The rhythm is in us and between us. And here at Much To Be Told, we want to talk about rhythm because it is a major component of what makes the un-TOLD festival such a hotspot for so many. We’ll see over the course of the entire text, why rhythm matters and why it matters who you get into rhythm with.
Introduction
Why should we care about rhythm? Because it connects us to the world in the first place. It plays a crucial role in listening and speaking, in predicting each other’s speech in noisy places, in walking and even in the emotional flow we exchange with each other. Rhythm is an essential aspect of reality.
As far as man and his life on this earth are concerned, rhythm has been present in all the civilizations he has developed, being used and cultivated in various forms. Parents swing their children rhythmically as babies to comfort them, rhythms still characterize tribal ceremonies, but they are also present in the military and religious processions we find in more developed cultures. Poetry has been recited rhythmically since ancient times, to better serve its memorization, as some records say in connection with Homer’s work. Repetitive and complex work creates a predisposition towards a specific rhythm, sometimes to break the monotony, sometimes to increase the productivity of the process. Stone-breaking workers sing to keep the rhythm required for hammer blows, postal workers in Ghana stamping letters use a very precise rhythm to make their work more efficient, or carpet weavers in Iran use songs with a complex musical structure to communicate to their fellow workers the patterns they are required to weave. All musical systems and styles are organized around rhythmic motifs. Indeed the universality of rhythm is a strong argument for the existence of biological processes governing the perception and production of rhythm. Some even see rhythm as the building block of consciousness.
About rhythm in the biological sense
The most concrete way in which we humans deal with rhythm is at the biological level. While we are not all familiar with the notion of circadian rhythm, we are all familiar with the effects it has on our bodies. The circadian rhythm, etymologically speaking, represents the roundness of a day, in other words its totality. It represents a cyclical series of hormones that are secreted at regular intervals. Thus our internal rhythm is controlled so that we can adapt to the sequence of day/night, activity/rest, maximum energy/minimum energy, etc. All of this is possible thanks to our body’s native intelligence to self-balance in order to increase the quality of life7. This rhythm is regulated by a host of external factors, called zeitgebers, which activate the internal biological clock through exposure to them. They were identified by Jürgen Aschoff, one of the founders of chronobiology, and activate the internal biological clock through exposure to them. The most important of these factors is light, followed by many others, including social interaction. This should make us wonder, why does the UNTOLD festival, by its very nature, bring together a large collective of people at night, and why do these musical events that have mass excitement at their center take place in the dark?
Already science is beginning to self-question about exposure to abnormal light at night, as Ecclesiastes says, wisdom cries out in the squares, but no one hears. Even an article in the journal revista Nature focuses on the role played by artificial light in regulating affective states and how the brain suffers as a result if abnormal exposure occurs at night. There is growing evidence that disrupting the circadian rhythm has effects on areas of the brain involved in adjusting emotions. And this occurs either directly through neurological disruption of the inner biological rhythm or indirectly through altered neuroplasticity and neural circuitry.10 Yes, what
can I say, we’ve come a long way as a society in terms of scientific knowledge… We just managed to quantitatively prove that it’s okay to stay in bed at night in the dark. My grandmother knew that qualitatively and intuitively, but now we have indisputable reasons to start sleeping at night. It’s a step towards an increasingly healthy life…
There are a lot of mental and somatic unbalances that result from not following this rhythm. Negative consequences in the area of psychiatric disorders include bipolar disorder, sleep disorders7 and depression. And also, at a more somatic level, we can speak of a wide variety of disorders, even chronic disorders, which can occur when we are exposed abnormally to light. This increases the risk of tumors, diabetes, obesity, and this is also due to a lack of respect for the natural rhythm of physiological processes.9
Synchronicity, rhythm, balance, these are the aspects that unquestionably define the path to a healthy and fulfilling life.
Fast and slow rhythms
Language is probably not what first comes to mind when we think of rhythm. You may, however, have learned about prosody, iambic and trochaic rhythm, anapest in school. But outside the context of poetry, we don’t often think of language in terms of rhythm. But in reality rhythm is an indispensable ingredient of linguistic communication.
Rhythms can be seen through various forms of temporal scaling, namely as short or long beats. Discourse has different structuring elements of rhythm and they are: the phoneme (the basic unit, the sound and the corresponding letter), the syllable, the word, the sentence, each of them manifesting its own speed. We thus understand that speech comes in units of different sizes. It is one thing to talk about the sound that a letter makes, and here we are talking about the lower end of the dimension, and another to talk about the slow movement of increasing and decreasing intensity, manifested throughout a sentence, which defines the upper end of the dimension. These elements of discursivity constitute rhythms that our sound mind needs to sort out. We can try to focus on the slow parts of speech, for example the pitch fluctuations of the sound that accompanies speech, and ignore the fast rhythms, for example the sounds attributed to the vowels and consonants that make up the spoken word, or vice versa. But this is not really possible and rarely desirable.
This temporal hierarchy is active in music as well. Music is a mixture of slow phrases, steady rhythms, sustained and rapidly changing notes, trills and loud drum beats. The interwoven temporal structures also include the sounds of the environment,
the movement of footsteps as we walk along a path and hear fast and slow footsteps, the sound of branches and leaves under our feet, or the quick snap of a branch. So just as sounds are arranged in different temporal lengths, our brain rhythms come at different speeds. Subcortical structures are equipped for durations on the order of microseconds, whereas the cortex is much more capable of integrating sounds over a longer period of time.
