On Rhythm

 

Redmoon Drum Tree

 

Selected entries from Dynaxiom

3052. The door to jazz is through rhythm. If you don't like jazz, your body probably doesn't understand swing--or it actually does, and your mind gets in the way.

2595. The 'job description' of a songwriter can now include "contributed to a machine learning training set" as one of the skills. In the past, contributing an original riff or rhythm was a songwriting skill or collaborative contribution. Now you can just put any old sound file in the data set. (7/2021)

2507. Drummers are rhythm 'finessers'.

2267. Time needs rhythm to give it form.

2175. Rhythm is a placeholder or container for words.

2039. Music is a form of temporary "marching for the mind" as it focuses on a rhythmic activity that involves both body and mind in focused areas of the brain. It frees the brain from excessive rumination. (Hermann Rauschning said, "Marching diverts men's thoughts. Marching kills thought. Marching makes an end of individuality.")

1975. As long as the rhythmic structure supports it, music can be built in many layers, but only to the point where the music disintegrates and the many parts have nothing in common. (A good example is the complexity in African music where each player/rhythm dovetails with every other player and naturally maintains its cohesion). (1998)

1927. Musical rhythm is always potentially embodied, i.e. it has to be played with the body in order for it to fully exist. You can make a machine make rhythms, but it never involves the body, except the fingertips typing the code. We play musical instruments by using the fingers primarily, but the whole body has to move with it, as well as the spirit and mind.

1863. Rhythm is something you have to surrender to.

1862. Beats are the 'slang' of rhythm.


1498. Both prosody and rhythmic displacement enhance or interfere with meaning. In speech, it is a strict requirement for comprehension; in music, it is a tool of creativity. Prose can sometimes have a musical quality, but the phrases are too long to map to specific rhythms. In the past few decades we have moved towards Beats rather than rhythms, with longer prose-like phrases loosely-draped over them. Rhythm's connection with the body is through the hands and feet, capable of producing marching rhythms (primarily in 2/4 or 4/4), as a way for humans to 'flock' or 'entrain'. This is what makes music so interesting as a bottom-up phenomenon, emerging from the body, extending out for group cohesion. While electronically-produced beats and rhythms have become evolutionarily established at this point, they have also broken the connection to the body, and are produced top-down from the intellect. The two may become synergistic, but it hasn't happened yet because pop music always has some element of fashion, which creates a sense that we have to be primarily concerned with what's new—or what should be new.

1348. My definition of improvisation: taking set structures and using developed skills in rhythm, harmony, and melody to create organized sounds that comport with the set structures in a listener's brain. When you define (or create a Definition for) something it helps you understand what's involved. Jazz uses 'instructions' (the 'Head') so the players can create a definition. But they are simple instructions, or no more complicated than necessary. Anything more is less defined.

1208. Placing music into complex artificial systems that have delays is both a problem and an interesting idea. Reverberation defines the dimensions of a place but can interfere with rhythmic coherence. The size of the room will naturally dictate the note durations that are feasible, but in artificial ambient worlds, both the music and venue are never co-dependent. That is one of the characteristics of electronic music that is superior to traditional acoustic music.

0979. Rhythm has the power to soften dissonance, something melody and harmony can never do because they are more vulnerable to creating dissonance. Rhythm can be 'dissonant', but that is only a temporal displacement.

0965. Music doesn't have the problem of being silent when it is written. Therefore, music is more connected with language than writing, as it automatically speaks for itself. Moreover, the rhythms inherent in speech move it more towards music than language. Once you add a musical element to language, it separates itself from the text symbols, and how the brain interprets them.

0923. Some speech is in natural triple meter; for example the phrase, 'oranges are sweeter than apples in May' naturally falls in 3/4 or 6/8 as spoken (at least as one uninterrupted phrase with even durations.) People are innately musical when they speak, and never realize the melodic and rhythmic nature of language. Music and language are natural extensions of each other.

0547. Melody needs rhythm to survive.

0427. The 'seed' of Africa can be relevant to us all: it is especially relevant in music as it brings together the 'acoustic' elements of social order (the oral tradition) and the use of rhythm and beats to communicate and form unique cultures.

0410(04). Beats are to rhythms as drum machines are to percussionists.

0166. The power of music is not so much in the rhythm and melody, but rather in its 'outside' elements, cultural connotation and the context and era in which it is created and/or performed. When you hear a piece of music, it activates all types of knowledge. Music is the adhesive that bonds experience and memory.

Poe: How does rhythm affect the shape of music?