The fundamental claim of this thesis is
that music perception and cognition are embodied activities. This
means that they depend crucially on the physical constraints and
enablings of our sensorimotor apparatus, and also on the sociocultural
environment in which our music-listening and -producing capacities
come into being. This claim shows a strong similarity to that
of John Blacking (1973), who wrote, "Music is a synthesis
of cognitive processes which are present in culture and in the
human body: the forms it takes, and the effects it has on people,
are generated by the social experiences of human bodies in different
cultural environments." (Blacking 1973: 89) I shall present
some further evidence in its support, by showing how exemplary
rhythms of certain kinds of music may relate to such embodied
processes. I shall argue that rhythm perception and production
involve a complex, whole-body experience, and that much of the
structure found in music incorporates an awareness of the embodied,
situated role of the participant. The claim that music perception
and cognition are embodied activities also means that they are
actively constructed by the listener, rather than passively transferred
from performer to listener. In particular, the discernment of
entities such as pulse and meter from a given piece of music are
not perceptual inevitabilities for any human being, but are strongly
dependent on the person s culturally contingent listening strategies.
In addition, I argue that certain kinds of rhythmic expression
in what I shall call groove-based music are directly related not
only to the role of the body in music-making, but also to certain
cultural aesthetics that privilege this role.
The work in this thesis lies on the outskirts of most contemporary research in rhythm perception and cognition. In particular, it avoids the Pandora's-box searches for beat-finders (Large 1994) and models of expressive tempo variation (Todd 1989, Desain & Honing 1996, Clarke 1988), in favor of a focus on somewhat different elements of rhythm. The aforementioned work has tended to focus on models derived from European classical music, which are valid but do not apply as universally as they might claim. Many of the aspects of rhythm that I discuss here have direct relevance to the performance and perception of popular musics, dance musics, and music that lacks a concept of "score" or "composer." The musics that concern me most directly in the present work are those that have arisen from African cultures, both in their native and diasporic manifestations. To this end I have drawn extensively from the writings and teachings of the Ghanaian master percussionist C. K. Ladzekpo (1995), as well as the theoretical and empirical discourses of many other musicians working in these genres. This work thus represents a nexus of cognitive-scientific ideas with cultural and artistic considerations.
I wish to make clear immediately that I myself am a professional pianist, improvisor, and composer, associated with the vast genre known as jazz. (The term "jazz" is an ambiguous and even controversial one, which I accept, for now, as referring to a certain African-American cultural model with hugely varied manifestations.) Many of the ideas in this thesis grew out of my experiences working in jazz, funk, and hip-hop bands over the last decade. I entered this field because I saw it as a way of studying what fascinated me the most about the music of which I am a part -- namely, its rhythmic vitality. As I became acquainted with the rather young field of music perception and cognition, I became frustrated by the overwhelming incompatibility between the priorities of the music cognition research program and my own musical experiences. A majority of research on rhythm perception and cognition has either focused on a style of music that exists in a rather rarefied form in the world today, namely European classical music from the Renaissance period to the pre-modern period. If any sense of urgency is detected in these pages, it is most probably because of my desire to surmount this issue, which I see as a problem of scope. I hope the reader will indulge me in such instances.
This thesis is divided into somewhat independent sections. Chapter 3 consists of a summary of the twin theoretical frameworks of embodied and situated cognition. These relatively recent paradigms frame cognition in terms of the body, its physical and temporal situation, and its social and cultural moment. They provide the raw materials for a more expansive view of music cognition that involves all of these dimensions, as elaborated at length in chapter 4. I argue that these ways of framing music cognition complement the abstract, symbolic models set forth in this area of research so far.
The remainder of the thesis applies the framework of embodied musical cognition to a few different specific concerns. Chapter 5 is a discussion of meter, in which I study the crucial role in attention that meter can play, and address the cultural contingency of meter perception. Chapter 6 is a summary of some kinds of expressive timing that appear in groove-based musics, including some simple audio examples. These examples lead into Chapter 7, which touches on different models of the physical activity of rhythmic tapping, before summarizing a paper that was given at the 1997 International Computer Music Conference, co-authored by Jeff Bilmes, Matt Wright, and David Wessel. We set forth a rhythmic representation that allows explicit control of expressive microtiming in the presence of an isochronous pulse. It was software using this representation that facilitated the construction of the examples in Chapter 6. Finally, chapter 8 wraps up this project by exploring some of its implications.
We must begin with some preliminary groundwork. The following chapter, a definition of relevant terms, provides an opportunity to examine some basic problems that we encounter in a multidisciplinary study. In the course of defining the terms that are relevant to our studies of rhythm cognition, I point out some of the assumptions, implications, and limitations inherent in their multivalent usage.
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