We do not take our concept of
bodily movement as primary and then project it onto our description of rhythm;
rather, the two are intertwined.
Given how natural it is to hear movement in rhythm, the default assumption
for any working account of rhythm is that movement is an essential feature of
experiencing rhythm, at least phenomenologically. The question, then, is whether
Malcolm Budd, a proponent of position (1), provides compelling reason to abandon
this default. I do not think he does. While Budd does illuminate the conceptual
difficulties of maintaining that movement is an essential feature of experiencing
rhythm, he does not explain away the naturalness of hearing movement in rhythm.
Barring an argument establishing the incoherence of hearing movement in rhythm,
such an explanation is in order, at least for a working account of rhythm to abandon
its default assumption regarding movement. Budd admits that it is possible to hear
movement in rhythm and notes that “what is possible is not what is necessary.”12
But hearing movement in rhythm is not simply possible; it is natural. It is difficult
to imagine someone fully attending to rhythm and not at least feeling some sense of
movement. As Levinson argues,
9 Budd, “Musical Movement,” 167–8.
10 Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 35, and, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 229.
11 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 37–41, and Aesthetics and Music,  144–5.
12 Budd, “Musical Movement,” 168.

Whether it is the head, the feet, the arms, the shoulders, or the hips that are thus
activated, what could testify in clearer fashion that there is in music movement of
some sort, to which it is almost impossible to keep oneself from responding, except
by an artificial effort dictated most often by social constraints[?]‌13
In any case, we can consider all the basic properties that give rise to rhythmic orga-
nization without worrying whether metaphorical or non-metaphorical movement
supervenes on this rhythmic organization. Even if one must hear movement to ap-
preciate rhythm properly, as Scruton notes, this movement is a Gestalt property.14
So even if it turns out that Budd is right that movement is an eliminable feature
of experiencing rhythm, my account of literature’s rhythmic organization remains
unaffected.
2. Rhythm and Literature
While literary texts are mute, literary works are not. The latter have properties of
sound, as our practice of discussing literature suggests. Critics, writers, and eve-
ryday readers alike remark on alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and the overall sound
of sentences in both poetry and prose literature. At minimum, it seems odd to deny
that literary works have properties that require vocalization or sub-vocalization in
order to experience them fully.15 Say then that the sonic properties of a sentence
are all the properties audible to the human ear—save any individualizing vocal
characteristics—when the sentence is appropriately vocalized by a natural language
speaker, where an appropriate vocalization contains correct pronunciation and
enunciation sensitive to all features of rhythmic organization.
The features that organize a sentence’s sonic properties rhythmically fall into
three classes: pronunciation, intonation, and phrasing.16 These are features shared
by both prose and poetry, and belong to the linguistic medium itself. “Speech is,”
as Scruton argues, “a paradigm for us of a rhythmical organization generated not
by measure and beat but by internal energy and the intrinsic meaningfulness of
sound.”17 The question is whether the apparent literary analogues to measure and
beat—lineation and meter—somehow distinguish poetry from prose rhythmi-
cally. I argue that while meter may give the rhythm of poetry a distinctive character,
neither lineation nor meter, contrary to conventional belief, make poetry more
rhythmic than prose. Linguistic features of rhythmic organization do the real work
of supplying literature with rhythm.
13 Levinson, “Aesthetic Appreciation,” 423.

15 I am assuming that the sound of a sentence can be internally realized via sub-vocalization. But nothing of
substance turns on this assumption, at least for my concerns here.
16 Patel, “Musical Rhythm,” canvasses empirical studies that examine the similarities between rhythm in
music and rhythm in language.
Correctly pronouncing a word requires enunciating its syllables and stressing

them correctly. The number of syllables that a word contains, and which syllables
receive more emphasis, determine the patterning of sound. Some languages (such
as French) are said to be syllable-timed, and others (such as English) stress-timed.18
The distinction is intended to trace what feature of pronunciation—syllable number
or stress—does the primary work in determining the time it takes to pronounce a
word. This distinction is contested,19 but the important point is that both syllables
and stress bear on the organization of sound in language. With English, it is most
salient with stress. For instance, a two-syllabled word with stress on the first syllable
organizes sound differently than a two-syllabled word with stress on the second
syllable. Consider the words rocket and Rockette20 or content defined as substance
or meaning and content defined as satisfied. These examples illustrate not only how
stress organizes sound, but also that stress is determined—at least usually—by the
correct pronunciation of the word.21
We should, however, distinguish stress from accent, where the latter is deter-
mined not by pronunciation, but by typographical conventions and contextual
cues. When italicization is used for emphasis—as in “He had barricaded himself
in his house”22—accent in vocalization is required and realized by the sense of
raising vocal pitch (i.e., modifying intonation).23 However, emphasis is not always
so clearly indicated, and thus what deserves accent might be open to more than one
interpretation, as in this passage:
The useful thing about being a selfish person is that when your children get hurt
you don’t mind so much because you yourself are all right. But it won’t work if you
are just a little selfish. You must be very selfish.24
Arguably, the last instance of “very” demands accent, as the context constructed by
the first two sentences leads to some degree of emphasis on “very.” But the degree of
accent—and even the accent itself—is debatable.
Just as there are constraints on the proper pronunciation of words, there are also
constraints on the proper enunciation of phrases. The most obvious constraint is
syntax. Even if the primary function of punctuation is grammatical, translating that
function into speech often requires enunciation of a particular kind. Commas call
for pausing; and thus a list of items joined by conjunctions reads faster than a list
18 Wennerstrom, Music of Everyday Speech, 47.

