Aging effects on neural processing of rhythm and meter

When listening to musical rhythm, humans can perceive and move to beat-like metrical pulses. Recently, it has been hypothesized that meter perception is related to brain activity responding to the acoustic fluctuation of the rhythmic input, with selective enhancement of the brain response elicited at meter-related frequencies. In the current study, the electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded while younger (<35) and older (>60) adults listened to rhythmic patterns presented at two different tempi while intermittently performing a tapping task. Despite significant hearing loss compared to younger adults, older adults showed preserved brain activity to the rhythms. However, age effects were observed in the distribution of amplitude across frequencies. Specifically, in contrast with younger adults, older adults showed relatively larger amplitude at the frequency corresponding to the rate of individual events making up the rhythms as compared to lower meter-related frequencies. This difference is compatible with larger N1-P2 potentials as generally observed in older adults in response to acoustic onsets, irrespective of meter perception. These larger low-level responses to sounds have been linked to processes by which age-related hearing loss would be compensated by cortical sensory mechanisms. Importantly, this low-level effect would be associated here with relatively reduced neural activity at lower frequencies corresponding to higher-level metrical grouping of the acoustic events, as compared to younger adults.

Rhythmic Techniques in Deaf Hip Hop

The art of signed music involves the use of rhythmicized signs from a signed language, such as American Sign Language (ASL), in a musical context. Signed music encompasses a variety of subgenres, including ASL hip hop or “dip hop.” A typical dip hop performance involves a Deaf or hard-of-hearing artist simultaneously performing vocalized and signed rapping over a looped background beat. Although dip hop emerged as a grassroots movement in the early 1990s, it has received little analytical attention in the scholarly literature on hip hop. In this paper, the authors combine techniques adapted from analyzing rhythm in non-signed rap music with techniques adapted from analyzing non-rapped signed music to analyze the rhythmic flow of tracks by dip hop artists Sean Forbes, Wawa, and Signmark. The authors demonstrate that dip hop artists have developed genre-specific rhythmic paradigms and tropes to convey the periodicity and rhyme that are fundamental to rap music. Specifically, we address the alignment of rhythm and meter in signed and vocal rap and the conveyance of a repeated “beat” through rhythmic signing. The analyses of dip hop tracks reveal important differences between dip hop and vocal rap, as well as differences between the conventions of dip hop and ASL poetry.

Cautioning Against “Academic Bookishness”: From the History of Translation of Russian Classical Literature into the Abkhaz Language

The article examines the experience of Abkhaz translators, writers and scientists in translating Russian classics into the Abkhaz language. It is shown that literary translation in Abkhazia developed in stages and in parallel with domestic literature, becoming its integral part, revealing the potential expressive capabilities of the native language. Briefly describing the legacy of the founder of Abkhaz literature D. I. Gulia, who was engaged in the translation of liturgical literature in the early 20th century, the author dwells on the most significant achievements of modern translators of Russian classical literature. Important theoretical and practical observations concerning the translation technique are presented, variants of some texts in the Abkhaz language are given, by examples of which the article illustrates the most significant discoveries and achievements of translators in the field of transferring the figurative system of the original text, rhythm and meter (when it comes to verse speech), composition, general tonality of the work.

It Sounds like Brahms

Chapter 1 discusses the balance of classicism and romanticism as artistic and expressive underpinnings of Brahms’s style. Brahms was in many ways a composer for whom the past—even the distant past—was still very much alive. Yet he was remarkably innovative. He often used Classical-Era forms, but he adapted them to his expressive ends. He used harmonic progressions identical to those used in similar circumstances by composers of the Classical Era, but also used harmonies as adventurously as Wagner or Liszt. In terms of texture and of rhythm and meter, he was, if anything, more adventurous than many of his contemporaries. The chapter offers a detailed analysis of harmony, dissonance, melody, melodic evolution, texture, rhythm and meter, counterpoint, and developing variation in a single Brahms phrase (from the second theme of the first movement of the A-major Violin Sonata, op. 100). Brahms’s phrase is compared to and differentiated from a similar phrase opening the second theme in Beethoven’s Violin Sonata in A, op. 30, no. 2.

