Rhythm and the Construction of Meaning

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Timekeeping is Everything: Rhythm and the Construction of Meaning Luis Botella

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FPCEE Blanquerna , Ramon Llull University , Barcelona, Spain Published online: 09 Sep 2008.

To cite this article: Luis Botella (2008) Timekeeping is Everything: Rhythm and the Construction of Meaning, Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 21:4, 309-320, DOI: 10.1080/10720530802255251 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10720530802255251

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Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 21:309–320, 2008 C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Copyright ISSN: 1072-0537 print / 1521-0650 online DOI: 10.1080/10720530802255251

TIMEKEEPING IS EVERYTHING1: RHYTHM AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING


LUIS BOTELLA FPCEE Blanquerna, Ramon Llull University, Barcelona, Spain

Rhythm and drumming have not been explored systematically from a constructivist or a personal construct theoretical approach. This article is an exploration of the bridges between constructivism and drumming in terms of the interrelated processes of listening outwardly, listening inwardly, and the actual motoric action of playing. Listening outwardly is approached from the constructivist notion of validation and/or invalidation of anticipations. Listening inwardly is related to the bodily base of rhythm perception. Playing drums is discussed particularly in relation to the emotional expressivity of drumming. The article ends with some personal reflections.

Constructivism in general, and personal construct psychology (PCP) in particular, have been extended to a growing range of fields of human experience, many of them quite epistemologically complex and symbolically mediated. Maybe because of this general preference for complex human meaning-making processes with a linguistic and abstract foundation, an experience so fundamentally sensorimotor and nonverbal as drumming has not received much attention so far. Even a cursory search at the PsycINFO database yields no results combining “rhythm” or “drumming” with “constructivism,” “constructionism,” or “personal construct,” and just a few when combining the latter three terms with “music.” Thus, I welcomed J¨orn Scheer and Viv Burr’s invitation to contribute an article to this special section of the Journal of Constructivist Psychology as an opportunity to explore possible bridges between two of my creative addictions—constructivism and drumming. I have used one of Flatischler’s (1992) notions to organize the content of this article. According to Flatischler, playing drums Received 29 December 2006; accepted 20 August 2007. Address correspondence to Luis Botella, Ramon Llull University, FPCEE Blanquerna, Cister 24, Barcelona 08022, Spain. E-mail: [email protected]

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is the result of a combination of (a) motoric movement and (b) listening (outwardly and inwardly). Each of these realms of experience faces us with its own challenges and rewards, and when they come together, the result is a combination of accuracy and flexibility in a drummer’s performance. I will first discuss listening outwardly, then listening inwardly, and finally the actual motoric action of playing —or “hitting things with other things,” in drummer John Keeble’s humorous expression. I will end the article with some personal reflections.


Time, Rhythm, and Anticipation: Get in Sync Michael Gondry’s music video for the Chemical Brothers’ “Star Guitar” is structured as a sequence shot featuring a continuous train journey seen from the perspective of a passenger looking through the train’s window.2 The video has a special characteristic: Even if the technical mastery of digital visual effects makes it look like a perfectly ordinary and apparently irrelevant journey through an industrial suburban area and a small-town railway station, it becomes almost immediately noticeable that it has a hypnotic effect. This is due to the fact that the natural tendency of rhythmic movements to synchronize with each other whenever they co-occur is skillfully manipulated in the video. Gondry synchronized every element of the landscape (watch the video carefully and you will notice that even minor ones are synchronized) with the theme’s rhythmic and melodic structure. Thus, once you become familiar with the song’s beat and anticipate, for example, a given drum fill between two musical phrases, the landscape passing outside the window synchronizes with the fill as if the world was perfectly predictable. Time is thus structured into a series of rhythmic patterns that follow a predictable sequence. Everything is in sync. From the very beginning of his magnum opus, George Kelly made time a cornerstone of the psychology of personal constructs by incorporating it to its philosophical roots—constructive alternativism: There are some parts of the universe which make a good deal of sense even when they are not viewed in the perspective of time. But there are other parts which make sense only when they are plotted along a time line. Life

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is one of the latter. . . . Life has to be seen in the perspective of time if it is to make any sense at all. (Kelly, 1955/1991, p. 6)


Time and life make little sense per se unless some regularities are identified in them, unless one is more or less able to predict their course. Kelly was explicit in this particular and, interestingly, he used a musical metaphor to further clarify his use of the term “replications” in PCP’s construction corollary: Only when man attunes his ear to recurrent themes in the monotonous flow does his universe begin to make sense to him. Like a musician, he must phrase his experience in order to make sense out of it. The phrases are distinguished events. The separation of events is what man produces for himself when he decides to chop up time into manageable lengths. Within these limited segments, which are based on recurrent themes, man begins to discover the bases for likeness and differences. (Kelly, 1955/1991, p. 37)