19 Patel and Daniele, “Language and Music,” B36.
20 Wennerstrom, Music of Everyday Speech, 47.
21 Context sometimes alters stress. Compare “sixteen believers” and “sixteen anecdotes” (Attridge, Poetic
Rhythm, 30). In the first phrase, it is natural to stress the second syllable of “sixteen”; in the second, it is nat-
ural to stress the first syllable. Perhaps a more conspicuous example is the pronunciation of “unknown” in the
phrases “unknown assailant” and “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier” (Kelly and Bock, “Stress in Time,” 389).
While one might stress the second syllable in the first phrase, it would be odd to do so in the second.
22 Bernhard, The Loser, 17.
23 Wennerstrom, Music of Everyday Speech, 18, calls this pitch accent.
24 Davis, “Selfish,” 138.
individuated by commas. Periods sometimes call for a pause slightly longer in dura-
tion. Parentheses and em dashes ask not only for a pause, but also a change in pitch,
one that can affect the typical time it takes to pronounce a word. An introductory
prepositional phrase demands a short pause, even if unpunctuated. But there are
various degrees to which syntax can be properly enunciated, where these variances
may affect the patterning of sound.
Just as perceived importance may influence intonation, meaning may influence
phrasing. A phrase describing action or an agitation, for instance, may ask to be
read swiftly, while a more meditative phrase may encourage a slow, deliberate pace.
What is expressed by a sentence gives it “internal energy,” a sense of how it ought to
be phrased.25 Consider the following two passages:
He closed his eyes and waited and was not at peace at all but instead felt the
beginnings of a terrible dread welling up inside him, and if that dread kept growing
at the current rate, he realized in a flash of insight, there was a name for the place
he would be then, and it was Hell.26
I learned an important thing in the orchard that night, which was that if you
do not resist the cold, but simply relax and accept it, you no longer feel the cold
as discomfort. I felt giddily free and eager, as you do in dreams, when you sud-
denly find that you can fly, very easily, and wonder why you have never tried it
before.27
In the first passage, “dread” seemingly carries the momentum created by the first
two conjunctions through the rest of the sentence, diminishing any elongated pause
or pronunciation, “and if that dread” asking to be vocalized in a quick burst. In the
second passage, “relax” and “accept” have the opposite effect, a measured and me-
thodical rhythm encouraged, commas almost asking to be lingered upon. Derek
Attridge shows how to parse this internal energy more precisely. He argues that
most words within any stretch of language are felt to have one of four basic types
of movement, all of which influence the perceived grouping of words, and thus
phrasing:
(1) they are part of a movement toward some point that lies ahead; (2) they are
part of a movement away from some point that has already passed; (3) they are
part of a relatively static moment from which something might develop; [or]
(4) they are part of a moment of arrival toward which the previous words have
been moving.28
25 Rhythms prescribed by syntax and pronunciation may also work against the internal energy of a phrase,
presumably even for deliberate effect.
26 Saunders, “Victory Lap,” 25.
27 Robinson, Housekeeping, 204.
28 Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, 183.
One might take issue with Attridge’s four basic types, but it seems undeniable that
sentences deserve analysis along these lines, that meaning influences phrasing and
thus rhythm.
All features of rhythmic organization examined thus far belong both to poetry
and prose. I will now consider features specific to literary language. But if my anal-
ysis is right, then it is the shared linguistic features of poetry and prose that do the
real work of supplying both with rhythm. Neither an appeal to lineation nor to
meter can support the conventional view that poetry is more rhythmic than prose.
Poems are lineated; prose is not. In poetry, a row of text does not end simply due
to the constraints of the page’s margins, as it does in prose; the arrangement of lines
is not a contingent affair. Rather, a poem’s rows of text end for reasons other than
the margins; a poem’s lines are intentionally broken. But lineation’s influence on
rhythm is less straightforward than it appears. It might seem that line breaks con-
strain phrasing, calling, like commas and periods, for pause in enunciation. But it
would be wrong to say they clearly function this way. Readers unfamiliar with the
conventions of poetry often treat them in this fashion, pausing longer than they
would for a period; and there is a history of scholarship to support such treatment.29
But there are also many poets and scholars who advise against this, urging that we
read through line breaks, pausing only when the usual features of syntax demand
we do.30 On this view, line breaks serve only to amplify pause, and even that func-
tion is questionable. Finally, between these extremes lies the prescription of a brief
pause at line breaks.31 In short, there is no consensus on the proper treatment of line
breaks in the vocalization of poetry. But given any view, there is no sense in saying
that poetry is more rhythmic or has more ability to be rhythmic than prose. Pausing
to any degree at line breaks would result in rhythmic organization, but no more
than syntax does in prose.
Meter also does not make poetry more rhythmic than prose. On the one hand,
some prose may have meter. Faulkner’s prose, for instance, is said sometimes to be
written in iambic pentameter32 and Baum argues that meter can be found in much
prose.33 On the other hand, as noted above, rhythm does not reduce to meter. In
fact, meter may sometimes overwhelm rhythm, subsuming any non-periodicity to
periodic beat. Some argue that this is a common occurrence in rap music.34 With
enough emphasis on the beat of a metric poem, a reading can begin to lose the
poem’s rhythm. Some poems may even invite such readings, most likely to their
detriment. In her guide to understanding and writing poetry, Oliver warns against
just this.35 So while poetry may, on the whole, be more metric, this entails only
that its rhythms tend to be more regular and thus more easily noticed. Many prose
29 Hall, “Poetics of Abstraction,” this volume, Chapter 21.
30 E.g. Pinsky, Sounds of Poetry, 18; Hall, “Poetics of Abstraction.”
31 Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, 2.
32 Pinsky, Sounds of Poetry, 67, 73.
33 Baum, English Prose Rhythm,  82–91.
34 Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 250; Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 136.
35 Oliver, A Poetry Handbook,  43–4.

writers clearly labor over sentence rhythms despite their sentences being non-
metric, to which George Saintsbury’s lengthy A History of English Prose Rhythm
attests.36 Virginia Woolf even believed that rhythm was the primary business of all
good writing—for her, without the right rhythm, nothing else could work.37
Nevertheless, while meter may not make poetry more rhythmic than prose, it
does shape its rhythms in a particular way. Without some extra-rhythmic cue, one
must scan a line or sentence to determine if it has meter and what that meter is. Here,
scanning amounts to determining whether any linguistic features of rhythmic orga-
nization establish a periodic beat. If they do, the line—or sentence—has meter. But
since linguistic features of rhythmic organization underdetermine rhythm, they
therefore also underdetermine meter. Unlike prose, however, poetry has metric
forms, established by history and codified by practice. The lines of sonnets, ballads,
and blank verse are iambic; those of epics and elegies, dactylic; those of limericks,
anapestic.38 Except for blank verse, these forms are also comprised of a particular
rhyme scheme, stanza structure, or subject matter. Thus there are extra-rhythmic
cues that a poem follows a particular metric form, that its lines have a particular
meter and ought to be vocalized accordingly.39 So while a poem’s meter may not be
indicated explicitly, as in musical scores, it may be suggested by form.
This all amounts to meter functioning in a much more determinate way in po-
etry than in prose. Sentences in works of prose may be metrical, but there are no
prose forms that determine a particular kind of meter. Because of this, one might
argue that at least in poetry that embodies metric forms, rhythm has a distinct
character. Such a view might be pushed further by arguing that even blank verse
offers an extra-rhythmic cue to its pervading meter in virtue of it being historically
entrenched. After enough unrhymed lines exhibit iambic pentameter, the sugges-
tion of blank verse will ring for a reader with the relevant background knowledge.
A metric expectation will arise. In fact, one might attempt to extend this line of
argument to all metric poetry and, potentially, poetry in general. Tempest seems
to have something like this in mind.40 Yet it is not clear that such an argument can
ground any fundamental distinction between prose and poetry. Baum argues that
“the difference is only in degree of [rhythmic] regularity”41 and I am inclined to
agree. Poetry is in no sense more rhythmic than prose, even if its rhythms tend to
be more regular, marked by a consistent, anticipated beat. While it may be tempting
to think that this regularity does in fact make poetry more rhythmic, such a view
runs the risk of reducing rhythm to meter. Whatever position one takes on rhythm,
36 As do Baum, English Prose Rhythm, and Tempest, Rhythm of English Prose—both shorter, yet still sub-
stantive, monographs.
37 See Sutton, “Putting Words.” I cite Woolf ’s position merely as evidence of a prose writer who toiled over
rhythm; the tenability of her position is another matter.
38 Though there are exceptions, such is the general rule, and thus the default assumption.
39 In some cases, a poem’s form is explicitly indicated in the title (e.g., Shakespeare’s sonnets).
40 Tempest, Rhythm of English Prose, 110–11.
41 Baum, English Prose Rhythm, 80.
relegating it to the mere space of beat seems unsatisfactory, as it makes no room for
rhythmic complexity and threatens to leave free verse beyond poetry’s bounds.42
3. Rhythm and Interpretation
Since linguistic features of rhythmic organization underdetermine rhythm, for any

