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.

Analytic vs. Continental Philosophy of Music — Feb 24

I'll be giving a talk on Thursday, Feb. 24, 8:00pm, at Montclair State U (University Hall Rm 1030). I'll begin by surveying a handful of philosophers' views on central issues in philosophy of music, some views put forward by analytic philosophers, some by continental philosophers. I'll then propose a useful way of distinguishing between continental and analytic philosophy of music in general. This talk grows out of the principle of distinguishing between the traditions that shapes the long-ish piece I just finished called "Philosophy of Music," for the second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music. 

Montclair State University is a 35-40 minute New Jersey Transit train ride from Penn Station, NY (the Montclair-Boonton line). It's best to take the train to the Montclair Heights station, and then grab the ever-present shuttle bus at the station (or, it's about a three block walk to University Hall from the station).

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 . . .

Nietzsche on Music

From Nietzsche's Gay Science, section 373, ‘Science’ as a Prejudice

“Suppose one judged the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas—how absurd such a ‘scientific’ evaluation of music would be!  What would one have comprehended, understood, recognized?  Nothing, really nothing of what is ‘music’ in it!” (trans. J Nauckhoff)

Philosophy of Music Talks at Montclair State U

I'll be chairing a Philosophy of Art session at the New Jersey Regional Philosophical Association Conference, which is held this year at Montclair State University (MSU is 20-30 minutes from Manhattan). The conference will take place on Saturday, Nov. 14,  9AM-5:30PM (registration at 9, sessions begin at 10,  Phil of Art session at 2:40PM).  The location of the phil of art session is University Hall, Room 2007, 2nd Floor.  

Papers:
“The Mind’s Ear: Musical Imagination and Musical Imagery”
Margaret Moore
(Ph.D. Candidate, Temple University)

“Authority and Musical Interpretation"
Jonathan Neufeld
(Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University)

“On What Art Is,”
Rick Kamber 
(TCNJ)

Conference Details and mass transit instructions from NYC after the fold. 

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.