Rhythm Day 21

1. Rhythm Day 21 Music Cognition MUSC 495.02, NSCI 466, NSCI 710.03 Harry Howard Barbara Jazwinski Tulane University

2. Course administration • Spend provost's money Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

3. Goals for today Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

4. The elements of rhythm • Rhythm is the variation of the length and accentuation of a series of sounds or other events. • Much music is characterized by a sequence of stressed and unstressed beats (often called "strong" and "weak") organized into a meter and partially indicated by a time signature, the speed of which is determined by a tempo. Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

5. Beat • The basic time unit of much Western music • each tick sounded by a metronome Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

6. Types of beats • Downbeat • The impulse that occurs at the beginning of a bar in measured music, typically the first beat of a measure. • Its name derives from the downward stroke of the director or conductor's baton at the start of each measure. • Upbeat • An unaccented beat or beats that occur before the first beat of a following measure. • In other words, it is an impulse in a measured rhythm that immediately precedes, and hence anticipates, the downbeat, which is the strongest of such impulses. • It is also an anticipatory note or succession of notes occurring before the first barline of a piece, sometimes referred to as an ‘upbeat figure’, section or phrase or "anacrusis". • Backbeat • In music of duple time, the back beat refers to the even beats of the bar. • Off-beat • rhythms that emphasize the weak beats of a bar. • The downbeat can never be the off-beat because it is the strongest beat in 4/4 time. Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

7. Other usages of "beat" • The onset of the corresponding time unit, such as the very moment when a metronome ticks. • The complete time interval between two consecutive ticks or taps. • In popular music, the whole sequence of individual beats. • In hip hop music, the entire instrumental, non-vocal portion of a song. Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

8. Time signature • A convention used in Western musical notation to specify • how many beats are in each measure, and • what note value constitutes one beat. • In a musical score, the time signature appears at the beginning of the piece, immediately following the key signature. Simple example of a 3/4 time signature: here there are three quarter-notes per measure. The "beat" most often refers to the bottom number. Sound Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

9. Meter • A term that music has inherited from the rhythmic element of poetry, where it means • the number of lines in a verse, • the number of syllables in each line and • the arrangement of those syllables as long or short, accented or unaccented. • Hence in music it refers to the measurement of musical lines into a number of measures of stressed and unstressed beats, indicated in Western musical notation by a time signature (though the terminology of Western music is notoriously imprecise in this area). Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

10. Meter identification • The definition of a musical meter requires the identification of repeating patterns of accented and unaccented syllables, short and long, or a "pulse-group" that corresponds to the poetic foot. • Normally such pulse-groups are defined by taking the accented pulse as the first and counting the pulses until the next accent. Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

11. Tempo • In musical terminology, tempo (Italian for time, movement) is the speed or pace of a given piece. • It is a crucial element of composition, as it can affect the mood and difficulty of a piece. Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

12. In terms of previous lectures … • "Once a metric hierarchy has been established, we, as listeners, will maintain that organization as long as minimal evidence is present" (Lester 1986, 77). Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

13. Daniel G. Mauro (2005) Using Music to Tap Into a Universal Neural Grammar

14. The Musical Brain Model • Musical pieces consist of temporal sequences (rhythms) of frequency events (pitches) that are organized in serial (melody) and in parallel (harmony). • The brain processes information by means of temporal and frequency-based coding mechanisms that occur in serial and parallel neural pathways. • The acoustic ingredients with which musical pieces are created synchronize with rhythmic and frequency-based neural codes, thereby inducing a variety of extra-musical brain responses. • Music can be used as a systematic tool for probing these dynamic brain coding mechanisms. Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

15. Music consists of temporally organized frequency events • Most forms of music can be described in terms of three essential components: melody, harmony and rhythm. • Melody consists of a horizontal sequence of pitches, where each individual pitch is composed of a fundamental frequency and a series of harmonic overtones. • Harmony consists of vertical arrangements of pitches (chords) that support the melodic structure as it moves through time. • The essential components of rhythm are meter (regular alternation of accented beats) and phrasing (temporal pattern of musical events). Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

16. The brain organizes information in terms of frequency codes • Frequencies are an ubiquitous form of information coding throughout the brain. • For example, stimulus intensity in various modalities (e.g., loudness, brightness) is encoded by the average spiking frequency of neurons. • Oscillations in distributed neural networks are crucial to perceptual binding – the ability of the brain to integrate various aspects of sensory input into a coherent and unified whole. • In particular, coherent oscillations in the gamma frequency band (30 to 80 Hz) have been implicated in linking visual, olfactory and auditory percepts. Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

17. The brain organizes information in terms of time codes • Neuronal oscillations are insufficient to explain cognitive functions which occur over longer time scales. • Modes of cognition as diverse as language and spatial temporal reasoning require the sequential ordering and manipulation of discrete information over time. • Three main types of coding mechanisms have been described in the literature, two of which are time- related: • time-of-arrival (e.g., latency codes, inter-neuronal synchrony codes); • temporal pattern (e.g., complex pattern codes, interspike interval codes); and • connectivity (e.g., labelled-line, spatial-pattern codes) Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

18. Back to musical rhythm • Rhythm comprises a variety of components including beat, pulse, accent, tempo, duration, meter, grouping, and phrasing. • Of these rhythmic features, four are relevant to the present discussion: pulse, tempo, meter, phrasing. • Pulse refers to a series of regularly recurring beats that provides a temporal framework against which durations and patterns are perceived. • Tempo is simply the repetition rate of a pulse, typically measured in beats per minute (bpm). • Meter is the organization of beats into a cyclically repeating pattern of accents. • Phrases are rhythmic groupings that incorporate varying patterns of time intervals and accents. Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

19. Brain = music • The latter three aspects of musical rhythm relate to the three neural timing properties outlined earlier. • In a piece of music, tempo (pulse frequency) can be said to correspond to the frequency of brain rhythms. • Meter provides a temporal reference around which musical events are synchronized and thus bears a relationship to cortical synchrony. • Finally, musical phrasing is similar to the occurrence of neuronal firing sequences that exhibit temporal spiking patterns. Music Cognition - Jazwinski & Howard - Tulane University

20. Next Monday Rhythm in music & in language