particular sentence, passage, or line, there are many viable rhythms. Thus, settling
on one, or some subset, requires considering questions of interpretation. Of course,
with poetry that embodies metric forms, the set of viable rhythms is smaller. But
meter does not strictly determine rhythm. Even within metric poetry, there is room
for variation in accent and phrasing. Thus, any account of rhythm in literature must
address the issue of underdetermination, though I will do so only briefly.
Some questions of interpretation can be addressed in familiar literary-critical
fashion. What words carry special significance or importance and thus de-
serve special emphasis or accent? What is the mood conveyed in a sentence or
line? Does it call for moments of slow and heavy phrasing, syllables elongated
and exaggerated in places? Or something staccato? What is the best analysis of a
passage’s “internal energy” (as Scruton puts it and Attridge demonstrates)? These
questions align with those addressed in literary critical practice regarding theme,
structure, semantic content, character, and so on. They fall within the purview of
critical interpretation.
Critical interpretation is essential to literary practice. A literary work’s imagery,
narrative, plot, characters, structure, and semantic content all have to cohere in one
way or another. That coherence, that complete picture of the work, often requires
an interpretative account of some kind. Critical interpretation is the business of of-
fering such accounts; it consists in “formulating a view of what a work means or
expresses and how it hangs together at various levels.”43
Yet some questions concerning the interpretation of a literary work’s features of
rhythmic organization are the business of what Levinson calls performative inter-
pretation. With respect to music, performative interpretation, “a considered way of
playing a piece of music,”44
consists in deciding to play a score, taken as unequivocal or uncontroverted, in a

particular way, in effect electing particular values of its defining, though never ab-
solutely specific, parameters of tempo, rhythm, dynamics, accent, and phrasing.45
42 This is of particular importance to High Modernism and the new rhythmic practices of twentieth-
century poetry. See this volume, Chapter 23, Montgomery, “Leaving It Out.”
43 Levinson, “Interpretation in Music,” 61.
44 Levinson, “Interpretation in Music,” 63. Levinson distinguishes between two modes of performative in-
terpretation: realizational and reconstructive (61–2). But this distinction is not important here.
Such decisions are a crucial feature of musical practice. If we are attending to

rhythm in literature, such decisions with respect to the vocalization of a text appear
equally crucial, even if they are not a usual part of literary practice.
While critical interpretation certainly informs an understanding of rhythm and
provides guidance in matters of accent and phrasing, critical interpretation does
not uniquely determine performative interpretation. As Levinson puts it,
there are inevitably aspects of a PI [performative interpretation] that are irreduc-

ibly performative—aspects whose content may be signaled, though not captured,
by phrases such as ‘this is how it should go’—and which thus could not be part of a
CI [critical interpretation], necessarily expressed as it is in articulate terms.46
A critical interpretation of a passage that demands, say, special accent on a word

may be realized by various performative interpretations. After all, there are various
degrees of accent, with shadings subtle enough such that no plausible critical inter-
pretation could dictate a particular one.
Even if we agree that there is a single correct critical interpretation, there is still
no principled way to settle on a singular performative interpretation. Among the
set of performative interpretations suggested by a critical interpretation, one per-
formative interpretation might be preferred over another. But it is hard to see what
reasons could be offered for that performative interpretation being the correct or
best one. We cannot infer any particular critical interpretation from a performa-
tive interpretation;47 so it cannot be argued that one’s favored performative inter-
pretation best reveals the correct critical interpretation. Nor is there much help
in appealing to the author of the work having that performative interpretation.
Just as Alan Goldman notes that “composers who conduct are not always the best
conductors or interpreters of their own works,”48 authors are not always the best
oral readers of their own works.49
But this should not be cause for concern. As Peter Lamarque notes,
Few would hold that for each play or musical work there must be a single right per-
formance, even though performances are judged for their effectiveness and fidelity
to the work.50
There may be no performative interpretation that allows us to experience the

rhythm of a literary passage, but each performative interpretation that is justified by

47 For instance, slow and heavy phrasing of a literary passage is compatible with critical interpretations
that consider the passage somber or lethargic or especially tense and fraught with narrative tension, among
other moods.
48 Goldman, Philosophy and the Novel, 34.
49 At least some are aware of this. William Gaddis, for instance, abstained from giving readings of his novels,
noting that “You have to be a sort of actor to get away with reading it aloud” (“On Receiving,” 129).
50 Lamarque, “Literary Interpretation,” 302.
the correct—or at least a plausible—critical interpretation allows us to experience

a different aspect of a passage, uniquely illuminating through the particular values
of accent and phrasing it elects, in the particular realization of rhythm it brings to
the fore.51
4. Rhythm and Prose
Even if one admits that, in principle, poetry is not more rhythmic than prose, one
still might hold that attending to rhythm is rarely required to recognize the merits
of a prose work. Some prose works have rhythm that requires attending to, works
where rhythm stands to the fore, works whose authors evidently care a great deal
about rhythm and craft their sentences accordingly, authors like Woolf, Proust, and
Joyce. But this does not encompass most prose literature. Strongly rhythmic prose
works are the exception. It seems absurd to suggest that one should need to attend
to rhythm in pulp fiction in order to appreciate it fully. We read such works for
their entertaining plots, not their engaging rhythms. While there may be a place for
such rhythmically impoverished literature in our lives, I will outline some reasons
why rhythm in prose literature is generally worth attending to and why prose works
whose rhythms deserve attention are worth seeking.
First, considerations of rhythm are common in literary criticism of prose.52 So
if assessing the value of literary works is part of the primary business of literary
criticism—as Noël Carroll argues53—then it would seem that rhythm deserves our
attention when reading prose literature. It is reasonable to think that criticism ex-
plicitly serves a social function, one that aids readers in recognizing the merits of
literary works.
Second, a common recommendation given to novice writers of poetry and prose
is to read their work aloud so they may be more sensitive to its rhythms.54 It may not
be that everything novice writers are instructed to do or be sensitive to deserves our
attention when reading. For instance, novice writers are commonly recommended
to write daily, yet a writing schedule seems irrelevant to our appreciation a writer’s
work. But we at least have good reason to attend to advice for novice writers when it
bears directly on the writer’s work.
Third, rhythm stands to the fore in various ways. It may be most natural to think
of notably rhythmic language as being what Robert Ochsner calls “fluid.”55 The fol-
lowing sentence from Updike’s Rabbit Redux embodies such fluidity:
51 On the underdetermination of rhythm in literature, see this volume, Chapter 15, Hasty, “Complexity and
Passage,” 233; Baum, English Prose Rhythm, 91; and Saintsbury, History of English Prose Rhythm, 465.
52 For a sampling of the evidence, browse past issues of the New York Times Book Review. At the time of this
writing, a search for “rhythm and novel” returns over 700 results.
53 Carroll, On Criticism, esp. Chapter 1.
54 E.g. Burroway, Writing Fiction, 205; Gardner, Art of Fiction, 153; Lombardi, “Description,” 115; LaPlante,
Making of a Story, 554; Mills, Creative Writing Coursebook, 35, 91; Prose, Reading Like a Writer, 56.
55 Ochsner, “Rhythm in Literature,” 273.
The clicking and the liquor and the music mix and make the space inside him very
big, big enough to hold blue light and black faces and ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ and stale
smoke sweeter than alfalfa and this apparition across the way, whose wrists and
forearms are as it were translucent and belonging to another order of creature; she
is not yet grown.56
As Ochsner notes, the fluidity is made “emphatic by Updike’s sound patterns—

alliteration, consonance, near rime, and reduplication.”57 But rhythm can be prom-
inent without being fluid. Consider this sentence from Hemingway’s “A Clean,
Well-Lighted Place.”
It was late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow
the leaves of the tree made against the electric light.58
Here there is a “complex rhythm on the edge of unrhythmicality.”59 Rhythm stands

