Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Anne Danielsen, Anne Danielsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317091387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction presents new insights into the study of musical rhythm through investigations of the micro-rhythmic design of groove-based music. The main purpose of the book is to investigate how technological mediation - in the age of digital music production tools - has influenced the design of rhythm at the micro level. Through close readings of technology-driven popular music genres, such as contemporary R&B, hip-hop, trip-hop, electro-pop, electronica, house and techno, as well as played folk music styles, the book sheds light on how investigations of the musical-temporal relationships of groove-based musics might be fruitfully pursued, in particular with regard to their micro-rhythmic features. This book is based on contributions to the project Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction (RADR), a five-year research project running from 2004 to 2009 that was funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

Chapter 1 Introduction Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Anne Danielsen

DOI: 10.4324/9781315596983-1

This book arose from a research project at the University of Oslo called Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction (RADR) that evolved from one particular question: what happened to the sound and rhythm of African-American-derived, groove-directed popular music styles when these grooves began to be produced and played by machines? The question is a challenge to the view shared by many researchers up to the present that a groove depends on human performativity to be aesthetically satisfying: ‘feel’ is something that musicians add to an otherwise stiff rhythmic structure through their performance of it. It has further been assumed that the groove qualities of rhythmic music arise specifically from microtemporal deviations from a presumed norm.¹ It therefore also follows that machine-generated music must be necessarily devoid of groove qualities, because it typically lacks the microtemporal variation added by people in performance.

1 See, for example, Keil 1994a, 1994b, 1995; Prögler 1995; Monson 1996; Waadeland 2001; Iyer 2002; Butterfield 2006; Hove et al. 2007.

Two trends in contemporary computer-based rhythmic music oppose these assumptions, however. First of all, since the 1990s this music has involved ever-increasing experimentation with and manipulation of the microtiming of rhythmic events. This development is especially noticeable within African-American-dominated genres such as rap, neo-soul, and contemporary r&b, where the use of digital equipment for music production was quickly accepted and cleverly applied. It is linked technologically to the fact that digital editing software allows for the adjustment of individual tracks and events on a time axis with millisecond precision. As a consequence, artists and producers can create entirely new rhythmic feels – for example, by creating overlapping layers of rhythms with multiple locations of their basic pulses at a microrhythmic level. Grooves characterized by such confusion regarding pulse location became something of a fad among contemporary r&b and hip-hop producers in the late 1990s; they characterize the work of artists and bands such as D’Angelo, Common and the Roots, all of whom were prominent at that time. They can also be heard somewhat later on Brandy’s innovative album Full Moon (Atlantic 2002), produced by Rodney Jerkins, where the ‘feel’ aspect of the groove is almost overdone, leading to what I call the ‘exaggerated rhythmic expressivity of the machine’. Ironically, this level of microrhythmic excess evokes earlier (and very analogue) groove-based traditions such as 1970s funk, and thus represents the antithesis of the rhythmic clarity and precision that was sought after in the early days of digital music processing in the 1980s. At a phenomenological level, this excess is experienced as a peculiar, almost vertiginous blurring of the pulse we typically rely on to locate ourselves in the play of rhythm in a given song.

The second trend comprises a counterargument to the entire assumption that a groove requires microtemporal deviations from a metric grid in order to succeed. In the electronica-related styles that concern us here, all of the rhythmic events are on a metric grid. Nevertheless, this is mostly music for dancing, and it has unmistakable groove qualities. In the early days of this trend, high-pitched sounds such as the hi-hat cymbal (or something else that fills the same musical function) were programmed ‘unnaturally’, either too quickly or too evenly or both. Because the ability to actually play in this way would indicate very highly developed technical skills among human performers, the sound of these songs evokes an overdone, even unlikely virtuosity.² I therefore call this second trend the ‘exaggerated virtuosity of the machine’, as defined by Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy (Warp 1997) or the album by Squarepusher (the performing pseudonym of British electronic music artist Thomas Jenkinson) Hard Normal Daddy (Warp 1997). (After a few years this aesthetic strategy had travelled from these avantgarde electronica artists’ toolboxes to the title track of the Destiny’s Child album Survivor (Columbia 2001), thus entering the popular music mainstream.) The fast speed and quantized evenness of many of the tracks on these albums anticipate the related process of chopping up musical or nonmusical sounds and subjecting the bits and pieces to a similar rhythmic treatment. Even though there are differences in the sonic qualities of their material, these artists share a preference for exaggerated tempi and an attraction to the completely straightened out, ‘square’ feel of quantization. This aesthetic also promotes a tendency to transform sounds with a clear semantic meaning or reference point – a different musical context, for example, or something else altogether – into ‘pure’ sound.³ Sounds or clips are also often combined in choppy ways that underline sonic cut-outs rather than disguising them, resulting in a form of ‘schizophonia’⁴ – the kind of euphoric, skittering collage referred to by Fredric Jameson (1984) as ‘The Breakdown of the Signifying Chain’.

