Subject: Re: Rhythm perception From: Ole =?ISO-8859-1?Q?K=FChl?= <semok(at)HUM.AU.DK> Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 18:21:40 +0100jpff(at)CS.BATH.AC.UK den 15. november 2005 kl. 13:40 +0100 skrev: >We were discussing rhythm patterns the other day and the question came >up about how one determined the start of a pattern. If there is a >heavy emphasis on one beat of the sequence then I can understand that >that is taken as the first beat. > But if the sequence is unemphasised how does one decide? Or do >people decide differently, or is it cultural? > >I am not sure where to start to look -- as ever this is outside my >general field of study -- but I though this list might be the place >to ask for clues. > >I hope I have explained the question sufficiently! > >==John ffitch > Dear list I think we should distinguish between meter and phrase or pattern, and the question, as I understand it, concerns the latter. Where does one phrase begin and the next end, and how does the human perception go about determining this? >From a musicological point of view this is the problem of segmentation, which is usually approached from the microlevel as a bottom-up procedure or from the macrolevel as a top-down procedure (or both). Either you add individual sounds until a certain point, which constitutes the phrase/pattern or you chop it up from the top in smaller and smaller pieces (see Lerdal and Jackendorf for an example). We have a similar problem in speech perception, where we are told that we use 'parsing' to distinguish individual words in a stream of sounds. But to my knowledge it is not clear what parsing is, how it is learned and whether it is a higher order function or occurs earlier in the auditory pathway. In gestalt theory they talk of grouping, which is basically a bottom-up concept, but they have no theory to explain how it works. I should like to offer a different explanation, which might be controversial to some. Tomasello suggests (in Constructing a Language, 2003) that children do not learn words by grouping individual sounds, but learn them as finished gestalts. From there they proceed downwards (to individual sounds) and upwards (to clauses and sentences). I want to suggest this approach as a general procedure: we do not make sense of the world from the microlevel nor from the macrolevel but from a mesolevel. The musical phrase/pattern is formed as a gestalt in the mind, in the same way as we conceive of gestures, words, and visual shapes (check out the concept 'binding' for visual perception). There is no room here for all details of this theory, but an article of mine called 'Phrase, Gesture and Temporality' is available at http://www.hum.au.dk/semiotics/ It would be interesting to know exactly where in the auditory pathway the auditory streams is organised in larger units that we can call phrases or patterns, but I don't think this has been established. Hoping for reactions to this. Ole Kühl Center for Semiotics Building 1467 Jens Chr. Skous Vej 7 DK-8000 Aarhus C DENMARK +45 89425494 semok(at)hum.au.dk