to the fore precisely because of its unpredictability. In sum, interesting rhythms,
worth attending to, need not be mellifluous.
Fourth, dialogue is a feature of much prose. Often, a goal when writing dialogue
is that it be natural, that it capture the kinds of things real people say and the way
they say them; one trouble with much novice writing is its failure to do that, its ten-
dency to contain stilted dialogue.60 A notable example is the dialogue of Gaddis.
Consider a passage from his novel JR:
—He wasn’t out there just now when they took her away, he . . .
—Who Dan took who away, where . . .
—To the hospital Miss Flesch they, didn’t you know what happened? He was
riding her over . . .
—Will you just let him tell it Gibbs? And this foulmouthed whoever this was
that just took over her lesson how’d he get in there.61
As Raban aptly states, Gaddis brilliantly captures the way we speak now,
with a wicked fidelity to its flimsy grammar, its elisions and hiatuses, its rush-and-
stumble rhythms. When Gaddis’s characters open their mouths, they’re apt to give
voice to sentences like car pileups in fog, with each new thought smashing into the
rear of the one ahead and colliding with the oncoming traffic of another speaker’s
words.62
56 Updike, Rabbit Redux, 121, quoted in Ochsner, “Rhythm in Literature,” 273–4.
58 Hemingway, “Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” 136, quoted in Ochsner, “Rhythm in Literature,” 275.
60 E.g. Lamott, Bird by Bird, 64–6; Burroway, Imaginative Writing, 135.
61 Gaddis, JR, 46.
62 Raban, “At Home in Babel,” 164.

But dialogue need not be so rhythmically complicated to be successful in capturing

the reality of everyday speech. Consider this passage from Carver’s “Cathedral”:
‘I’ll move that up to your room’, my wife said.

‘No, that’s fine’, the blind man said loudly. ‘It can go up when I go up.’
‘A little water with the Scotch?’ I said.
‘Very little’, he said.
‘I knew it’, I said.63
Though simple, there is something dead on in the way the rhythm shifts to a stac-
cato patterning in the last two lines. Rhythm worth attending to does not just reside
in the ornate, complicated, and prominent.
Fifth, successful narration captures rhythms we can imagine someone’s thought
embodying. This is especially important when narration is in first-person point of
view. If a first-person narrator’s “voice” does not feel as if it could be the way a real
person would think or speak, the whole narrative will feel flat and perhaps inau-
thentic. Rhythm not only aids in constructing a narrator who feels real, but helps
suggest reality as a particular person, with a distinctive personality. For instance,
part of why J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is so celebrated is the authenticity
of Holden Caulfield’s narrative voice. Take the opening sentence:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is
where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents
were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of
crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.64
The energetic, almost breathless rhythm created by the cumulative effect of the
commas followed by conjunctions conveys the spirit of a bright, fast-talking teen
who feels both real and compelling. As Eberhard Alsen notes: “One of the as-
tonishing things about The Catcher in the Rye is that adolescents all over the
world . . . continue to identify with Holden Caulfield even now.”65 Were Salinger’s
narrative rhythms not so freewheeling and colloquial, Caulfield’s character would
feel less authentic, less a real sixteen-year-old.
Authenticity in voice is also important when narration is in close third-person
point of view (also known as free indirect style), when the third-person narration
reflects a particular character’s perspective. As James Wood argues,
As soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend
itself around that character, to take on his or her way of thinking and speaking.66
63 Carver, “Cathedral,” 519.
64 Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, 3.
65 Alsen, “Catcher in the Rye,” 153.
66 Wood, How Fiction Works,  7–8.

Thus, in most prose literature, when the narrative voice does not feel true to char-
acter, when “author and character get too separated, . . . we feel the cold breath of an
alienation over the text.”67
Finally, the opportunity for sheer aesthetic pleasure that well-wrought rhythms
in prose offer should not be overlooked. As Saintsbury notes,
the power of appreciating concerted harmonies in articulate and sense-bearing

language seems to be much rarer than that of enjoying music proper. Yet it is cer-
tain that the tens who appreciate the close of the Urn Burial . . . receive as keen
and as systematic a pleasure as the tens of thousands who listen to Beethoven or
Bach.68
As an avid vocalizer of literature and listener of Bach, I can at least attest to this
being my experience. The pleasure I receive from a sentence like “The chilly rep-
tilian film of concentration in the cold blue eyes, Jim”69 is great and largely due to
rhythm, the way the measured, iambic opening—enhanced by assonance, alliter-
ation, and sense—gives way to the triple stress on “cold blue eyes” then brought
to a wavering halt by the comma, a precipice that descends into a last, unexpected
beat. However, contra Saintsbury, I suspect that the relative lack of those who ex-
perience such pleasure is less a matter of the power to enjoy rhythm in prose and
more a matter of finding reason to attend to rhythm in prose. For a reader fluent in
the language of a given literary work, making considered choices about accent and
phrasing is far from foreign; linguistic judgment based on context and semantic im-
portance is an everyday affair. Thus, by intending to be sensitive to a literary work’s
rhythm a fluent reader’s construction of a plausible performative interpretation
is not far off. Though accents and phrasings must be chosen deliberately, the felt
reasons for these choices may be intuitive and non-verbal, sentences seemingly just
moving in particular ways. If this is right, consider what I have argued here a call for
readers’ attention.
Works Cited
Alsen, Eberhard, “The Catcher in the Rye,” in Harold Bloom, ed., J. D. Salinger (new edn,
New York, 2008), 145–73.
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NC, 1952).
Bernhard, Thomas, The Loser, tr., Jack Dawson ([1983]; New York, 2006).
67 Wood, How Fiction Works, 34.

68 Saintsbury, History of English Prose Rhythm, 224. Saintsbury is referring to the fifth chapter of Thomas
Browne’s Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or, a Discourse on Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk (1658), analyzed
by Saintsbury at 183–91.
69 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 678.
Budd, Malcolm, “Musical Movement and Aesthetic Metaphors,” in Aesthetic Essays (Oxford,
2008), 154–70.
Burroway, Janet, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (New York, 1992).
Burroway, Janet, Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft (3rd edn, New York, 2011).
Carroll, Noël, On Criticism (London, 2009).
Carver, Raymond, “Cathedral,” in Collected Stories, ed. William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll
(New York, 2009), 514–29.
Davis, Lydia, “Selfish,” in Samuel Johnson is Indignant: Stories ([1976]; New York, 2001), 138–9.
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for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings, ed. Joseph Tabbi ([1995]; New York, 2002),
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Gardner, John, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (New York, 1985).
Gass, William H., “The Music of Prose,” in Finding a Form: Essays ([1996]; Champaign, 2009),
313–26.
Goldman, Alan H., Philosophy and the Novel (Oxford, 2013).
Hall, Jason David, “Rhythm, Meter, and the Poetics of Abstraction,” in Peter Cheyne, Andy
Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics
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Hamilton, Andy, Aesthetics and Music (New York, 2007).
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(2009), 415–25.
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Practical Guide from New York’s Acclaimed Creative Writing School, Gotham Writers’ Workshop
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in Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics,
Music, Poetics (Oxford, 2019), C23.
Ochsner, Robert, “Rhythm in Literature and Low Style,” Style, 19.2 (1985), 258–81.
Oliver, Mary, A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry
(New York, 1994).
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Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 24.1 (2006), 99–104.
Patel, Aniruddh D. and Joseph R. Daniele, “An Empirical Comparison of Rhythm in Language
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Prose, Francine, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who
Want to Write Them (New York, 2006).
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163–72.
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Saunders, George, “Victory Lap,” in Tenth of December (New York, 2013), 3–27.
Sutton, Emma, “‘Putting Words on the Backs of Rhythm’: Woolf, ‘Street Music’, and The Voyage
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Updike, John, Rabbit Redux (New York, 1971).
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Index
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion,
appear on only one of those pages.
Figures are indicated by f following the page number.
acousmatic (experience of music), 31, 45, beat, see meter

