WHO:	Justin London , Carleton College
TOPIC:	"Hearing Rhythmic Gestures: MovingBodies and Embodied Minds."
ABSTRACT:	The limits on our ability to produce and/or hear rhythmic patterns have long been known; studies of our ability to synchronize with a series of taps, discriminate differences in duration, and so forth, go back to the nineteenth century (Bolton 1894, Woodrow 1909, Wundt 1911). More recent studies of musical performance--from jazz drumming to Chopin Etudes--have confirmed earlier research: in a rhythmic pattern, component durations cannot be shorter than about a tenth of a second, nor can they be much longer than two seconds. As it will be shown, the same temporal limits for music crop up in other, non musical behaviors--speaking, walking, running, arm waving, and so forth. Thus both music and gesture seem to obey a common set of neurobiological limits for the perception and production of patterned movement, grounded in our kinematic awareness and motor control. To explore this relationship, I will first present some classic experiments and demonstrations in the perception and production of rhythm and duration. This empirical research establishes not only the upper and lower limits for musical rhythm, but also gives us a sense of the temporal topography between those limits. I will then take a slight detour to consider other aspects of musical rhythm, specifically our ability to interpolate missing elements in a rhythmic pattern and our sense of hearing a rhythmic accent in the absence of any musical event (so called "loud rests"). I will then return to other, non-musical rhythmic motor behaviors and examine some empirical data on common ranges for those activities. This will then lead to my final and most speculative point: that not all musical gestures are really "musical." Just as harsh timbres or stridently dissonant chords are sometimes characterized as "unmusical," so to can sounds by "unrhythmical" (or "rhythmically unmusical"). For sounds to be rhythmical they must occur within the critical range for musical rhythm noted above, and be regular enough to afford the listener the ability to synchronize his or her attention and/or motor behavior(s) with them. This synchronization allows for a collective, social response to the music by performers and audience alike. When this synchronization is possible, then we have musical gestures, gestures that have a sense of movement and coherence precisely because we ourselves can move that way.s
WHEN:	1/22/2004 4:30:00 PM
WHERE:	Eastman School of Music 404

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