A good test of this particular Kellyan notion is the following: Turn off the volume of the “Star Guitar” video before having heard the music for the first time, and just watch the train journey. You will probably notice some of the more obvious rhythmic regularities, but miss most of them. In fact, the organizing function of rhythm is one of the main reasons attributed to its universal appreciation: We appreciate rhythm because it helps us organize the sound (Grinde, 2000, p. 20). Regularity and recurrence are the basis of human attempts to make sense of events by predicting and organizing them, and they lie at the heart of the pulsation that creates rhythmic patterns. Flatischler (1992) defined a pulsation as “coming into being through the recurrence of similar events at similar intervals” (p. 31). In the case of an audible pulsation, he stated, the event is a sound. Almost everyone is able to feel in the body the steady, underlying pulse of most musical pieces, even those never heard before or belonging to an unfamiliar musical tradition. This is what leads even small children to tap their feet or clap their hands—and to dance—when listening to music. The subdivision of such a steady pulse in smaller units such as upbeats, off beats, onbeats, backbeats, and downbeats, plus the range of time signatures, tempi, dynamics, rhythmic, and polyrhythmic patterns, create the possibility of


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using rhythm as an expressive and articulate language that evokes embodied emotional responses. In this respect, most musicologists agree that one of the processes involved in the emotional arousal we experience when listening to music is the fact that we bring certain anticipations to our listening (e.g., Rosenfeld, 1985). These anticipations are based on a mixture of cultural learning and personal experiences based on previous listening. For example, the clave is the typical rhythmic timeline of Afro-Cuban music, and it is usually played on two cylindrical pieces of wood called claves—hence, its name. It generates not only a particular pattern but a particular form of listening to musical styles such as the son, salsa, rumba, and even Brazilian bossa nova. Music (even within the same piece) can validate or invalidate our anticipations. In the second case, tension arises (although such a tension can also increase our interest); in the first, we relax (although an extremely predictable music can be boring as well). Pop, rock, country, and rhythm and blues beats are mostly based on a predictable 4/4 time signature with straight-eighth notes on the hi-hat, and a steady one and three on the bass drum and two and four on the snare. However, the possibilities and creative variations are so many, and the rhythmic pattern so appealing, that these styles enjoy an immense commercial popularity all over the world. At the same time, complicated and apparently uncommercial approaches such as some jazz masterworks in odd time signatures (e.g., Dave Brubeck’s Take Five in 5/4, or Blue Rondo a` la Turk in 9/8) have also achieved enormous success and become classics in their own style. Again, the applicability of PCP notions (i.e., anticipation, validation, invalidation) is surprisingly obvious. The dynamics of emotional reactions to validation/invalidation of our anticipations could explain the repeatedly found phenomenon that the first hearing of a piece of music is not generally the preferred one (Ockelford, 2006). After some further hearings, and as our anticipations become more and more accurate, our valuation of the same piece increases. However, as could also be predicted in PCP terms, the relationship between favorability and familiarity is shaped as an inverted “U” (Ockelford, 2006). When we have heard a song hundreds of times and we know it by heart, it ceases to be as attractive as it used to be. There is one exception,



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however: The study of intense and overwhelming emotional thrills (also referred to as “chills” or “shivers”) as a response to certain musical passages suggests that many of these thrilling passages evoke the same thrill every time we listen to them—no matter how many times we have heard the same song (Grinde, 2000). The possible extensions of this argument are relevant in many other fields of human experience. In my case, as I am sure in many others, music—and particularly its rhythmic element—has always been a recurrent theme . . . another musical metaphor, by the way. Even if I have never had a formal musical education beyond the usual introductory lessons at school, most of my memories, and particularly the more emotionally relevant ones, are accompanied by what could be called a personal soundtrack. Having been born in the 1960s, the soundtrack of my childhood, adolescence, and youth is basically an eclectic compilation of Spanish, American, and British pop and rock music. Most of my memories of these years, and most of the constructs generated by these experiences, would certainly lose a lot of their meaning if they were separated from the music that colors their background. Listening Inwardly: What If the Inner Child Is a Drummer? I will begin this section with another image: Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson’s movie Baraka3 features a scene in which a wandering Buddhist monk, dressed in traditional attire, walks along a crowded Tokyo street. He is immersed in himself, following the rhythm of his own mindful kin-hin walking meditation, apparently alien to the rushing crowd of businessmen and -women that surrounds him—the impressive images in high-quality Todd A0–70-mm format highlight the feeling that the monk is literally walking to the beat of a different drum. The bodily foundations of rhythmic patterns have been repeatedly highlighted. Tagg (1999), for example, noted that “such relationships between musical sound and the human body are the basis of all music”—even if he also admitted that “the majority of musical communication is nevertheless culturally specific” (p. 17). Dogantan-Tak (2006, p. 460) summarized one of the main proposals and conclusions reached in studies of expressive performance as follows: “[T]here is a prototypical timing-intensity