56–57,  267 missing, 176
actualism, 74 Beauvoir, Simone de, 152
Adams, Ansel, 260, 261, 264 Beethoven, Ludwig van
Adorno, Theodor W., 143–45, 258, 288–89 Diabelli Variations (Op. 120), 159–60, 161
aesthetic appreciation, 364, 366–68 Third Symphony, 304
aesthetic experience, 366–68 Bell, Alexander Melville, 352
of literature, 366–68 John Milton’s Paradise Lost displayed as
aesthetic times (paradigm shifts in the arts, prose, 352f, 352
concerning temporal experience), Bell, Clive, 366
272,  284–85 Bell, David Charles, 352
Aka Pygmies, 202–3 John Milton’s Paradise Lost displayed as
Alperson, Philip, 125 prose, 352f, 352
Alsen, Eberhard, 404 Bergson, Henri, 4, 204, 272, 273, 275–78,
anthropology, of rhythm, 201 279,  283–84
anticipation, role of, in perception of rhythm, influence on Debussy, 283–84
282–83,  294–95 Berry, Chuck
Arapaho Wolf Dance singers, 199–200 “Johnny B Goode,” 295
architecture, rhythm in, 279, 326, 335 Blacking, John, 194
Aristides Quintilianus, 2–3 bodily movement, and rhythm, 1–2, 16, 18,
Aristotle, 2, 280–81 20, 21, 25, 30, 32–33, 38, 44,
Armantrout, Rae, 390 91–96, 112–13, 117, 161, 183, 259, 292,
Arom, Simha, 292 296–304,  331
attention, 82, 113, 115, 121, 187, 368–71 bodily agency, and rhythm, 152
bodily, 113 bodily rhythms, 96
mobility of, 115 kinesthesis, role in rhythm, 302
Attridge, Derrick, 248–49, 250f,  397–98 Boghossian, Paul, 23, 83–84
auditory perception, function of, 52 Bolton, Thaddeus L., 355
Australian aboriginal music, 224 Bordieu, Pierre, 120–21
Ayers, David, 376–77 Bradley, Dick, 147–48
Brahms, Johannes, 177
Bachelard, Gaston, 4, 120–21, 272, 273, 274, Symphony No. 4, 171, 177f, 177
275, 277–79, 280, 286, 288–89 breathing, and pulse, 111–12
The Dialectics of Duration, 278 Brogan, T. V. F., 263–64
The Poetics of Space, 278 Brown, Calvin S., 356–57
backbeat,  145–50 Budd, Malcolm, 23, 28, 44–45, 47, 368,
democratized beat, 148, 149, 151 394, 395
Barthes, Roland, 113–15 Bunting, Basil, 375
Baum, Paull Franklin, 398–400 Buswell, Guy T., 319–20
Beardsley, Monroe C., 358–60 Bynum, William F., 354–55
410 Index
Cage, John Danto, Arthur C., 92–93

Dream, 268 Darcy, Warren, 129–30
Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible), Davies, Stephen, 158, 162, 259
199–200 Davis, Lydia, 222
Carroll, Noël, 402 Debussy, Claude
Carver, Raymond Jeux,  283–84
“Cathedral,” 404 Delaunay, Sonia
Cerha, Friedrich Rhythm paintings, 310, 311–12, 313, 326
Spiegel VI,  121–22 Deleuze, Gilles, 204
Chabris, Christopher F., 369 Deliège, Célestin, 272, 278–79,
Chernoff, John, 205 285–86,  287–89
Chomsky, Noam, 191 Deutsch, Diana, 200–1
clades, 66, 74 Dewey, John, 91–93
Clark, Kenneth Diabelli, Anton, 159, 161
Raphael’s The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, dialogue form, 15
314–15, 314f, 320, 337 Diderot, Denis, 3, 320–21, 326, 327
Clarke, Eric, 51–52 Joseph-Marie Vien’s St Denis Preaching in
Clayton, Martin, 119–20, 121, 194., See also Gaul, 320, 321, 322f, 326
interaction, social Gabriel François Doyen’s The Miracle of St.
Clifton, Thomas, 122 Anthony’s Fire, 320, 321, 325f, 326
Collins, Wilkie disjunctive definition (cf. unifying, of
John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 352 rhythm), 37, 40
Coltrane, John, 102–4, 105 disposition (contrasted with capacity), 36–41
Garrison, Jimmy, 102–3, 104, 105 distributed cognition, and joint action, 188
Jones, Elvin, 102–3, 104, 105 Dorigny, Nicholas
conceptual holism (of music, poetry, and The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, after
dance), 31, 35, 332 Raphael, 315, 316f
conceptual interdependence (of music, Doyen, Gabriel François, The Miracle of St.
poetry, and dance; or entrainment Anthony’s Fire, 320, 321, 325f
and meter), 30, 34, 35, 392. See also duration, 4, 63–64, 67–69, 112–22
conceptual holism rhythmicized duration, 272, 273–78
Condon, William, 188 upper limit of, for perceiving rhythm, 65
content, perceptual, 76–77 Dyirbal, song poetry and rhythmic
continuity/discontinuity, 272, 274 accompaniment, 224
Cook, Nicholas, 255 dynamic thesis/account, see movement
Cooper, Grosvenor, 4
Crane, Tim, 171 Eitan, Zohar, 46
Creeley, Robert, 375, 380–89 Elias, Norbert, 116
“After Mallarmé,” 384–85, 389 Eliot, T. S., 376, 378
“As Real as Thinking,” 387–89 Ellis, H., 95
Erik Satie’s “loops” and Anton Webern’s emergent timing, 219–21
“reductions,” 382 emotionalism, appearance, 158, 161
“The Language,” 385–87 emotions, music as language of, 137–38,
Cunningham, Merce, 96, 333 156, 165
Empson, William, 264
Dahlhaus, Carl, 279–80 endogenous/internal rhythms, 184–85, 196
Dallapiccola, Luigi entrainment, 19–20, 31, 32, 117, 156, 159, 161,
schwebender rhythmus (floating 165, 171–79, 183–92, 221, 226–27, 294–
rhythm), 294 95, 308, 311, 316–17, 340
Dallas, E. S., 353, 354 as elucidation rather than scientific
dance, 2, 3, 16–17, 18, 26–38, 91–96, 331. explanation, 19–20, 32, 36–37
See also bodily movement; conceptual definition of, 184–85
holism; conceptual interdependence inter-individual/interpersonal, 164,  187
Danielsen, Anne, 205 eurhythmics, 96
Index 411
experimentation, rhythmic, 234, 238–39, 241 Haken–Kelso–Bunz (HKB) equation, 189

