Beat Hierarchy and Beat Patterns-- From Aksak to Composite Meter (original) (raw)
Related papers
2021
Many studies about musical meter have made a mistake that the target of research is exist in musical stimuli in its complete form. However, without human cognition, music is not yet music but merely physical difference of sounds. Therefore, the essence of music exits not in stimuli but in human cognition. This study postulate that human understands music by means of schemas as in cognitive sciences. Therefore, metrical structure of music can be regarded as the direct reflection of this schema, because for listner's easiness, composers and performer make music correspond to human cognitive schemas. Thus, we can extrapolate the nature of the schema by research of general characteristics of musical works. (This is a draft English translation of Chapter 1 from my dissertation in Japanese.)
Memory and the Perception of Rhythm
When we perceive an aesthetic object, we do so on many different levels. If the object is a painting, we may view it first from a distance to take in its overall form, symmetry, and color composition. Moving closer, we may allow first one aspect and then another to come into focus, until we are able to observe the smallest detail. We may then retreat to a more distant perspective, allowing our apprehension of the whole to be enhanced by our greater familiarity with its parts. Likewise, when we hear a piece of music, we may first focus on local events, listening for subtle inflections of pitch, articulation, or rhythmic motive, while in subsequent hearings we may attend to the large-scale progression of themes and tonalities. Our conception of the piece is thus built up over repeated listenings, as the relationship between smalland large-scale structure is gradually clarified.
Rhythm: Africa and Beyond
This article studies the empirical structures and theoretical status of rhythmic feels in jembe music, which is a popular style of drum ensemble music from West Africa. The focus is on systematic variations of durations (Bengtsson 1975)—that is, cyclic patterns of non-isochronous pulse streaming at the metric level of beat subdivision. Taking for example a standard piece of jembe repertoire that is set in a 4-beat/12-subpulse metric cycle (often notated as 12/8), I show that the ternary beat subdivision forms a repeated sequence of unequal (short, flexible, and long) subpulses. This stable rhythmic feel pattern, SFL, is unmistakable and non-interchangeable with a second ternary pattern, which is characterized by long, flexible, flexible subpulses (LFF) and occurs in other pieces of jembe music. As predicted in Justin London’s “hypothesis of many meters” (London 2004), these timing patterns distinguish individual meters. I further analyze how schemes of binary and ternary beat subdiv...
Musical Meter in Attention to Multipart Rhythm
Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2005
Performing in musical ensembles can be viewed as a dual task that requires simultaneous attention to a high priority �target� auditory pattern (e.g., a performer�s own part) and either (a) another part in the ensemble or (b) the aggregate texture that results when all parts are integrated. The current study tested the hypothesis that metric frameworks (rhythmic schemas) promote the efficient allocation of attentional resources in such multipart musical contexts. Experiment 1 employed a recognition memory paradigm to investigate the effects of attending to metrical versus nonmetrical target patterns upon the perception of aggregate patterns in which they were embedded. Experiment 2 required metrical and nonmetrical target patterns to be reproduced while memorizing different, concurrently presented metrical patterns that were also subsequently reproduced. Both experiments included conditions in which the different patterns within the multipart structure were matched or mismatched in t...
Rhythmic Processes in Time-Space
Music and Space: Theoretical and Analytical Perspectives, 2021
This essay explores broad parameters of musical time-space formation and introduces an analytical representation-a pulse-stream graph-to illustrate how a unitary temporal pattern can give rise to the overall shape and form of a musical work or how multiple temporal patterns interact when unfolding in rhythmic polyphony. The time-space is stratified according to distinct cognitive processing of one of three types of memory (echoic, short-term, and long-term), requiring different analytical considerations depending on the timescale of the events under scrutiny (foregroud, middleground, and background). As one form of temporal continuity, rhythmic processes-closed, open, or flexible-outline different pathways through time. Analysis of György Ligeti's etude Entrelacs and Elliott Carter's work 90+ illustrate how compositional treatment of rhythmic processes and their interaction with other aspects of the musical work imply different sense of time, despite basing the work on conceptually identical long-range polyrhythms.
Modeling a Processive Perspective on Meter in Music
This paper aims at the description of the metric structure of music in terms of a processive or temporal approach. While many models in the metric domain assume a rela- tively consistent metric structure throughout the piece, t he experience of listening to a complex piece of music of- ten differs from that assumption. The processive approach applied in this paper is interpreted as the unfolding of the metric hierarchy over time while listening to the piece. We base our investigations on the model of Inner Metric Analysis that describes the metrical hierarchy of a piece of music independently of the bar lines. Using the cu- mulative and sliding window approaches that characterize the metric process through the piece we can distinguish between stable succession of events and abrupt or grad- ual changes that can serve as a description of the dynamic process taking place while listening to the music.