A Sense of Rhythm
Craig Farkash
PhD Student, Social and Cultural Analysis program
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Concordia University
Rhythm noun \ ‘ri-thəm \
a movement, fluctuation, or variation marked by the regular recurrence or natural flow of related elements
// the rhythms of country life
(Merriam-Webster)
Imagine yourself standing on a street corner. It doesn’t matter where – Montreal, Edmonton, Cortona, any place would suffice. In fact, it may be best that you imagine a place you’re familiar with. What do you see? Depending on the time-of-day buses may roll to a stop nearby and eject bodies going about their daily business, or perhaps a single car glides home under the glow of a lone streetlight. Now close your eyes. What do you hear? Perhaps the laughter of children and the crunch of winter gravel under their feet as they shuffle their way home from school, or the whir and hiss of the bus we saw earlier, accelerating onwards. What do you smell? Touch? Taste? Any number of things might spring to mind, subject to the whims of the corner you’ve imagined yourself standing on, what time of day the clock hands point to, or what season it is.
Now, what comes to mind when you think of rhythm? Open any dictionary and you’ll find numerous definitions. The entry under ‘rhythm’ in the Merriam Webster dictionary alone has six unique definitions with multiple sub-definitions related to music, poetry, speech, and biology, and more. Other dictionaries offer similarly broad and multi-directional statements, not to mention the varied academic uses of the term. As Lefebvre asks in Rhythmanalysis: “Is there a general concept of rhythm? Answers: yes, and everyone possesses it; but nearly all those who use the word believe themselves to master and possess its content, its meaning” (2004 [1992]: 15). Ask a thousand people what rhythm means and you’ll likely get a thousand different answers, all equally valid, in some form or another.
Rhythm noun \ ‘ri-thəm \
A the aspect of music comprising all the elements (such as accent, meter, and tempo) that relate to forward movement
C The group of instruments in a band supplying the rhythm
– called also rhythm section
(Merriam-Webster)
I grew up in a musical family. As a young boy, I can remember most of our family gatherings on both sides involving music of some sort. My grandpa Charlie played saxophone in an old timer’s band and when my brother and I had time off from school we might travel with them on the great prairie polka and foxtrot circuit. My great-grandma Rena played piano and organ at her church until she was into her 90’s. I remember stories of her annoyance at other church organists, muttering under her breath that they should “play with some pep!” It was because of her I was enrolled in the Royal Conservatory of Music piano program and, perhaps contradictorily, from her is where my contempt for the metronome stems. Ask me what rhythm meant then in those days and I’d probably tell you it was a musical feeling. I wouldn’t have been alone – music is where many minds are drawn when attempting to define rhythm. According to a brief survey by Haili You, “there are some 200 definitions in Western music history on the experience of rhythm in its structural, motional, and emotional aspects” (1994: 361-362). But rhythm is more much more than musical.
Rhythm noun \ ‘ri-thəm \
a regularly recurrent quantitative change in a variable biological process
// A circadian rhythm
– compare BIORHYTHM
(Merriam-Webster)
Touch your neck or your wrist in just the right place and you may feel the da-dum…da-dum…da-dum of your heart beating more or less rapidly, depending on a range of factors – activity, age, time of day, and so on. It’s a biological rhythm that follows us throughout our lives. Life’s silent metronome. Rhythms aren’t unique to the heart. For over 70 years now circadian rhythms (referring to biological rhythms taking place over an approximate period of 24 hours) have been studied and observed in humans, and even longer in nonhumans. Experiments at the Andechs Bunker by Rütger Wever and Jürgen Aschoff of the Max-Planck-Institut für Verhaltenphysiologie were among some of the earliest to test circadian hypotheses, and are likely among the most well-known from that early period. In these experiments, volunteers were isolated from ‘natural’ time markers for extended periods of time, while researchers monitored a range of physiological variables:
In one experiment of sufficiently long duration, the total phase shift between the biological rhythm and local time exceeded 24 hours, proving the autonomy of the human circadian rhythm (i.e., its generation by endogenous processes)…on the third day of the experiment, the subject’s watch was taken away, and all environmental time cues were omitted. The subject then showed a rhythmic period of 25.9 hours continuing for 17.5 cycles (19 objective days), again being consistent in all measured variables. After reestablishing contact with the environment, the subject’s rhythm was nearly reversed in comparison to the normal phase relationship to local time…this shows the ability of the human circadian system to be rhythmically independent of environmental changes of day and night (Wever 1979: 6-7).
Under these conditions, subjective days in isolation were perceived to be around 4% longer than the 24-hour clock by research subjects. Wever, who carried out “418 experiments in 447 human volunteers in the bunker under nearly every conceivable condition” (Wirz-Justice et al 2005: 554), along with Aschoff, helped establish popular understandings of our biorhythms, how the body responds physiologically when isolated from the everyday. And yet the conditions in the Andechs bunker are nearly impossible to replicate in the outside world.