expression, in music, 50–51, 58, 125, Halbwachs, Maurice, 183–85, 196
139,  156–65 Haley, Bill, 153–54
arousalism, 156 Hamilton, Andy, 78–79, 89–90, 93, 110–11,
expression, performative, 268–69 121, 259, 331–32, 333–34, 392, 393
expressive quality, of music, 157, 158, 165 Hanslick, Eduard, 32, 115, 125
resemblance theory, of musical Harrell, Tom, 35
expressiveness (see resemblance) Hasty, Christopher, 4, 78–79, 110–11, 199,
Expressionism, German, 327–28 203, 204–5, 255, 256–57, 268, 269–70,
274, 280, 291–92, 294
filled vs empty time intervals (rhythms), 217 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 354–55
Fitch, W. Tecumseh, 227 Hemingway, Ernest
Flint, Frank Stuart, 375 “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” 403
flow, cf. fixed, abstract rhythm, 110, 265–66 Hepokoski, James, 129–30
Forkel, Johann Nicolaus, 137–38 Heraclitus,  1–2
Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik,  137–38 Herder, J. G., 137–39, 200
formalism, 125, 253–54 Higgins, Kathleen Marie, 89–90
enhanced formalism, 125, 139 Hindustani classical music, 157–58, 192
form, 272, 277–78 Holdeman, David, 349–50
form, musical, 126–27 Holder, Alan, 358
Fraisse, Paul, 219, 294, 295 Holliday, John, 362–63, 364, 365, 366
Fraleigh, Sondra, 94–95 Hopkins, Robert, 368
free verse (vers libre),  374–89 Huang, Juan, 80–81
Fry, Roger, 309, 326–27 Hughes, Langston, 199
Funkhouser, Eric, 25 Hulme, T. E., 375
humanism, philosophical (cf. naturalism), 17,
Gadamer, Hans-Georg,  284–85 26, 32, 93, 121, 259
Gaddis, William Hume, David, 15
JR, 403 Humphrey, Doris, 94–95
gagaku, 203 “Humpty-Dumpty,” 244f,  244–45
Gaiger, Jason, 335–36, 337, 339–40, 341 Hung, Tsun-Hui,  221–22
Raphael’s The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Husserl, Edmund, 272, 273, 275, 276–77
337–39,  340
Gallagher, Shaun, 302–3 illusion, problem of, 171
gamelan, 206 improvisation (in music and dance), 97, 101–
Balinese, 203 7, 111, 117, 119, 122, 280–81
Javanese, 203 contact improvisation, 97
Gass, William H., 392 Ingarden, Roman, 279
Gaver, William W., 56 intention (are there non-intentional
generative, rhythmic processes as, rhythms?), 17, 27–28, 91–94, 96–97.
127–28,  191 intentionalism, hypothetical vs moderate
generative grammar, Chomskian, 191 actual,  338–39
Ghosh, Nayan, 193 interaction, social, 116, 117, 183–96
Gibson, James J., 101, 163, 172, 179 interpretation, performative, 255–60, 269–70,
affordances, 163 400, 401–0, 405
Gilbert, Jeremy, 143 critical, 400
Ginsberg, Allen, 378 theories of (see intentionalism)
Goehr, Lydia, 125 intuition,  275–76
Goldie, Peter, 113 isochrony, 241, 243–46, 353
Goldman, Alan, 366, 401
Gracyk, Ted, 148 Jackendoff, Ray, 43, 184, 191
Granot, Roni Y., 46 Jackson, Michael
groove, 146, 241, 301 “Billie Jean,” 143–44, 144f,  150–51
Grossberg, Lawrence, 143 James, William, 105–6, 204, 368
412 Index
Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile, 96 Margolis, Joseph, 91–93

jazz, 101–7, 148 Massaro, Davide, 319
Jones, Mari Riess, 162, 184, 294–95 Matthen, M., 79–80
Jones, Tom, 381 Mattheson, Johann, 128, 156
Judson Dance Theater, 92–93 McAuley, Devin, 185–86
McTaggart, J. M. E., 204
Kandinsky, Wassily, 309 A-series and B-series, 204, 205, 206–8,
Kanizsa, Gaetano, 172–73 209,  210–11
Kanizsa triangle, 172f, 172–73, 179 meaning, see understanding
Kant, Immanuel, 275, 276–77, 278 melody, 29, 44–45, 80, 139, 162, 278, 376
Keats, John listening to, 292, 297, 298
“Hymn to Pan,” 236f memory, 282–83, 299
Keil, Charles, 147, 151 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 152, 301–2
Kendon, Adam, 188 Merriam, Alan, 201–2
Kinderman, William, 159 Mesoamerican Chinantec, 200
kinesthesis, 302 Messiaen, Olivier, 32, 279, 281–83
Kivy, Peter, 161, 162, 362, 363–64 Debussy’s music, 281–83
Klein, Christoph, 317–18, 320–21, 326, 327 metaphor, 5, 6, 21, 44, 157, 272, 277–78,
Klyn, Niall A., 222 288–89, 328, 332, 393
Koch, Heinrich Christoph, 4–5, metaphorical perception, 77, 83
127–35,  136–37 metaphor of music as language, 130–31
Ruhepunct, 128, 130–31 movement as metaphorical, 5, 6, 21, 44,
Schlagreihe, 128, 128f, 129f, 132 332, 393
Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, meter, 18, 19, 20, 34, 43, 67, 76, 77, 78, 89,
127–28,  131 127, 137–38, 144, 148–49, 159, 171–79,
Kortooms, Toine, 299 183–96, 241, 248–49, 263–64, 280, 293,
Kowler, Eileen, 318–19 349–59, 375–76, 377–78,  393
Kvifte, Tellef, 210–11 ambiguity of, 20, 80, 221
Kylián, Jiří, 94, 333–34 as modeling the virtues, 1–2
hyper-meter,  130
Lamarque, Peter, 401 meter and beat, 78, 89, 148–49, 221
Langer, Suzanne K., 92 meter vs speech rhythm (meter–rhythm
language, metaphor of music as, debate, metrical abstraction), 349–59
130–31,  137–38 in prose cf. poetry, 398–400
language, rhythms of, compared to musical pulse without meter, 119
rhythms, 200 Meyer, Leonard B., 4, 157–58
Large, Edward, 184, 294–95 Miall, Chris, 219
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 273–74 mimesis (imitation), 1–2, 3, 6, 102,
Lerdahl, Fred, 43, 184, 191 202–3,  280–81
Levinson, Jerrold, 58, 59, 88, 125–26, 165, 394, monorhythm, 69, 72, 74
395, 400, 401 polyrhythm, 73, 74
Lewis, Penelope, 219 Moore, Steven T., 185–86, 220
literature, rhythm and, 362–72, 395–402 Moran, Nikki, 119
Locke, David, 180–81 movement, and rhythm, 1–4, 16–38, 43–52,
Locke, John, 172–73, 265 76–89, 331, 393
Lomax, Alan, 190–91 and timing, 219
Cantometrics,  190–91 bodily (see bodily movement)
London, Justin, 78, 79, 160, 164–65, 184, 191 dynamic thesis/account (that music moves
Lussy, Mathis, 257, 268–70 literally), 2–3, 16, 21, 26, 32, 38 (see also
Lutoslawski, Witold, 206–7 movement)
motionless moving, 35
MacDougall, Hamish G., 185–86, 220 movement criterion (that understanding
Maliphant, Russell, 333–34 music involves capacity to move with
Mandelbaum, Erik, 365–66 it), 32
Index 413
music and movement, associations Essay on English Metrical Law,

