Our bodies’ perception of musical rhythm, and how that applies to the rhythm of the calendar.
Taking a number of passages from This is Your Brain on Music and shifting their context from musical tempo and rhythm to calendrical tempo and rhythm. You never know what might come of it. [As far as I know, there have yet to be any studies that determine the cognitive effects of different calendar systems on one's thinking process - I suspect this would be a daunting process - how would you manage a control group?]
p15 “Rhythm refers to the durations of a series of notes [tones], and to the way that they group together into units.”
p16 “Meter is created by our brains by extracting information from rhythm and loudness cues, and refers to the way in which tones are grouped with one another across time.”
p 55-6 “Briefly, rhythm refers to the lengths of notes, tempo refers to the pace of a piece of music (the rate at which you would tap your foot to it), and meter refers to when you tap your foot hard versus light, and how these hard and light taps group together to form larger units.”
p 57 “Tempo refers to the pace of a piece of music… If a song is a living, breathing entity, you might think of the tempo as its gait…or its pulse – the rate at which the heart of the song is beating.”
Granted, musical rhythm, meter, and tempo differ from those of the calendar. Music is based on the mathematical relationships between our ear’s mechanism of sensation and perception, the rate of vibration of molecules in the air, and our personal and cultural history of music. Not exactly the same mechanism. Here, I’m trying to see what argument can be made to argue in favour of a calendar organized into regular, repeated periods of time, and the irregular one we currently have (i.e. the Gregorian Calendar).
Here are the calendar versions of the same qualities:
- rhythm – refers to the duration of tones (notes). This is tricky to apply to the calendar. If we use the second as a basis, then each second is identical. Same with the day. This makes more sense to look at the rhythm of the weeks compared to New Year’s Day i.e. if each week is a whole tone, then the New Year’s day is a seventh tone.
- meter – refers to the way tones (notes) are grouped with one another across time. If we apply this to the basic unit of the second and the day, then we have a meter of minutes, hours, weeks, years.
- tempo – the pace of a piece of music, which is fixed at 60 Hz for the second. Considering the second is equated with the resting heartbeat, then this is an appropriate tempo to use as a basis.
p 70 “Rhythm is a game of expectation. When we tap our feet we are predicating what is going to happen in the music next. We also play a game of expectation in music with pitch. Its rules are key and harmony.”
This is perhaps the most important aspect of the reform of the calendar. We’re not concerned so much with pitch, but with expectation and anticipation. If the year follows a regular cycle of weeks, months, quarters (as we already do with seconds, minutes, hours), then we will eventually come to anticipate these periods intuitively (or subconsciously, or unconsciously, or whatever the actual process becomes). There won’t be the irregular week:month or week:quarter or week:year ratios which make anticipation difficult (especially for holidays that adhere to particular weekdays – when is the second monday of october 2012? hard to anticipate when it continually changes).
p 102 “Low-level, bottom up processing of basic elements occurs in the peripheral and phylogenetically older parts of our brains; the term low-level refers to the perception of elemental or building-block attributes of a sensory stimulus. High-level processing occurs in more sophisticated parts of our brains that take neural projections from the sensory perceptions and from a number of low-level processing units; this refers to the combining of low-level processing units; this refers to the combining of low-level elements into an integrated representation. High-level processing is where it all comes together, where our minds come to an understanding of form and content…
“At the same time as feature extraction is taking place in the cochlea, auditory cortex, brain stem, and cerebellum, the higher-level centers of our brain are receiving a constant flow of information about what has extracted so far; this information is continually updated, and typically rewrites the older information. As our centers for higher thought – mostly in the frontal cortex – receive these updates, they are working to predict what will come next, based on several factors:
- what has already come before in the piece of music we’re hearing
- what we remember will come next if music is familiar
- what we expect to come next if the genre or style is familiar
- any additional information we’ve been given…
It’s these last four points that I want to consider (the rest is for context). Applying these again to the calendar gives us:
- what has already come before as in weeks, months, years. The sequence Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday is repeated indefinitely, such that on any given Friday, we know to expect Saturday to follow. Same with months, and of course numbers (1 is followed by 2, then 3 etc…)
- living through enough years, we are already familiar with the 7 weekdays and 12 months. A shift to a new calendar system will disrupt this, of course, however, as the rhythm of the new calendar is much more regular, it won’t take very long (a handful of years in my estimation) to become familiar enough with the new cycle. Since the weeks stay the same, and the months are numbered, there isn’t as much of an adjustment as people might believe.