The rhythm is in us
If you just play the conga drums using a specific rhythm, you’ll be able to see it in the brainwave activity recording. You will then be able to see how neural activity repeats in synchronicity with the rhythm you are playing every half second. But what does the brain do if along with the conga drums we listen to another song, one that synchronizes with the rhythm? The brain produces a new rhythm! But in addition to the obvious response, you may notice another, smaller signal. This new signal comes from the brain’s ability to understand pairs of accented and unaccented beats. So that it can recompose the tempo at the brainwave level.
This speaks to the fact that our brain has the capacity to be trained and at the same time rehearse the rhythms present in music, both implicitly and explicitly. However, this extra signal, related to the newly added rhythm, does not occur when the song deliberately becomes out of tune with the rhythm of the conga drum. The mind’s response to the drum beat is deeply shaped by the listening context. Rhythmic organization operates automatically when we listen to sounds. But if our expectations of rhythm are violated, then our brain behaves differently, and that’s because of our internal sense of rhythm perception.
Rhythm intelligence
Imagine the very popular song: ‘Shave and a haircut, two bits’ and tap the rhythm with your finger on the table. When you tap your finger, you normally mark the durations of the song. Each duration corresponds to a sound, which is represented by the rhythm. But in this case, the pause times become ignored. But when you tap your foot, you mark only 4 beats, those corresponding to the accented beats. And, in this case, they even include a pause. And that’s because music has both durations, which are organized according to rhythmic patterns, but also accents, which structure the music on a deeper level.
We can assume that there are several types of rhythmic intelligence. There is no way to predict if someone will be able to perform a task related to a certain level of rhythm, based on their ability to handle another rhythmic level. This has been observed in people whose brain tissue has been damaged and who were thus able to perceive some aspects of rhythm, but others were not accessible to them for processing. It was therefore understood that these distinctions are fundamental to how the brain system functions. We can observe dissociations in rhythmic abilities in each of us, which confirms the idea that rhythm is not an all-or-nothing ability. Because our ability to perform one type of rhythm or another is closely related to our language skills. And both our ability to be able to hold rhythm or accents predict our ability to read and develop our language.
In a very simple way, rhythm in speech tells us when important information starts and when it stops. Stressed syllables occur at approximately equal intervals and, very importantly, they convey much of the information contained in the speech. When the rhythm flows continuously, the listener is guided to the essential points communicated in the sentence by the predictions the rhythm makes in the receiver. He is then better prepared to understand the content of the spoken words. With better understanding of the spoken word comes the ability, when learning to read, to learn to read, to make the necessary connections between the sounds of language and their written form.
Rhythm and socializing
How we feel in relation to another person is very much about rhythm. Those who chat as they walk even end up synchronizing their pace to communicate better.
For example, Snowball, the cockatoo parrot, will dance with you, but if you get out of rhythm, then he will turn around and neglect you. Rhythm also influences our social attitudes. The extent to which one person synchronizes with another in an experiment affects that person’s opinion of the experimenter’s dislike or preference for them. Students at a university were instructed to tap the beat alongside a metronome while another experimenter tapped the beat nearby. If the experimenter succeeded in beating the beat at the same speed, then the note given to the question, “How pleasant is the experimenter?” What was observed showed that when the experimenter succeeded in tapping the beat at the same speed, then the note given to the question, “how agreeable is the experimenter?” increased. And pre-school children who were asked to perform a task that involved synchronizing to a certain beat performed much better when they did so with another person, than when the sound came from an impersonal speaker.
Even for very young children, synchronizing with other people leads to positive emotions towards them. In one study, an experiment involved participants rocking babies to the beat of a song. Some of the participants kept to the rhythm of the song, while other participants intentionally broke the rhythm. When the rocking session was over, the baby was placed on the floor and the adult deliberately dropped an object on the floor and acted as if they needed help looking for it. What was observed was that babies who were rocked to the rhythm of the song were much more responsive to helping the adult find the object. So, this availability of the baby to help may be correlated with the formation of a social bond that promotes cooperation through synchronized rhythms. Babies who were rocked, but not rhythmically attuned, showed significantly less interest in helping the adult. Rhythm-level synchronization leads to interpersonal synchronization.
Don’t go to un-TOLD to experience a moment of isolated intensity. That’s how we break what little rhythm we, as 21st century humans, still have to find a little rest. Cultivate for free the joyful rhythm of being real and alive day by day, that’s how you’ll find true rest, the one that fills your inner being.
Bibliography:
- The Extraordinary Ways Rhythm Shapes Our Lives
- Qualitative and Quantitative Features of Music Reported to Support Peak Mystical Experiences during Psychedelic Therapy Sessions
- Joint drumming: social context facilitates synchronization in preschool children
- Musicians Without Borders
- Rhythm in speech and language: a new research paradigm
- Interpersonal synchrony increases prosocial behavior in infants
- Circadian_rhythm
- Zeitgeber
- Artificial Light Exposure and Circadian Rhythm
- Timing of light exposure affects mood and brain circuits
