Together in music

Looking back at the diverse chapters of the “Together in music” volume, three main themes are identified that reoccur. These relate to the relevance of embodied in-the-moment interaction between musicians for the creative processes to develop, the rich multi-dimensionality of the group music-making experience at a micro-, meso-, and macro-level, and the close relationships between social and musical coordination. These themes highlight the need to advance research by investigating ensemble performance and creativity at multiple analytical levels, e.g. taking microtiming, social coordination, and identity into account, and by explicitly considering developments and emergence over time. Furthermore, these themes promote the advancement of methods and techniques to investigate ensemble music-making processes, several of which are identified and illustrated in the book, including pattern detection in behavioral interaction, visualization of relationships between musicians, and innovations in the measurement and analysis of entrainment behavior in timing and intonation.

Third party stabilization of unstable coordination in systems of coupled oscillators

The Haken-Kelso-Bunz (HKB) system of equations is a well-developed model for dyadic rhythmic coordination in biological systems. It captures ubiquitous empirical observations of bistability – the coexistence of in-phase and antiphase motion – in neural, behavioral, and social coordination. Recent work by Zhang and colleagues has generalized HKB to many oscillators to account for new empirical phenomena observed in multiagent interaction. Utilising this generalization, the present work examines how the coordination dynamics of a pair of oscillators can be augmented by virtue of their coupling to a third oscillator. We show that stable antiphase coordination emerges in pairs of oscillators even when their coupling parameters would have prohibited such coordination in their dyadic relation. We envision two lines of application for this theoretical work. In the social sciences, our model points toward the development of intervention strategies to support coordination behavior in heterogeneous groups (for instance in gerontology, when younger and older individuals interact). In neuroscience, our model will advance our understanding of how the direct functional connection of mesoscale or microscale neural ensembles might be switched by their changing coupling to other neural ensembles. Our findings illuminate a crucial property of complex systems: how the whole is different than the system’s parts.

COGNITIVE BASIS OF FOCAL POINTS: EVOLUTION AND CORRELATED EQUILIBRIUM EMERGENCE

The paper sketches a way to connect cognitively realistic notion of relevance needed for social coordination and game-theoretic models of such coordination, in particular, that of correlated equilibrium. Such a connection would help to answer the question of how social coordination described in game theory is evolutionary and cognitively possible. The main argument put forward is to equate a signal’s relevance to its information quantity - the more relevant a signal is, the more it changes probabilities of action.

Navigating the complex social ecology of screen-based activity in video-mediated interaction

Task-oriented video-mediated interaction takes place within a complex digital-social ecology which presents, to participants, a practical problem of social coordination: How to navigate, in mutually accountable ways, between interacting with the remote co-participants and scrutinizing one’s own screen –which suspends interaction–, for instance when searching for information on a search engine. Using conversation analysis for the examination of screen-recorded dyadic interactions, this study identifies a range of practices participants draw on to alert co-participants to incipient suspensions of talk. By accounting for such suspensions as being task-related through verbal alerts, typically in the form let me/let’s X, participants successfully ‘buy time’, which allows them to fully concentrate on their screen activity and thereby ensure the progression of task accomplishment. We discuss how these findings contribute to our understanding of the complex ecologies of technology-mediated interactions.

Variability of social interactions in new versus established relationships in female degus

When a behaving system explores a new environment or stimulus it varies its behavior to ensure proper sampling. As contingencies are learned, behavioral variance can give-way to routines and stereotypies. This phenomenon is common across a range of learning systems, but has not been well studied in the social domain in which the stimulus an agent investigates, another individual, is reactive to the agent’s behaviors. We examined the effects of social novelty on interaction variability in laboratory-reared, female degus, known to readily express affiliative behaviors with initially unfamiliar, unrelated individuals. Degus were presented with a series of 20 minute, dyadic “reunion” sessions across days, interleaving exposures to familiar and unfamiliar same-sex conspecifics. We found that dyads could be distinguished from one-another by their interactive behaviors, suggesting dyad-specific social relationships. Following the first session, stranger dyads were unexpectedly easier to differentiate than cagemates due to a combination of higher diversity of behavior between dyads and, in some cases, lower variability within dyads. Some evidence could be found for higher variability in stranger interactions within the first two exposures, though within-session variability increased in cagemates across reunions, ultimately exceeding levels in strangers. We also observed that while strangers interacted more than cagemates, this could be traced to only 30% of the animals and the higher interaction levels did not attenuate over sessions or after co-housing the animals. No strong differences were observed in the temporal structure of social behavior between the two groups. Results reveal that new relationships in adult, female degus are more diverse but not more variable compared with established relationships, particularly after the first social exposure. Given known tendencies of female degus to form and maintain new relationships, these findings are consistent with the notion that higher interaction variability may be maladaptive to building social coordination and trust.