- this doesn’t add anything new to our comparison
- this refers to outside signals regarding music – like visual cues for example. Having a number of visual representations of theAbysmal Calendar should help – like the image at the top of this page, or this mandala.
p 106 “Our brains are exquisitely sensitive to timing information.”
There’s more details about the timekeeping aspects of our brain in the notes from Introduction to Biological Rhythms and the Light Book.
p 123 “The best place to begin to look at expectation in the musical brain is in how we track chord sequences in music over time. The most important way that music differs from visual art is that it is manifested over time.”
p 127 “We found evidence for the existence of a brain region that processes structure in general, when that structure is conveyed over time.”
p 165 “We listen to music that has a pulse… This pulse, with a few exceptions, is regular and evenly spaced in time. This regular pulse causes us to expect events to occur at certain points in time. Like the clickety-clack of a railroad track, it lets us know that we’re continuing to move forward, that we’re in motion, that everything is all right.”
Here we’re talking about structure conveyed over time, which is the essence of the calendar. As we’ve seen from different calendars in use around the world, these structures can have a great deal of variety (which theAbysmal wholeheartedly supports and encourages). The same with different cultural norms of music. A calendar with a regular pulse of days creates that expectation, and over the long run, it becomes intuitive, such that the calendar becomes more closely tied to our subconscious thinking than to our conscious consideration. The advantage here is that we no longer need to consult outside calendars to know what’s coming (you’ll still have to keep track of appointments, that’s something else entirely), as you’ll know it intuitively.
For example: The rent comes out at the first day of the month, on a four-week schedule. Paycheques are deposited every two weeks. Bills can be paid every month on a schedule alternating with the rent. Regular. You don’t have to worry that the first of the month is a Tuesday, but next month it’s a Thursday. Every month starts on Saturday. Regular events can be anticipated just as we do with the weekend in our current scheme.
p 217 “Inside the womb, surrounded by amniotic fluid, the fetus hears sounds. It hears the heartbeat of its mother… And the fetus hears music… The auditory system of the fetus is fully functional about twenty weeks after conception.”
Then there’s this. When we first develop our sense of time (and indeed the mechanism that forms our basis for timekeeping), it starts with the heartbeat (which we’ll call 60 beats a minute, although there’s a great amount of variance). Back when our fertility cycles were more closely attuned to the moon, we were at our most fertile at the full moon nearest the vernal equinox. Consider conception around that time then. The fetus gestates through the summer and autumn, and is born at the new or full moon nearest the winter solstice. And so the newborn grows outside of the womb as the daylight gradually increases through the year.
We have so inundated ourselves with artificial light, that we have removed our bodies from these natural cycles. Small wonder our bodies are confused, and often unhealthy. theAbysmal Calendar realigns the calendar with the solstices and equinoxes, and further reintroduces the lunar cycles to the calendar (which the Gregorian Calendar ignores, despite its importance in calculating the major holiday of Easter).
Granted this is an inconclusie analysis, however, it does reinforce one thing. Regular rhythm is the key to anticipation, and our basis of time is innately tied to the rhythm of the heart, the moon and the seasons. If we are truly going to replace the Gregorian with something else, it best be built upon our biological rhythms, in order to better attune us to our long-standing relationship with rhythm and music.
341 Days to Dec 21st 2012
Related articles
- Sound: Pitch, Rhythm and Perception (theabysmal.wordpress.com)
- Ron Ashkenas: Start the Year in the Right Rhythm (huffingtonpost.com)
- Similarities between the human heart and music (jujutree.wordpress.com)