As we go about our daily business, our “circadian rhythms…are modified continuously by environmental stimuli” (Wever 1979: 83). Light intensity, light modality (self-controlled or externally set), ambient temperature, natural electromagnetic fields, artificial electromagnetic fields, physical workloads, psychical burdens, social contacts all influence the body’s autonomous rhythms (Wever 1979: 83-127). This consistent exposure to zeitgebers, or time-markers, allow us to synchronize our body’s rhythms:
“with the external environment but also internally to ensure a normal phase relationship among these rhythmic variables. However, nowadays, a high percentage of the population are not exposed to a strong light/dark cycle either spending the majority of their time indoors with low light contrast between day and night, or performing shift work” (Bonmati-Carrion et al 2020: 2).
It has been taken for granted that “night workers are in general less efficient and suffer psychologically and physiologically during night shifts” due to chronodisruptions of their circadian rhythms. (Aschoff 1965: 1432).
Today, the circadian rhythm is seen as natural. But, can we consider something ‘natural’ if the circumstances under which it is experienced are nearly impossible to replicate in the ‘real’ world? It seems not wholly unreasonable to surmise that at any point in human history and pre-history, that external zeitgebers, both environmental and social, are the determinants of our biological rhythms. What if our internal rhythms are really social ones? If circadian rhythms are regionally based, centred on environmental factors, then they are also cultural rhythms, for it is really culture that has allowed humans to thrive in innumerable environments across the planet. As might this be nonexistent as humans travel to the moon and then beyond, to different planets in our solar system will the circadian rhythm as we know it cease to exist?
As an undergraduate and later as a masters student, I lived, studied, and later worked in Belgrade on an ethnographic fieldschool for a handful of summers. From late May until early August a group of keen anthropology and arts students would converge and explore the city through the senses. I’d grown up in the country on an acreage outside of Edmonton, the northernmost major metropolitan area in North America, and I was unprepared for the Belgrade heat, reflected by the mass of asphalt and concrete and humidified by the convergence of the Danube and Sava rivers. I spent most of my days walking in shadow, seeking out air-conditioned spaces. But it was really no matter—the night was when it would finally cool and the city really came to life. I’d spend the night on splavs (party barges docked along the riverfront) or at Vox (the best blues bar in Eastern Europe) or any number of music venues until 3, 4, 5 in the morning, when the sun began to peak over the horizon. I’d sleep for a handful of hours and then head to class, starting the cycle all over again. Our sense of rhythm is tied to much more than our biology. Might these kinds of cultural zeitgebers be as much—if not more—the source of rhythm as the internal, the biological?
Rhythm noun \ ‘ri-thəm \
the effect created by the elements in a play, movie, or novel that related to the temporal development of the action.
(Merriam-Webster)
Sergei Eisenstein, writing on film rhythm in Towards a Theory of Montage, suggests that “rhythm is a maximally generalized depiction of a process within the subject matter, a graph of the changing phases of contradictions within its unity” (2010 [1991]: 130; original emphasis). In creating montage, the rhythm of filmic (visual and sonic) juxtapositions is what gives an attempted metaphor its meaning. Here rhythm is removed from one its ‘purely formal definitions, such as the repetition of a certain combination or grouping at fixed and equal intervals of time: the alternative play between long and short, stressed and unstressed” (Eisenstein 2010 [1991]: 227), and used in playful unsuspecting ways. Rather than editing a march ‘in march rhythm’ or ‘a waltz in waltz rhythm’ one might also edit a ‘waltz in funeral rhythm’ (Eisenstein 2010 [1991]: 227), with the use of sound pushing these metaphors further.
Rhythm noun \ ‘ri-thəm \
A an ordered recurrent alternation of strong and weak elements in the flow of sound and silence in speech
B a particular example or form of rhythm
// iambic rhythm
(Merriam-Webster)
We’ve—very briefly so far—touched on rhythm as a marker of motion, of music, of biology, and of film. There are any number of ways we might progress from here, but in what limited time we have left, we might look at rhythm as speech, as communication. According to Lefebvre, “everyday life is modelled on abstract, quantitative time, the time of watches and clocks. This time was introduced bit by bit in the West after the invention of watches, in the course of their entry into social practice” (2004 [1992]: 82). But to confine rhythm to the tic…tic…ticking of a clock or metronome doesn’t do justice to the complexities of the thing. We are “tied together and yet isolated from each other by invisible threads of rhythm and hidden walls of time” (Hall 1983:3), rhythms influencing “how parents relate to their children as well as how people relate to each other on the job and in the home” (14) – German rhythms are different from French rhythms are different from American rhythms, and so on. The rhythms we use are “a function of the culture of the people who are around when these patterns are being learned” (Hall 1983: 177), they’re enculturated.
Rhythms—whether musical, spoken, or otherwise—are internalized. According to Hall, one of the misconceptions of musical rhythm is that because there is a beat, “the generally accepted belief is that the rhythm originates in the music, not that music is a highly specialized releaser of rhythms already in the individual” (Hall 1983: 178). To understand this (and to better place rhythm as language), we can turn to Chernoff’s study of African Rhythm and African Sensibility. In this book, he examines the many competing ways rhythm operates in African music, but also in communication. Comparing Western and African music, Chernoff suggests that:
“in Western music…rhythm is most definitely secondary in emphasis and complexity to harmony and melody. It is the progression of sounds through a series of chords or tones that [Westerners] recognize as beautiful. In African music this sensibility is almost reversed…there are always at least two rhythms going on. We consider the rhythms complex because often we simply do not know what “the” rhythm of a piece is. There seems to be no unifying or main beat. The situation is uncomfortable because if the basic meter is not evident, we cannot understand how two or more people can play together or, even more uncomfortably, how anyone can play at all” (Chernoff 1979: 42).
