Just got this on Amazon Kindle. It is brilliant!
It discusses how we are human because we learnt about rhythm.
It seems the prehistoric cave paintings are in positions that are also acoustically most interesting. Archaeologists have worked out that the scenes can be made to be as if the legs of animals are moving if the right sounds are done at the right time - there is a whole science of litho-acoustics.
The aim of this publication is to stimulate research in ethnomusicology informed by the concept of entrainment, which describes the interaction and consequent synchronization of two or more rhythmic processes or oscillators. Entrainment as a concept has a considerable history - it was first identified by the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens in 1665 and has been applied widely in mathematics and in the physical, biological, and social sciences. It is a process that manifests in many ways, some of which involve human agency or cognition. Strangely though, it has had relatively little impact to date in studies of music, where it might be thought particularly relevant, and is only beginning to be seriously considered within
ethnomusicology. This is, to our knowledge, the first publication to address the concept in detail from an
1 ethnomusicological perspective.
In music research, we have already seen an entrainment perspective adopted in the study of musical metre, particularly in the 1990s. Instead of looking for musical cues transmitted from performer to listener as the sole determinants of time and metre precepts, music psychologists have begun to apply an entrainment model in which rhythmic processes endogenous to the listener entrain to cues in the musical sound (Large and Kolen 1994). Although there is much to be done in this area, the entrainment model seems to reflect the cognitive processes much better than do previous models of metrical perception.
Some recent work also points to new perspectives offered by the entrainment concept in the study of proto- musical behaviour in infants, and in the evolution of musical behaviour in the human species (Trevarthen 1999-2000, Merker 2000).
We believe that this concept could have a particularly significant impact if applied to ethnomusicological research because it offers a new approach to understanding music making and music perception as an integrated, embodied and interactive process, and can therefore shed light on many issues central to ethnomusicological thought.
Entrainment may be central to an ethnomusicological orientation for which performance and listening are the focus of interest. Such a development is likely to be more productive if researchers share an understanding of what the concept implies (as well as what its limitations might be); we offer this contribution to colleagues in that spirit.
http://oro.open.ac.uk/2661/1/http://www.mus.cam.ac.uk/~ic108/lithoacoustics/BAR2002/BARpreprint.pdfThe Islamic ban on music arguably stops us being who we are.
Topic: Noise David Hendy