tiger c. roholt

Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance

I'll be working on two books in the next couple of years. The second (also published by Continuum) will have the above title (although the second part of the subtitle will probably change). This will be a three-aspect account of the feel of rhythm (i.e., groove) in rock, hip-hop, jazz, etc.

Sean Kelly

On Staying Human in a Technological Age (filmed for the film "Being-In-The-World")  

 

Kelly is at Harvard 

Music, Anti-Scientism (& Interdisciplinarity)

I’ve just contributed a short piece on music and anti-scientism to the Creative Research Center blog at Montclair State University. The piece considers an aspect of the music theorist Thomas Clifton's view and its connection to Martin Heidegger's readiness-to-hand. The CRC project at MSU is new, and has had a very promising beginning, well guided by Neil Baldwin (a Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at MSU). The blog is definitely worth a look, even if you are outside the MSU community—especially if you are interested in interdisciplinary academic experiments.

I’ll reprint below the Overview/Philosophy of the CRC (this is a quotation from the CRC Welcome page):

The Creative Research Center (CRC) is a born-digital, dynamic, nimble, open-source, collaborative space -- a Web forum to stimulate, reinvigorate, promote and publicize Very Large-Scale Conversations.

While the CRC lives in the College of the Arts of Montclair State University, the arts are not the sole proprietors of imaginative thinking. The reason-for-being of the Creative Research Center, thus, is to inspire discussion of shared commonalities of imagination and creativity across all fields of knowledge, including (but not exclusively) the expressive arts. The environment of Montclair State as an aspirational public university, therefore, is the ideal place to incubate such a Center.

The CRC has far-reaching curatorial, editorial and outreach intentions including breaking down "silos" which frequently exist among academic . . .

Body Movement and Rhythm Perception (Groove)

My dissertation—Groove: The Phenomenology of Musical Nuance (2007)—has to do largely with rhythm perception. One of the claims I made is that body movement is not merely a reaction to hearing rhythms but that moving our bodies influences the way we hear rhythms; body movement is a part of the perceptual structure.  Tapping your foot, e.g., affects the way you hear a given swing rhythm. (To musicians and phenomenologists, this is not an outlandish claim, but many analytic philosophers do not accept it.) 

Interestingly, recent work by psychologists Jessica Phillips-Silver and Laurel J. Trainor provides experimental evidence that body movement influences rhythm perception. In their paper, "Hearing What the Body Feels: Auditory Encoding of Rhythmic Movement," they describe recent experimental findings to the effect that body movement affects subjects' perception of ambiguous rhythms.  

This is their summary of the experiment. "We trained adults, while listening to an ambiguous rhythm with no accented beats, to bounce by bending their knees to interpret the rhythm either as a march or as a waltz. At test, adults identified as similar an auditory version of the rhythm pattern with accented strong beats that matched their previous bouncing experience in comparison with a version whose accents did not match" (Phillips-Silver and Trainor, p. 533; Cognition, 105, 2007). [thanks, Bill]

Whereas Phillips-Silver and Trainor are concerned with the effect of earlier body movement on later interpretation of rhythmic structure, my specific concern has been more qualitative, with the way we hear fine-grained, performed, rhythmic variations (timing nuances) while we move. Very briefly, I believe that hearing grooves (the feel of a rhythm as  "leaning" or "pushing," e.g.) involves feeling, in the body, early or late notes as thwarted rhythmic expectations. Our experience of expectations of rhythmic regularities becomes deepened through body movement which is in accord with the regularities. When slightly early or late notes disrupt regularities—if we are moving—we experience the thwartings in our bodies, more qualitatively than if we had been perceiving in a detached manner.

Interviews with Philosophers

Here is an amazing collection of long television interviews with prominent philosophers (now on YouTube); the interviews were conducted by Bryan Magee in the 1970s, originally aired on the BBC. Interviewees include, Quine, Putnam, Searle, Sidney Morgenbesser, and others!

Click on the image above to be taken to the first part of the Hubert Dreyfus interview, "Husserl, Heidegger, and Modern Existentialism."

Fellow Americans, stop and think about the fact that this was on television.

Merleau-Ponty on Eye-Reflections

There is an interesting point made here about the trickiness of Photoshopping the reflections of light in eyes. I left a comment on that weblog (Boing Boing) suggesting that the issue might be even more deep and important than Photoshoppers think. I promised to offer something brief here about what Maurice Merleau-Ponty says about the perception of reflections in eyes in his Phenomenology of Perception (1945). 

Just how do we experience a reflection in eyes when we look at someone's face? Merleau-Ponty considers how the reflection in human eyes shows up in experience, and he also describes the impact upon our overall experience of the face. He is ultimately making a point about the perception of actual human eyes, but in the quote I'll give, he makes the point by referring to painting (which is perfect for this Photoshop discussion).

"Only after centuries of painting did artists perceive that reflection on the eye without which the eye remains dull and sightless as in the paintings of the early masters. The reflection is not seen as such, since it was in fact able to remain unnoticed for so long, and yet it has its function in perception, since its mere absence deprives objects and faces of all life and expression."*

Merleau-Ponty's point is that the perceptual effect of the reflection on the eye is to give the face "life and expression." What he says next is based upon idea that there are different ways of perceiving this reflection.

"The reflection is seen only incidentally. It is not presented to our perception as an objective, but as an auxiliary or mediating element. It is not seen itself, but causes us to see the rest."*

The idea is that we can perceive an eye-reflection either as a separable  object of attention (as a Photoshopper might), or "incidentally" (as the typical viewer of a touched-up photograph might). When viewed in the latter way, the reflection makes an important contribution to our perception of "life and expression" in a face; namely, it mediates that perception; again, seeing an eye-reflection "incidentally" fosters our perception of the "life and expression" in a face.

If this is right, then a Photoshopper aims to get the reflection correct so that when a viewer sees the photo, the reflection can do the proper mediating of the facial expression. A mishandled reflection can make the face look dull, or just plain weird. Maybe this next point is surprising: the conscientious Photoshopper is seeing the reflection in one way, while the normal viewer is perceiving it in another; the import of getting the reflection right only becomes clear to the Photoshopper when she stops focusing on the reflection and perceives it incidentally while looking at the face as a whole.

My own work is on music, and I use this observation in examining musical nuances, which are the minute "expressive variations" made by musicians. I claim that in order to correctly hear the slightly late note sung by Wyclef Jean or Frank Sinatra, we should not focus our attention on its lateness but rather perceive it "incidentally" and thereby allow that note (with others) to mediate a groove. The experience of a rhythmic leaning or pulling arises when we hear these slightly late notes in this way (not when we focus our attention on them).

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* Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Routledge, 1996), p.309.

Dreyfus Heidegger Lectures

Apparently, all of the lectures from the Hubert Dreyfus fall 2007 Heidegger course will be available as a podcast on iTunes. Clicking this link will open iTunes and take you directly to the Dreyfus/Heidegger page.