Groove.

A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance

Tiger C. Roholt
Bloomsbury Academics, 2014, 175 pp, $ 29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781441166272.

Reviewed by Clément Canonne, University of Burgundy

This book is a welcome addition to the ever-growing field of the philosophy of music. It
tackles with a lot of clarity an overlooked subject – the phenomenon of groove – which is
crucial in the appreciation of a great number of popular music genres (jazz, reggae, funk,
rhythm and blues, hip-hop…). Groove is this “quality of music that makes people tap their
feet, rock their head and get up and dance” (Madison 2006, p. 201). While a central
phenomenon for listeners, dancers and, of course, musicians themselves – which Roholt
shows with an illuminating example from the Beatles’ Love Me Do recording session – it
remains very mysterious, as testified by the difficulty we seem to have in defining the very
concept of groove; and yet we all have a clear sense of how groove music make us feel when
listening to tunes such as Herbie Hancock’s Hang Up Your Hang Ups or James Brown’s Cold
Sweat. In this book, Roholt’s endeavor is thus to clarify the feel that arises in the musical
experience of a groove, by answering two major questions:
1) What exactly do we hear when we hear a groove?
2) What is the role of the body and bodily movements in such an experience?

In chapter 1, Roholt introduces the question of musical nuances – all those tiny (and
sometimes not so tiny) deviations in pitch or in duration made by the musicians when
performing. According to Roholt, groove is largely a matter of micro-timing nuances. Micro-
timing nuances explain why two parts identical in their rhythmic notation can actually sound
very differently; in the present case, it can explain why one part grooves while the other does
not, or why one part achieves the right kind of groove while the other does not. A general
problem is that such musical nuances are said to be ineffable (Raffman 1993), our capacity for
pitch or duration discrimination being far more precise than our music-theoretical concepts
(C-sharp, eighth-note, and so on). Roholt addresses this problem by claiming that musical
nuances may not be effable but their objectives – the fact that a musician performs a musical
nuance for a reason (such as: “I want to brighten my sound here”, “I want to play this phrase
with an elastic feel”…) – clearly are. Indeed, we can discuss these nuance objectives not only
by indirect descriptions – trying to render these nuance objectives by carefully describing the
perceptual experience that they elicit – but also by referring to recording or performance
examples that are shared in a given culture or community. This should not be seen as an
escape strategy from the ineffability problems as the musicians are themselves much more
concerned with what the micro-timing variations accomplish – eliciting the right sort of
groove – than they are concerned with the micro-timing nuances themselves.

In chapter 2, Roholt tries to identify the listening attitudes that can induce the listener to have
a groove experience. The bulk of the discussion rests on the opposition between “analytical”
perception and what Roholt calls “engaged” perception. Roholt claims that analytically
focusing on the performance’s micro-timing nuances (which is the point of view endorsed in
the empirical studies done by pianist-researcher Vijay Iyer, discussed at length by Roholt)
modifies our ordinary perception and disrupts the experience of groove, for at least three
reasons. Firstly, grooves are gestalts, holistic experiences that depend on the perception of the
music as a whole; their sense thus depends on their role in the whole. Secondly, some nuances
can only play their role when they operate in the background of perception, and not in the
role of figure. Roholt draws here on an example discussed by Merleau-Ponty. Painters usually
add reflections in the eyes that enliven the face of a portrait. But this detail must stay in the
background of perception in order to function properly: as soon as we focus on it, the “gestalt
of enlivening” disappears. Like the reflections which direct our gaze towards the perception
of a certain gestalt, micro-timing nuances need to stay in the background in order to mediate
our perception of the music, guide our hearing towards the interlocking rhythmic patterns or
the temporal tensions between two lines, and foster the feeling of groove. Thirdly, some
perceptions need to remain indeterminate or ambiguous in order to produce their effects.
Roholt draws here on the Müller-Lyer illusion. The peculiar feeling we have when seeing the
Müller-Lyer lines is due to the ambiguity of our perception – we effectively perceive the lines
to be neither of the same lengths nor of different lengths. This feeling disappears as soon as
we try to clarify our perception, for example by making the effort to confirm that the lines are
actually of the same length. In a similar way, by allowing the micro-timing nuances to remain
indeterminate or ambiguous, we perceive the musical parts both as rhythmically tight (far
from the ample rubato that can be used by classical musicians) and as
elastic/pushing/pulling/leaning, etc. This ambiguity plays a crucial role in the groove feeling.

