Rhythm, Rhythmanalysis and Algorithm-Analysis (original) (raw)
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SAGE Research Methods Foundations, 2019
This entry is about rhythmanalysis as conceived by French philosopher, sociologist, urban scholar, and literary critic Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991). Rhythmanalysis can be thought of as a tool of analysis that shows how change occurs through the imprinting of new rhythms on an era (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 14). It has been described as both conceptual and corporeal since, on the one hand, it offers a critique of spatio-temporal relations in capitalist society and, on the other, it suggests a research practice. Rhythmanalysis has attracted considerable interest in the 21st century, since the publication in 2004 of the English translation of Lefebvre's short book, Rhythmanalysis, Space, Time and Everyday Life, which was first made available in French one year after his death in 1992. It is regarded by some scholars as the fourth volume in his hitherto three-volume work, Critique of Everyday Life. It adds a temporal dimension to Lefebvre's long-standing analyses of space. And it is credited with giving Lefebvre something of an afterlife, as his popularity in the Anglo-American academy has soared since its publication (Elden, 2006). Rhythmanalysis has been taken up and developed across the social sciences, notably within geography. It has been used in particular to study mobility, place, work, and nature as well as consumption and leisure practices, education, and identity. Rhythmanalysis is a 'strategy of inquiry' rather than a method per se. It draws on documentary, ethnographic, and audiovisual methods and can be used for the analysis of big data. Dydia Delyser and Daniel Sui (2012) argue that it cannot be captured within a qualitative-quantitative divide, and this fits with broad understandings of time and space as 1 both measurable and something that needs to be understood through subjective experience. Rhythmanalysis is nevertheless most often associated with a qualitative tradition, in particular with ethnography, and this entry focusses on the use of rhythmanalysis in qualitative research. The discussion is divided into four parts. The first critically presents Lefebvre's thinking on rhythmanalysis and how he advocated for it as a research practice centred on the body. The second discusses cultural historical rhythmanalysis using documents and materials. The third explores rhythmanalysis as a form of ethnography. The fourth focusses on audiovisual methods to document, perceive, and analyse rhythm. These approaches to doing rhythmanalysis are not mutually exclusive and may be combined. Lefebvre and the Development of Rhythmanalysis Lefebvre lived for most of the 20th century, from 1901 to 1991. His early years in southwest France stimulated his interest in agrarian life and cyclical time. He celebrated rural life and
Rhythm as an Integral Part of Mathematical Thinking
In M. Bockarova, M. Danesi, D. Martinovic and R. Núñez (Eds.), Mind in Mathematics: Essays on Mathematical Cognition and Mathematical Method (pp. 68-85). München, Germany: LINCOM GmbH., 2016
The topic of this chapter is rhythm. The argument that I will be defending is that rhythm is an integral part of mathematical thinking. The argument rests on the idea that mathematical thinking is something akin to temporal art, like drama, poetry, and dance-mathematical thinking happens in time. The argument goes even further. Mathematical thinking not only happens in time but its most striking feature is movement. This conception of mathematical thinking is at odds with traditional conceptions that portray thinking as something happening in a kind of mental repository containing ideas: We cannot speak of ideas as being in the mind in the sense in which furniture is in the room; an idea is an active thing constituted by its activity, coloring other ideas and in process of internal modification; it must be conceived as a form of energy (Demos 1933: 273) Thinking, as I conceptualize it here, is rather "an effluence of creativity; it has come about and it may give place to some other manifestation of life" (Demos 1933: 273). To assert that mathematical thinking is movement brings us close to the topic of rhythm. Rhythm has a convoluted etymology. It was defined in the 16 t h century as something related to the manner in which the accentuation of syllables affects the oral reception of language; it might not be a surprise then, that thus conceived, rhythm remained entangled for many years with its measuring form-metrics. Referring to the linguistic tradition, where rhythm has been investigated through prosody, that is, the linguistic patterns of stress and intonation, Richard Cureton (2004: 113) notes that "The prosodic tradition has always been primarily interested in the voice, how it moves rhythmically from syllable to syllable, stress to stress." Rhythm, however, went beyond the linguistic tradition and started being applied to other domains like music, and natural and social phenomena. In its general sense, the concept of rhythm tries to characterize the reappearance of something at regular intervals and attempts to capture the idea of regularity, alternation, or something oscillating between symmetry and asymmetry. Here, rhythm appears as a complex of conflicting "components," each one exploring and expressing our experience of the world in a different manner. Each one of these components creates a different sort of subjective time:
Rhythm as schema: in search of a mature theory of rhythm in visual art
Sensorium: aesthetics, art, life, 2011
In the extant fragment of "Elementa Rhythmica II", Aristoxenus makes the comparison between poetic rhythm (ρσθμος, and ρσθμιζομενον) and visual rhythm or schema (στημα, and στηματιζομενα). Aristoxenus" terminology is useful for analyzing visual rhythm, since it is routinely used to account for rhythm in a variety of art forms: poetry, dance, music, sculpture and painting.