of,  46–48 350–51,  352–53
non-spatial movement,  21–32 Paxton, Steve, 97
periodic vs discrete, 219 Peacocke, Christopher, 48–50, 83–84
resonance frequency of locomotion, 220 Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Still Life with
See also order-within-movement (order-in- Pottery Jars,” 48–49
movement); metaphor Pearson, Ewan, 143
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus pentameter, iambic, 248–49, 374–75,
“Dissonance” Quartet, 131, 135–39, 135f, 376,  398–99
136f, 137f perception, see multimodal; auditory
“Jupiter” Symphony, 130–31 perceptual synchrony, 218
multimodal perception/perceptual content, performance,  233–34
76, 80, 89 Peters, Deniz, 255
cross modal perception, 175 phenomenology, of time and rhythm, 27, 273,
Murray, Lindley, 351 291–304
music, see acousmatic; conceptual holism; time-consciousness, Husserl’s
conceptual interdependence; emotions; phenomenology of, 296–98
expression; formalism; improvisation; photography, compared to music, 260
language; movement; popular music; pictorial experience, 307–26, 336
resemblance; sonicism; sounds; static Peirce, C. S., 105–6
thesis; tones; understanding Pitjantjatjara, song poetry and rhythmic
accompaniment, 224
Nanay, Bence, 367 plainchant, 35, 36, 294
Nancarrow, Conlon, 211, 340 Plath, Sylvia
natural kind term (rhythm as), 30 The Bell Jar, 369–70,  371–72
natural vs intentional rhythms, 91 Plato, 1–2, 15
Nelson, Peter, 120–21 Podro, Michael
Newton, Isaac, 273, 274 Tintoretto’s Vincenzo Morosini,  308–9
“Scholium,” Principia, 273 poetry, 233–52, 349–59,  374–89
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3 as opportunity for experimentation, 238–39
Apollonian–Dionysian distinction, 3 conceptual holism/interdependence, with
nominalism, 74, 287 music and dance (see conceptual)
normativity, 272 interdependence and conceptual holism
North Indian classical music, 4–5 reading aloud, 349–51
Nussbaum, Martha, 115 rhythm, poetic, 233–52, 374–89
poiesis, 281
O’Callaghan, Casey, 77, 81, 85–86 Pollock, Jackson
Ochsner, Robert, 402–3 Convergence, 326
John Updike’s Rabbit Redux, 403 polyrhythm, see monorhythm
olfaction, rhythm produced through, 342 Pope, Alexander, 374–75
Olson, Charles, 378, 383 popular music, 141–52, 212
Omond, T. S., 353, 354, 359–60 contrasted with folk and art music, 141
order-within-movement (order-in- Poulet, George, 365
movement/order of movement, rhythm Pound, Ezra, 16–17, 375, 376–77, 378–79, 381,
understood as), 1–2, 16, 31, 93, 279 382, 383
Powers, Richard
Paddison, Max, 141 Orfeo, 199–200
painting, rhythm in, 279, 307–26, 335 pragmatism, 105
parallels between music and, 51, 309 relational perception, 105
Palmer, John D., 212 Printz, Wolfgang Caspar, 179–80
Pasler, Jann, 283–84 Prinz, Jesse, 365–66
Patel, Aniruddh D., 187, 200–1 projection (of qualities, and of beats), 17, 121,
Patmore, Coventry, 350–51, 353, 204–5, 235, 248, 394
354–56,  359–60 proto-rhythm,  17
414 Index
pulse, see meter Salinger, J. D.

punctuation,  125–35 Catcher in the Rye, 404
Pythagoras,  266–67 Sartre, Jean–Paul, 152–53, 255,
261–62,  264–65
quality space, 21, 26 Saunders, George, 224, 397
Schachner, Adena, 187
Raban, Jonathan, 403 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 3
Ramachandran, Ranjani, 194–95 Schenker, Heinrich, 129–30
Ramler, Karl Wilhelm, 130–31 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3
reading, silent, 35, 363–64 Schuller, Gunther, 148
repetition (role in rhythm), 63–65 Schumann, Robert, 113, 114
resemblance, music as resembling human Kreisleriana, 113
expression of emotion (resemblance Schütz, Alfred, 32, 117–20, 121, 183–84,
theory of musical expressiveness), 188, 194
50–51,  156–65 inner time, 19, 117
rhythm mutual tuning-in, 19, 117–18, 183–84,
African traditions of, 149 194, 195
Australian aboriginal traditions of, 224 Scriabin, Alexander, 116
definition of, 16, 31, 62, 78, 137, 148, Prelude, Op. 74, No. 2, 116
280, 393 Scripture, Edward Wheeler, 355–56, 358–59
encoded vs embodied, 255–65 The Elements of Experimental Phonetics,
as form (rhythmicized duration, large-scale 355–56,  356f
notion of rhythm), 4–5, 272, 273–78 Scruton, Roger, 5, 22, 23, 30, 41, 45–46, 57, 77,
instrumental vs vocal, 221, 224–25 83, 84, 88, 328, 334, 393, 395
lived, 110–11, 292 sculpture, rhythm in, 279, 335
monorhythm, 69, 72, 74 Shaw-Miller, Simon, 309
objective vs subjective dimensions of, Shorter, Wayne, 107–8
defined,  291–92 “Footprints,” 107, 108
perceptual limits of, 173, 217–18 silence, 96, 122, 159
soundless,  331–42 Simons, Daniel J., 369
South Asian traditions of, 157–58, 192 Simons, Peter, 331–32, 334–35, 342
and timbre, 293 Slade (Wolverhampton rock band), 29
Richards, I. A., 357–59 “Merry Xmas Everybody,” 29
Practical Criticism,  357–58 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 363–64
Ridley, Aaron, 89–90 Snyder, Bob, 300–1
Rizzolatti, Giacomo, 164 Socrates, 1–2, 15
Robinson, Marilynne, 397 sonata form, 131–35
rock music/rock ’n’ roll, 32, 143–44, 147 as rhythm, 131–35
Rodenmeyer, Lanei M., 301 sonicism (view that music is exclusively
Roholt, Tiger C., 302–3, 304 sonic), 31, 40
Beethoven, Third Symphony, 304 sounds (and music), 62, 180
Tame Impala’s “Elephant,” 303, 304 sound-producing events, 52
Rose, Simon, 111 space, 5, 21–26, 45–46, 286
between, part 1,  111–12 quality space, 23–26
Rosen, Charles, 131–32 Stallings, Lauri, 97
The Classical Style,  131–32 static thesis/account (that music does not
Rosenberg, Raphael, 317–18, 320–21, move), 7, 23, 26, 63, 78n5
326, 327 Stolnitz, Jerome, 368
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3, 200 stress, cf. accent, 298–97
Rudinow, Joel, 149 Stynes, Frederik, 186
subjectivity, 272, 273
saccades, 317 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 126–28, 129–30,
Sachs, Curt, 185–86, 190–91, 196, 199 132, 134
Saintsbury, George, 374–75, 398–99, 405 Schlagfolge, 126–27, 127f, 132
Index 415
syllable timing, speaking vs singing, 224–25 Varèse, Edgard, 287, 293