2 As Simon Zagorski-Thomas points out (see Chapter 12 in this volume), there is some ambiguity here, given that high speed and evenness evoke both the precision of the machine and a certain technical virtuosity in the human performer – consider, for example, the fast speed of be-bop jazz recordings in the 1950s or the very even strokes required of drummers in recording studios in the 1980s. 3 For a discussion of this tendency in rap music, see Danielsen 2008. 4 The term was first employed by Schafer (1977) to refer to the split between an original sound and its electroacoustic reproduction.

The musical result of both of these trends is at once thrilling and challenging for the rhythm researcher, who must wrestle with questions about how to identify the basic beats of these new-style grooves, how to understand the effect of subdivision and syncopation within them, and how to explain the groove qualities of music whose rhythmic events in fact lie rigidly on a metric grid. This last issue engages not only the hyperquantized grooves of our digital age but also earlier forms of groovy dance music that are characterized by a strictly metronomic organization of rhythmic events, such as disco. Moreover, both trends involve music where processes of technological mediation add important and otherwise unachievable qualities to both sound and groove. Real musicians would probably have trouble producing truly multiple locations of a basic pulse, gravitating instead toward the shared understanding of shape and location that in turn enables them to play together. They would also have a hard time keeping up with the digitally programmed ‘drums’; even analogue drum machines cannot reproduce their sounds, even if they can match the speed. Both trends thus are examples of music where mediating technologies are exposed – they represent instances of opaque mediation, to use a term coined by R. Brøvig-Hanssen (see Chapter 11).

In short, the two trends pointed out above, which are considered in many of the essays in this collection, characterize music that exposes the use of digital music production tools and thus in one sense conforms to the label ‘machine music’. At the same time, these grooves profoundly undermine the notion of machine music as rigid and simple in its microrhythmical design. In the age of digital reproduction, then, the ‘machine’ is not what it used to be. Its music can be deep and groovy or high-paced and frenetic; it can expose its mediating technology or conceal it; it can even evoke the human touch of the pre-digital era.

This book presents a variety of close readings of technology-driven popular music genres, such as contemporary r&b, hip-hop, trip-hop, electro-pop and electronica, as well as played folk-music styles. Each chapter can be viewed as a distinct attempt at contributing to a multi-faceted answer to the project’s initial question: what happened to the sound and rhythm of groove-directed popular music styles in the age of digital reproduction? The book also represents an important step in the process of developing theories of musical rhythm that take account of the microrhythmic dimension of groove-based musics while also revising those older theories that have long relied on musical notation. Its major topics – microrhythm and rhythmic structure, technological mediation, and the role of movement and corporeality in the experience of grooves – are pursued using a variety of methodologies ranging from musical analysis and empirical investigations to discussions of cultural meaning and aesthetics. The contributions come from scholars in all of the various disciplines that have contributed to the study of musical rhythm, including musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, music psychology, cultural studies and aesthetics. In addition to their strong interpretations of the rhythmic and sonic subtleties of groove-directed music,⁵ these scholars bring prevailing theories on rhythm and sound to bear specifically on the developments that have taken place in popular music from the 1990s onward, in the wake of the new digital music-production tools. The book reveals that the common assumptions regarding rhythm and groove referred to in the opening of this chapter do not stand firm. The grooviness and expressivity of African-American-derived musical styles did not die with the new technology. Rather, they were reproduced and transformed.

5 I use the term ‘groove-directed music’ to refer to music with a groove at its core, as both the means and the end of the artistic process. This in contrast to, for example, a rock song, which is groove-based but often directs our attention to other constitutive aspects, such as chords, melody or lyrics.