Tehnologii informatice și de comunicație în domeniul muzical / Information and communication Technologies in Musical Field
The computer order of the world we live in turns out to be one that music has been waiting for about four centuries. As long as it took until it was freed from the "philological" stigma and until the establishment of the digital age. It awaited it with its entire numerical morphology, which once legitimized it as equal among the other three disciplines of the ancient quadriviumarithmetic, geometry and astronomy. Carrying number in time as its generative principle and vital energy, music has reacted to digitization extremely "empathetically". And the transition to the cybernetic habitat unfolded as a replica of the transfer from natural sonicity to cultural musicality. Indeed, the metaphor as well as the archetype served as the vehicle of these transitions, both as deep and equally essential meanings of the surrounding reality, but also meanings of the fictional human imagination. This is how music itself was born, a type of human thought constituted down to the smallest details from invariants, eternal "monads", but also omniscient "nano-particles" with an unlimited term of existence. Everything that followed from the invention of (digital) sound synthesis was, in short, the equating of the invariants of music with the algorithms of the new habitat of alphanumeric virtuality.
In a post-digital era, where digital computerized technology is no longer a novelty but already ubiquitous, it is crucial to understand the meaning-creating potential of rhythm in a "media archeological," techno-cultural, and epistemological sense (Ernst 31; Huhtamo and Parikka). And while doing so rhythm should be defined as an inter-modal 1 tool and model for analyzing cultural objects and their hidden relations with current techno and media-cultural situations.
While in t he t erminology of t he comput at ional sciences an algorit hm is of t en def ined as a f init e sequence of st ep-by-st ep inst ruct ions, which "bear a crucial, if problemat ic, relat ionship t o mat erial realit y," 1 rhyt hm, a t erm closer t o t he st udy of cult ural phenomena, shall be def ined as an element ary movement of mat t er, bodies and signals, which oscillat e in-bet ween t he discret e and t he cont inuous, bet ween t he symbolic and t he real, bet ween digit al and analogue. T his art icle considers t he specif ic role of algorit hms and t heir rhyt hms. It not only addresses some import ant hist orical dimensions of cont emporary comput at ional cult ure, but also analyses algorit hms f rom a syst emat ic point of view, specif ically in relat ion t o sof t ware-induced breakdowns of dist ribut ed net works. disappeared. My argument in t his art icle is t hat despit e t his, t he use of algorhythmics as a met hod of crit ical enquiry int o comput at ional cult ure and t heir operabilit y is applicable t o underst anding lat er periods of t he hist ory of comput at ional cult ure. My art icle af f irms t he versat ilit y of algorhythmics, especially in combinat ion wit h t he not ion of agencement (explained below), t hrough a considerat ion of t he crash of t he long-dist ance t elephone net work in Nort h America in January 1990 (t he "AT &T -Crash").
2015
For a special issue of Body & Society on ‘Rhythm, Movement, Embodiment’, Paola Crespi presents two previously untranslated texts, Rudolf Bode’s ‘Rhythm and its Importance for Education’ and Rudolf Laban’s ‘Eurhythmy and Kakorhythmy’. In the following interview she uncovers further unpublished and untranslated sources and she discusses some of the main themes of these texts in relation to the more widely known text by Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (2004), as well as Roland Barthes’ How to Live Together (2012), in which he presents an account of ‘idiorrhythmy’.