length contrasts (in Vedic, early Chinese, and Vergo, Peter, 309
Aboriginal Australian poetry), 223–24 vestibular system, influence on metrical
syncopation, 151, 178–79, 180, 304, 350 perception, 44, 77, 80–89
syntax, cf. semantics, 252 vibrations, of objects, 52, 87–88
Vien, Joseph-Marie, St. Denis Preaching in
Taipale, Joona, 302 Gaul, 320, 321, 322f, 323f, 324f
tala, North Indian, 192 virtual causality (governing musical
technology, effect on rhythm, 209, 342 movement), 29, 45, 55, 394
eye-or gaze-tracking, 308, 317–18, 319–20, virtues, the, and rhythm, 1–2
326, 339 Vivas, Eliseo, 368
laboratory, and investigation of rhythm, 355
Tenzer, Michael, 190–91 Webster, Noah, 351
Thaut, Michael H., 79 Western art music, 205, 272, 287
time, philosophy of, 273 Westling, Donald, 357–58
absolutism vs relationism, 273–74 Whitehead, A. N., 204
aesthetic time, historical time, experimental Will, Udo, 274
time, 285 Williams, William Carlos, 378–81, 382–84
temporality, 272, 273, 285 “A Red Wheelbarrow,” 379–80
temps durée vs temps espace, 275–76, 280 Wimsatt, W. K., 358–60
time-consciousness, Husserl’s Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 28
phenomenology of, 273, 296–98 seeing-as,  20
Tintoretto, Jacopo, 308–9 Wollheim, Richard, 163, 255
portrait Vincenzo Morosini,  308–9 seeing-in, 20, 163
Todd, Neil P. McAngus, 157 Wood, James, 404
tones (musical, contrasted with sounds), 29, Woolf, Virginia, 362–63, 398–99
45–46, 83, 138, 280 Mrs Dalloway, 363
tone or tonal languages, 223–24 work–performance distinction,  255–60
totality,  277–78 work songs, 183–84
touch, role in perception of beat, 80–81
as involving movement, 87–88 Yeats, W. B.
Trainor, Laurel J., 80–81 “Adam’s Curse,” 349–50–,  359–60
Trevarthen, Colwyn, 120–21
Zuckerkandl, Viktor, 5, 23
understanding (music), 26, 34, 35, 36, 39, 45, Zurbarán, Francisco de
59, 125–26,  160–61 “Still Life with Pottery Jars,” 48–49
Updike, John, 402–3

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The Philosophy of

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

List of Illustrations xiii

10. Rhythms, Resemblance, and Musical Expressiveness 156

23. Leaving It Out: Rhythm and Short Form in the Modernist Poetic

8.1. Sulzer’s Schlagfolge 127

Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music (Routledge, 2011). Most recently, he

Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison

1. Historical Considerations

Recent neglect notwithstanding, philosophical traditions have long acknowledged

continues in contemporary process philosophy, influencing thinkers, including

1 Plato, Republic, Bk 3, 397a–​401a; Laws, Bk 7, 798d–​802e; Laws, Bk 2, 665a.

For Aristides, then, rhythm applies to proportionality in static objects, physical

In 1802 (though published posthumously, another half-​century later), Schelling

6 Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 17.

7 Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 110–​11.

8 Elaine P. Miller, “Harnessing Dionysus.”

9 Schopenhauer, Will and Presentation, 306.

10 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 10 (“Epigrams and Arrows” §33).

11 Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 29.

Drawing from such nineteenth-​century sources, Bergson’s distinctly modernist

2. Recent Times: Attention and Neglect

12 Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration, 124.

13 Cooper and Meyer, Rhythmic Structure of Music.

14 Hasty, Meter as Rhythm.

15 Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought, 69, further discussed at 243–​59.

fundamental significance, as has been emphasized by Martin Clayton’s work on the

16 Clayton, Time in Indian Music.

17 Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 14.

18 Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 292.

3. Outline of Chapters

Enhancing its interdisciplinary ambition, this book is organized not territorially,

communication and composition; rhythm at the base of cognitive and linguistic

rhythm in expressiveness supports a combination of the “resemblance” and “conta-

to conceptualize rhythm. Moreover, he contends that rhythm in painting can

Andy Hamilton, David Macarthur, Roger Squires, Matthew Tugby,

The advantages of the dialogue form—​in particular, the advantage of openness—​

1 Hamilton “Rhythm and Stasis,” 29, 40.

1. Projection, rhythm, and proto-​rhythm

(palace green, durham)

3 Pound, ABC of Reading, 14.

redundant. I favor instead Clayton’s view of rhythm emerging spontaneously in

10 Clayton, “Entrainment”; London “Metric Entrainment.”

11 Further discussed at Section 4.

12 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 34.

talk of the listener interpreting or hearing-​as—​a metaphor that does seem

2. The movement in music

(bean social café, durham)

13 Discussed in Cooper and Meyer, Rhythmic Structure of Music, 171–​4.

16 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 40.

essentially a spatial notion, and so his idea of non-​spatial movement, in music

rhythmical movement simply on the grounds that it involves a metaphysically

Dynamicus posits in the case of rhythm. For quality-​space theorists, such a

19 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 41.

can be applied to all properties, including geometrical, causal, and functional

(later that day, palace green, durham)

skep: Dynamicus—​when we consider the proposal of Metaphysicus, I hold that

21 Funkhouser, Logical Structure, 25.

22 Cowling, “Instantiation as Location”; Mumford and Anjum, Causes from Powers.

23 See Nussbaum, “Musical Perception.”

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1 Plato, Republic, Bk 3, 397a–401a; Laws, Bk 7, 798d–802e; Laws, Bk 2, 665a.

In 1802 (though published posthumously, another half-century later), Schelling

6 Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 17.

7 Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 110–11.

9 Schopenhauer, Will and Presentation, 306.

10 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 10 (“Epigrams and Arrows” §33).

11 Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 29.

Drawing from such nineteenth-century sources, Bergson’s distinctly modernist

12 Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration, 124.

13 Cooper and Meyer, Rhythmic Structure of Music.

15 Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought, 69, further discussed at 243–59.

16 Clayton, Time in Indian Music.

17 Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 14.

18 Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 292.

The advantages of the dialogue form—in particular, the advantage of openness—

1 Hamilton “Rhythm and Stasis,” 29, 40.

1. Projection, rhythm, and proto-rhythm

3 Pound, ABC of Reading, 14.

11 Further discussed at Section 4.

12 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 34.

talk of the listener interpreting or hearing-as—a metaphor that does seem

2. The movement in music

13 Discussed in Cooper and Meyer, Rhythmic Structure of Music,  171–4.

16 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 40.

essentially a spatial notion, and so his idea of non-spatial movement, in music

Dynamicus posits in the case of rhythm. For quality-space theorists, such a

19 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 41.

skep: Dynamicus—when we consider the proposal of Metaphysicus, I hold that

21 Funkhouser, Logical Structure, 25.

24 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 26, 29.

26 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §527.

Understanding here is like understanding a sentence—it involves a meaningful

27 Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, Introduction and Ch. 4.

28 Harman, Change in View.

29 Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 229.

32 Scruton, Understanding Music, 61.

34 Plato, Laws, Bk 2, 665a.

38 Clayton et al., “In Time with the Music,” 2.

39 London, Hearing in Time, 12.

41 Pound, ABC of Reading, 14.

44 Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 26.

was right, rhythm is “order in change”45—though as we have seen in the discus-

Rhythm is an order of changes of qualities in time that strikes us as meaningful—

form of description. In the vital mode of description, physical-pause or sound-

Cowling, Sam, “Instantiation as Location,” Philosophical Studies, 167.3 (2014), 667–82.

1 Lerdahl and Jackendoff, Generative Theory of Tonal Music, 36, 12.

Malcolm Budd provides a characterization of music and our experience of it:

One consequence of this conception of music is that “music as an art-form is not

5 Budd, Music and the Emotions, x.

6 Budd, Music and the Emotions, x.

7 Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 3.

8 Scruton, Aesthetics of Music,  19–20.

9 Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 221.

10 Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 51.

16 Peacock, “The Perception of Music,” 257–8.

18 Peacock, “The Perception of Music,” 263–4.

19 Peacock, “The Perception of Music,” 263.

20 Peacock, “The Perception of Music,” 265.

23 Kivy, Sound Sentiment, 51.

30 Clarke, “Motion in Music,” 225.

view sounds as the object-vibrations that are caused by sound-producing events. So

normally be produced by events of various kinds occurring in our environment—

37 Gjerdingen, “Apparent Motion in Music?”, 142.

44 Levinson, “Authentic Performance,” 83.

6. Coping with Complexity: Clades