Collective rhythm as an emergent property during human social coordination

The literature on social interactions has shown that participants coordinate not only at the behavioral but also at the physiological and neural levels, and that this coordination gives a temporal structure to the individual and to the social dynamics. However, it has not been fully explored whether such temporal patterns emerge during interpersonal coordination beyond dyads, whether this phenomenon arises from complex cognitive mechanisms or from relatively simple rules of behavior, or the sociocultural processes that underlie this phenomenon. We review the evidence for the existence of group-level rhythmic patterns that result from social interactions and argue that, by imposing a temporal structure at the individual and interaction levels, interpersonal coordination in groups leads to temporal regularities that cannot be predicted from the individual periodicities: a collective rhythm. Moreover, we use this interpretation of the literature to discuss how taking into account the sociocultural niche in which individuals develop can help explain the seemingly divergent results that have been reported on the social influences and consequences of interpersonal coordination. We make recommendations on further research to test these arguments and their relationship to the feeling of belonging and assimilation experienced during group dynamics.

On Waiting Willfully in Urban Uganda: Toward an Anthropology of Pace

Women in Uganda strategically time their entry into married motherhood in relation to others with whom they want to be connected. Although much of the burgeoning literature on “waithood” laments global youth’s delayed entry into social adulthood, I show that women in urban Uganda intentionally pause, slowing down their movement through the life course to cultivate networks of interdependence that will propel them not only forward through the life course but also upward socioeconomically. The logics and practices by which they pace themselves point beyond a neoliberal conception of time and agency, instead highlighting the heightened importance of divine connections and social coordination under increasingly capitalist and urban conditions. The lens of pace helps bring into view the situated, multilayered, relational projects of moving through life with others. EKIHANDIIKO OMUBUGUFU Abakazi omuri Uganda nibetebekanisiza gye obwiire bw’okutaaha omubushweere n’obuzaire waaba n’ogyeragyeranisa naabo abubarikweenda kwegaita/kuba nabo. N’obu ebihaandiiko ebirikweyongyera kukanya ebirikukwaata aha bunyeeto biraabe nibyooreka okutoonzya ahabw’eminyeeto kukyerererwa kukura, ninyoreka ngu abakazi omumyaanya ekurakureine omuri Uganda nibariindaho bakigyendereire, bakyeendeeza ahamigyendere omumituurire yaabo kwenda ngu babaase kwombeka emikago y’okuhweerahweerana etarikubayaamba kwongyera kubutuura emituurire yaabo kwonka kureka na n’okwongyera kubatunguura omubyentaatsya. Enteekateeka hamwe n’emitwaarize eyibarikutwaazamu n’ehingura ahanyetegyereza y’obweire hamwe n’obugabe bw’okwehitsyaho ebyetaago eya abakurakureine, beitu byongyera kumurika ekyetaago kihaango ky’okumanya ebyenyikiriza hamwe n’okutuuragye n’abaantu omumbeera z’obushuubuzi hamwe n’entunguuka ebiriyo nibikanya. Ekitangaazo ky’emitwarize nikiyaamba kureeba omubury’obuhikire, entebekanisa zitarikushushwana z’okubaasa kutuuragye nabaandi.

The climatization of global politics: introduction to the special issue

Climate change now constitutes a major issue in world politics, intersecting with and shaping many other political domains, and wider patterns of social and economic life. Global climate governance is also no longer restricted to multilateral negotiations under the UN Climate Convention: it increasingly extends beyond the international climate regime to climatize other areas of global politics. This concept of climatization points to a powerful but uneven process of extension, translation, and social coordination, as climate change becomes the frame of reference through which other policy issues and forms of global activism are mediated and hierarchized. This special issue brings together contributions on both theoretical aspects and empirical cases of the climatization process. The introduction sets out a conceptual framework to systematize these observations and guide further research. First, we identify the preconditions for, and driving forces behind, climatization. We then sketch the contours of an emergent ‘climate logic’ that reshapes affected domains, and examine the wider implications of climatization for global politics. Beyond the climate case, we hope this will provide new ways to observe and understand contemporary transformations of global society and global governance.

Nietzsche’s Epiphenomenalism about RConsciousness

This chapter argues for an epiphenomenal reading of Nietzsche’s view of reflective consciousness. The position ascribed to Nietzsche is that no reflectively conscious state is among the causally efficacious antecedents of token actions. This reading is defended by showing it is compellingly supported by textual evidence. The chapter also argues that reflective consciousness’s proper function is in the realm of social coordination. More precisely, Rconscious states play a crucial role in the acquisition of social norms. That role, however, is not sufficient for the relevant norm to become behaviourally efficacious and, thus, cause our actions. For only internalized norms are behaviourally efficacious in that sense. In turn, though Rconscious states are often the channel through which we are presented with social norms, it depends on the arrangement of our drives and affects whether we internalize them or not. The chapter ends by surveying and rebutting a range of objections to epiphenomenal readings of Nietzsche.