Hearing Homophony

This book examines a repertoire of homophonic vernacular partsongs composed around the turn of the seventeenth century, and considers how these partsongs exploit rhythm, meter, phrase structure, and form to craft harmonic trajectories. Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi, Thomas Morley, Hans Leo Hassler, and their contemporaries engineered a particular kind of centricity that is distinctively tonal: they strategically deployed dominant harmonies at regular periodicities and in combination with poetic, phrase structural, and formal cues, thereby creating expectation for tonic harmonies. Homophony provided an ideal venue for these experiments: spurred by an increasing demand for comprehensible texts, composers of partsongs developed rigid text-setting procedures that promoted both metrical regularity and consistent phrase rhythm. This rhythmic consistency had a ripple effect: it encouraged composers to design symmetrical phrase structures and to build comprehensible, repetitive, and predictable formal structures. Thus, homophonic partsongs create and exploit trajectories from dominants to tonics on multiple scales, from cadence to sub-phrase to phrase to form. Ultimately, this book argues for a model of tonality—and of tonality’s history—that centers not pitch, but rhythm and meter. Metrically oriented harmonic trajectories encourage tonal expectation. And we can locate these trajectories in a variety of repertoires, including those that we traditionally understand as “modal.”

A dissonância métrica como elemento de análise da música do período da prática comum: resenha de Hearing rhythm and meter

Hearing rhythm and meter: analyzing metrical consonance and dissonance in commom-practice period music é um livro recentemente escrito e publicado pelo professor e pesquisador norte-americano Matthew Santa. Seguindo alto rigor científico na exposição dos conceitos, esta produção tem um forte propósito didático na explicação de conceitos teóricos sobre ritmo e métrica, centrando o discurso na análise de dissonâncias métricas. Importante para especialistas em teoria e análise musical e fundamental para estudantes de Graduação em Música, Hearing rhythm and meter deve alterar a forma com que o leitor ouve repertórios do período da prática comum. O texto que segue abaixo procura resumir os principais tópicos abordados nesta produção bibliográfica.

‘Cell Division’ and ‘O Positive’

‘Cell Division’: This poem is on process, on making as a human endeavour. Wrapped in terminology, language embodies placement where the body wants to land. As language creatures, humans attempt definition without including sensory episodes of navigation, cognitive disassociations of tripped-up aural sensation, i.e. what feels good, i.e. fun. The function of the imagination in language is to question its continual evolution ‐ to grow the 'not-here' from the Self. With purposeful misspellings of text-speak, yr for your, and asking the reader to pronounce hum with extra mmms ‐ the writer interlays mouth with media to reach past the moment of the poem, past the page, to the reader's eyes, skin and body lingo, to share in the process. Titled ‘Cell Division’, as tendrils of our collective unsettling, this poem looks at choice and mobility as concurrent quadrants in the act of doing.‘O Positive’: As the unfolding of each moment presents itself, the question becomes, how much to hold onto what passes by? This poem, in its restraint and jangled incompletion, uses rhythm and meter inside the sentence form, to look at how communication travels inside the syntax of grammar. The sound of the breath as it moves through the lines, connects to the human flow referenced in the title ‐ which then connects to the ending neologism infantic, itself, a landing spot without origin.

Precedents for a Theory of Projection

This chapter evaluates the work of two theorists who have discussed in detail the phenomenon of “projection.” Friedrich Neumann's concept of the rhythmic pair differs from this book's account of projection most obviously in its isolation of the pair as an autonomous “whole,” its separation of rhythm and meter, and its invocation of time point for the determination of an event's boundaries. Although Neumann describes the process through which a rhythmic pair might become unified as a “higher order” discrimination, he does not consider the process through which equality is produced and removes projection from meter in order to characterize an exclusively rhythmic order that in many respects resembles Hugo Reimann's dynamic, “organic” model. By contrast, Moritz Hauptmann is concerned with the process whereby determinate duration and equality are created and proposes a theory in which meter, quite apart from rhythm, is regarded as a dynamic, organic phenomenon arising from an innate human disposition for equal measure. The chapter then considers Hauptmann's analysis of the formation of duple meter.