According to Roholt, this groove-inducing listening attitude is not so much a matter of

propositional knowledge (knowing certain facts about grooves) than a matter of procedural
knowledge (a practical know-how, tagged as a “facility for groove” by Roholt) involving the
body and actual bodily movements. The last two chapters (3 and 4) are thus dedicated to
clarifying the role of the body in this “facility for groove” listeners seem to possess, using
Merleau-Ponty’s concept of motor-intentionality (see Merleau-Ponty 2012). Perceiving a
groove involves the body in a strong way: our body is not only moved by the music, but also
actively directed towards the music. This feeling that arises from the motor-intentional
movements directed towards music – the dynamical bodily exploration of music –precisely is
the feel of a groove. As such, groove is not only a quality of the experience we have when we
listen to groove music but also a direct result of the activity of our bodies. According to
Roholt, “getting” a groove involves exploring the temporal tensions of the music through
one’s body: “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 perceptual qualities because they are felt in and by the body as a bodily
disequilibrium” (p. 112). That bodily feel is thus more than a form of embodied knowledge,
which conveys something to us about the localization of our body in musical time: it is also
the central aspect of the aesthetic appreciation of groove music.
The book concludes with a few considerations on the ontology of music. If grooves – and
other musical nuances – are such an important part of our musical experience, how does this
reflect on our ontology of musical works? Are the groove-inducing effects (and other
expressive/somatic effects music can produce) part of the performance’s properties or
constitutive properties of the musical work itself? In the case of classical music, where
musical works are generally thought of as abstract types (Dodd 2007), Roholt argues that
nuance types could be constitutive properties of the works, along with pitch classes, relative
durations, instrumental timbres, etc. To my mind, this is just another way to say that
performing practices in which the composition take place are part of the identity of the works
themselves (see Davies 2001); indeed, these performance practices typically establish rules
and norms in the use of musical nuances (rubato, intonation, articulation…) by the performers.
In the case of popular music, where musical works are generally considered to be the
recordings themselves (Gracyk 1996), Roholt argues that our ontology should include not
only musical nuances (which are preserved by the recording technology) but also the effects
of such nuances. This leads Roholt to suggest an idealist ontology, inspired by Roman
Ingarden’s view of literary works, where musical works are intentional objects, requiring a
certain kind of active perception from the listener to exist in their complete, non-schematic
form. This view is certainly interesting but its presentation here is too sketchy to be anything
else than programmatic; it would need much more careful argumentation in order to
overcome the traditional objections that can be make against this kind of position, for
example that such a view does not allow us to distinguish between the work and the
subjective experience one has of the work, or that it transforms an object which is intrinsically
public, with a certain number of objective properties, into something private and, at least
partially, non-shareable. (For other objections that can be made against idealism in music
ontology, see Levinson 2000).