Representing Rhythmic Structure

A fundamental premise for the analytical work in this book is that rhythm comprises an interaction between non-sounding reference structures (schemes used by the performer/listener in their respective music-related acts) and sounding rhythmic events. In rhythm, as in music in general, virtual reference structures and actual sounding events inform one another continuously (I discuss these concepts in more detail below). Such virtual reference structures may range from the overall organizing principles of music in general (such as pulse, subdivision and so on), to learned stylistic gestures, to categories established through the patterns introduced by one particular song. Before delving into the difficult question of how to identify and represent these virtual schemes, I will briefly survey some of the literature on rhythm that shares this premise and has supported the theoretical framework of many of the contributions in this book.

Timing variations from a presumed rhythmic norm may be either happenstance or deliberate. In the 1950s, Bengtsson, Gabrielsson, and their colleagues at Uppsala University began exploring what they called ‘systematic variations in duration’ in music. One of the basic hypotheses underlying their work was that these variations are not random occurrences but vital means of musical expression. In an article titled ‘Empirisk rytmforskning’ (‘Empirical Rhythm Research’), they discussed how variations may be used consciously to clarify certain specific structural features of the music, or unconsciously as part of a given tradition’s musical dialect. While the former, also called ‘expressive variations’, occur at particular (and significant) points in the music, the latter, which they called ‘idiomatic variations’, are repeated as part of a recurring rhythmic pattern. Both expressive and idiomatic variations are deliberate. In order to distinguish between expressive and idiomatic variations, they proposed the aforementioned systematic variations (SYVAR), which could encompass musical aspects including frequency, amplitude, envelope and spectrum (Bengtsson et al. 1969: 95-6). Their main theoretical and empirical focus, however, was duration (SYVAR-D), and the systematic variations in the chronometric temporal relations of sonic events.

This emphasis on norm and variation (or, more suggestively, ‘deviation’) has dominated much of the subsequent research on the relationship between rhythmic structure and timing. Kvifte’s research from the 1980s, for example, is clearly inspired by the fundamental assumptions of the Uppsala school, particularly his distinction (in turn influenced by Gregory Bateson) between ‘digital’ and ‘analogue’ aspects of the experience of music: ‘If we encounter a pitch somewhere between C# and D, we divide the experience of pitch in two aspects, one digital (the note “D”) and one analog (“out of tune”)’ (Kvifte 1989: 94).

Clarke’s work on categorical perception in music is also influenced by the pathbreaking theories of the Uppsala school. In his studies of the relationship between rhythmic structure and timing, Clarke investigates how conscious variations – what he calls ‘expressive timing’ – can clarify structural features of music (Clarke 1985, 1987, 1989). Another important issue in Clarke’s research, however, involves the inherent qualities that such variations contribute to the music – using Kvifte’s example, the fact that the D is out of tune is as important to the experience of it as the fact that it can be said to belong to the pitch category ‘D’. Clarke observes, ‘There is considerable evidence that this information [the perceptual information inherent in the variations] is not discarded [in the perceptual process], but is used to make a different sort of perceptual judgment than that associated with the categorical component’ (Clarke 1987: 22). This shift in focus toward the noncategorical or nonstructural aspects of rhythm is clarified in Clarke’s 2000 paper titled ‘Categorical Rhythm Perception and Event Perception’, where he concludes that all acoustical rhythmic information in fact engages two different perceptual domains – expression and rhythm, the latter understood as rhythmic structure (Clarke 2000: 5). In other words, sounding rhythm contains both its relevant structuring pattern and the particular quality of a significant or expressive variation of this pattern.⁶

6 Clarke uses the term rhythm to denote only its virtual aspects – that is, its structure – when describing how, in classical music, rhythm is a medium for expression (see Clarke 1985: 211). In contrast, I use rhythm to denote the interplay between the sound and its non-sounding virtual aspects.

The theoretical framework of Desain and Honing’s studies in rhythm and musical time likewise relies upon a division of musical experience along these lines. Drawing upon Clarke’s work on categorical perception, they state: ‘To make sense of most musical styles, it is necessary to separate the discrete and the continuous components of musical time’ (Desain and Honing 1989: 56). Other studies of microrhythm apply the same theoretical premise. Keil’s writings on participatory discrepancies in jazz represent an early example (Keil 1994a, 1994b, 1995). Butterfield, however, in a recent article, accuses Keil of understating the importance of structural aspects or, in Ke...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Music Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction—Anne Danielsen
• PART I MICRORHYTHM AND RHYTHMIC STRUCTURE
• PART II GROOVE AND EMBODIMENT
• PART III MEDIATION AND MUSIC PRODUCTION
• Bibliography
• Index