Rhythm requires context, which inevitably varies inter- and cross-culturally. In the context Chernoff writes of, its not uncommon “for both the musician and the spectator to maintain an additional rhythm in order to give coherence to the ensemble; otherwise he or she would become confused by the multiplicity of conflicting rhythms and accents. The essential point is the notion of an ability and a need to mediate the rhythms actively (Chernoff 1979: 95). An extra layer of communication is achieved, as well-tuned listeners can recognize rhythmic signatures down to the individual (Chernoff 1979). And this only serves to further confuse our understandings of what rhythm is, or what it can be.
Rhythm noun \ ‘ri-thəm \
Rhythm is a dancer
It’s a soul’s companion
You can feel it everywhere
Lift your hands and voices
Free your mind and join us
You can feel it in the air
(Snap! 1992)
What is a sense of rhythm? What seems to unite all the aforementioned conceptions of rhythm is the collective injustice we’ve done to the term, the way we take it for granted. When we focus on rhythm as biological, we ignore the musical. When we look at rhythm as natural, we sideline the social. It is something taken for granted, something “found indigenous to many cultural traditions as it is embedded in literature and arts and is being developed in the humanities and science” (You 1994: 361). In sketching out an anthropology of rhythm, Haili You suggests that “if the generalization that rhythm is a “universal scheme of existence” makes sense, rhythm must have to do with life in its natural, social, affective, and molecular senses” (1994: 362). In other words, rhythm is everywhere, and that makes it all the more difficult to pin down.
Perhaps that’s not the point. Perhaps there is no need to ‘pin down’ a sense of rhythm. In its essence, “rhythm is not merely the perceived order (or pattern) of repetition (recurrence) of something; it is the demand, preparation and anticipation for something to come” (You 1994: 363). Rhythm is an anticipatory sense. We really only notice rhythm when its off, when there’s something unsettling, something out-of-sync with our own rhythms. And in this sense rhythm belongs not only to the realm of musicians, or dancers, or biologists, but everyone. Everyone has a sense of rhythm, bio-culturally shaped by our environments.
We may even go as far as to say rhythm is the one sense to rule them all. It encompasses all five senses of the Western sensorial hierarchy. You can see rhythm on the streets around you or in an open field. You hear rhythm in the songs we sing and the music we dance to but also in the movements of the outside world. You can smell rhythm in the pleasant aromas wafting out of kitchens throughout the day or emanating from a public restroom. You can touch rhythm – as a musician’s hands move around a guitar’s fretboard or tap a beat on a drum kit, but also in the vibrations of a passing train or ongoing street construction. And you can taste rhythm, in the foods you eat at a certain time of day. Our cultural rhythms, whether beholden to the five senses or subject to other ways of sensing the world, allow us to anticipate what is to come, and adapt bio-culturally when our sense of rhythm is off. Rhythm is enacted with the entire self. Yes, “rhythm is a dancer” (Snap! 1992). But it is also so much more.
Craig is a student in the Social and Cultural Analysis Phd program in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. His research interests include ethnographies of sound, sonic justice, and combining his research and musical practices.
Works Cited
Aschoff, Jürgen. 1965. “Circadian Rhythms in Men.” Science 148 (3676): 1427-1432.
Bonmati-Carrion, Maria Angeles, Victoria L. Revell, Tom J. Cook, Thomas R.E. Welch, Maria-Angeles Rol, Debraa J. Skene, and Juan Antonio Madrid. 2020. “Living Without Temporal Cues: A Case Study.” Frontiers in Physiology 11 (11): 1-12.
Chernoff, John Miller. 1979. African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms. University of Chicago Press.
Eisenstein, Sergei, Richard Taylor, and Michael Glenny. 2010. Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works Volume II: Towards a Theory of Montage. London: I.B. Tauris.
Hall, Edward T. 1983. The Dance of Life. Toronto: Anchor Books, Doubleday.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1992 [2004]. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life. New York: Bloomsbury.
“Rhythm.” N.d. In Merriam-Webster. Accessed 19 April 2022. www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rhythm
Snap! 1992. “Rhythm is a Dancer.” Track #6 on The Madman’s Return. BMG Rights Management GmbH. Digital.
Wever Rütger A. 1979. The Circadian System of Man: Results of Experiments Under Temporal Isolation. Topics in Environmental Physiology and Medicine. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Wirz-Justice, Anna, Serge Daan, Simon Folkard, Alfred Lewy, Reimer Lund, and Jürgen Zully. 2005. “Rütger Wever: An Appreciation.” Journal of Biological Rhythms 20 (6): 554-555.
You, Haili. 1994. “Defining Rhythm: Aspects of an Anthropology of Rhythm.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 18: 361-384.