With its many thoroughly discussed examples, Roholt’s account of groove is very engaging,
and I find much to agree with. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of motor-intentionality is indeed a
stimulating one, and can certainly help us to understand the fundamental role played by the
body in any musical experience, beyond the single case of groove music. As Roholt rightly
puts it, the relation between the music and our bodies is not unidirectional. Sure, our body
moves to the music, and music elicits a wide range of corporeal responses, from exuberant
dancing to slight moves of the hands or fingers. But it is also important to stress that music’s
meaning – for example its emotional content – is also at least partially constructed through
our body, and that the understanding of music requires a bodily exploration of the numerous
movements of tension and relaxation – be they melodic, harmonic or rhythmic – that are at
the center of the vast majority of the music in the world.
The one major regret I have is that throughout his book Roholt seems to entertain a slightly
caricatural vision of empirical and analytical researches on groove. If some studies on
expressiveness indeed ask their subjects to focus on micro-timing nuances, in order to
measure their level of precision in the detection of such musical nuances (see Clarke 1989),
the majority of empirical studies dedicated to the phenomenon of groove are rather concerned
with determining the musical features that can induce for the listener the groove feeling, by
typically asking listeners to rate this feeling while listening to different musical samples (see
Ashley 2014 for a recent literature review). There is no reason to assume that such studies are
driven by an underlying operationalism, where the very concept of groove would be defined
by a certain number of acoustical parameters; it is rather a matter of finding the acoustical and
musical foundations that allow the experience of groove to emerge – the set of acoustical and
musical properties on which the phenomenon of groove supervenes, to put it otherwise, as it
should be clear to everyone that only certain kinds of music are able to induce a groove
experience. As I see it, the phenomenological approach championed by Roholt, aiming at
clarifying what really constitutes the groove experience, is thus fully compatible with the
approach of empirical musicologists or psychologists, which aim at clarifying the acoustical
and musical conditions allowing for such an experience.
In this regard, it is surprising that Roholt makes so much of micro-timing nuances to explain
the groove phenomenon while empirical researches tend to show that such nuances only play
a marginal role (if any) in the groove feeling. For example, recent studies showed that “two
main factors (beat salience and event density) explained most of the feeling of the groove as
rated by the listeners, regardless of excerpt genre. Notably, micro-timing had little effect,
suggesting that the “feel” typically attributed to small variations in timing or voice
asynchrony may be unimportant for grooves” (Ashley 2014, p. 158; see also Madison and
Sioros 2014). Other factors seem much more important to groove than micro-timing nuances:
repetition (groove is often built through repetition, and that may explain why classical music,
with its emphasis on development or variation rather than on immediate repetition, is not
often groove-inducing); a medium-fast tempo; rhythmical and metrical tensions (achieved
through syncopation, a high density of notes in the faster metrical levels, or the interlocking
rhythmical patterns typical of funk music); and a strongly felt downbeat (on the first beat of
each measure).
But these few reservations do not diminish the great pleasure I had reading this book, which
opens very fertile directions for the articulation and elaboration of a truly embodied aesthetics
of music, and which should encourage philosophers of music to put the body back on the
agenda in no uncertain terms.

References:

ASHLEY, Richard (2014). “Expressiveness in Funk” in D. FABIAN, R. TIMMERS and E.

SCHUBERT, Expressiveness in Music Performance, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p.
154-169.
CLARKE, Eric (1989). “The Perception of Expressive Timing in Music”, Psychological
Research, 51, p. 2-9.
DAVIES, Stephen (2001). Musical Works and Performances, Oxford, Oxford University
Press.
DODD, Julian (2007). Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology, Oxford, Oxford University
Press.
GRACYK, Theodore (1996). Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, Durham, Duke
University Press.
LEVINSON, Jerrold (2000). “Review of Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music”, The
Philosophical Review, 109/4, p. 608-614
MADISON, Guy (2006). “Experiencing Groove Induced by Music Consistency and
Phenomenology”, Music Perception, 24/2, p. 201-208.
MADISON, Guy and SIOROS, George (2014). “What Musicians Do To Induce the Sensation
of Groove in Simple and Complex Melodies, and How Listeners Perceive It”, Frontiers in
Psychology, 5/894, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00894.
MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice (2012). Phenomenology of Perception, New-York, Routledge.
RAFFMAN, Diana (1993). Language, Music and Mind, Cambridge, MIT Press.