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profile for the expressive performance of a rhythmic unit, the origins of which reside in our experience of bodily movements (including the kinesthetic experiences involved in respiration).” I will say more about this point in the next section, but in this one I would like to highlight that there is considerable evidence that our response to musical tempo is patterned by our body’s own rhythms (Rosenfeld, 1985). In fact, the universally used musical term andante means literally “walking pace,” and one of the more frequently mentioned “bioacoustic universals” is the relationship between musical pulse and the pulse or speed of bodily processes such as the heartbeat, walking, or breathing. As Flatischler (1992, p. 95) highlighted, “[C]ombining a body movement with an inhalation or exhalation generates a flowing movement, whereas a movement combined with the heartbeat gives rise to a pulsating movement.” The relation between heartbeat and rhythm appreciation has been repeatedly acknowledged. We perceive musical tempi according to the normal range of our heart rate: 70 to 80 beats per minute (bpm) as moderate, below 70 bpm as slow, and beyond 80 bpm as fast. In many world drumming traditions, the connection with the heart pulse is evident. I had the experience of attending a Japanese Taiko drumming performance recently, and the huge barrel drums reverberated so powerfully that I could actually feel (and not only hear ) the sound, as if it was pounding in my chest. Given the richness of the sound environment of the womb, and the fact that the fetus begins to listen actively and responding to sound by the 24th week of gestation, many authors (e.g., Grinde, 2000) propose that “we also appreciate rhythm because it is a comforting feature due to a resemblance to the pulse of the mother’s heart imprinted prenatally” (p. 9). Fetuses’ heart beats accelerate if they are exposed to loud music, and maternal singing is known to modulate infant arousal after birth (Sheinfield, Trehub, & Nakata, 2003). In this respect, it has also been observed that an immense majority of mothers cradle their babies in their left arm (keeping them thus literally close to the mother’s heart), independently of which is their dominant arm. Thus, as could be predicted on the grounds of interpersonal theories such as PCP and constructivism, when you listen inwardly you hear the echoes of your interconnection with others. In Justine Toms’ more poetic way of expressing it



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(see her foreword to Flatischler’s 1992 volume): As you listen with your inside ear, you don’t need to search outside yourself for the safe and assuring rhythms of life; you know that they are within you and always have been. So, maybe your inner child is a drummer. I became acutely aware of the pervasiveness of music and rhythm in my own mental life when I first began practicing zazen meditation. After a few years, I became relatively capable of detaching myself from my thoughts and just letting them go, as zazen practice teaches. However, this detachment made all the more obvious to me that, when I stopped paying attention to the voice of my thoughts, there was another sound that began emerging in my mind—music. It was almost impossible for me to stop it when I was meditating; but in fact, it did not bother me at all. Mostly, my inner music was made up of passages of songs I have heard and liked, sometimes just rhythmic patterns. I talked about this with a meditation teacher one day: She laughed and advised me to enjoy the music and let it go without attaching myself to it.

From Listening to Playing: The Emotionality of Hitting Things with Other Things Intuitively most people would probably attribute a wider range of emotional expressivity to a piano, a saxophone, or a violin than to a drum kit—particularly if one is only familiar with the typically loud, hard, and straightforward style of rock drumming. Melody seems more touching than rhythm. However, controlled studies on this topic (e.g., Laukka & Gabrielsson, 2000) demonstrate that professional drummers are able to express feelings such as sadness, happiness, anger, fear, tenderness, and solemnity (as was probably already obvious to anyone who has enjoyed the great performances of classic jazz master drummers such as Gene Krupa, Joe Morello, and Buddy Rich). Laukka and Gabrielsson asked two professional jazz/rock drummers to perform three simple rhythm patterns (swing, beat, and waltz) so as to express the aforementioned emotions. Then a sample of university students listened to all performances and rated them with regard to these emotions. Their results confirmed that listeners on the whole perceived the intended expressions correctly.


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I find this study fascinating for a number of reasons. First, the authors found also that “the communicative code used in emotional expression with drums appears to be similar to that used with other instruments investigated this far, which indicate that the code is not instrument specific” (Laukka & Gabrielsson, 2000, p. 187). Besides, their results in terms of the patterns drummers used to express the intended emotions showed striking similarities with results obtained in the study of paralinguistic expression of emotions in speech. Technically speaking, this level of emotional expression in drumming is possible because of the interaction of dynamics and tempo. For example, drummers in the study expressed sadness by playing slower and softer ; happiness by playing faster ; anger by playing louder ; and fear by playing faster, shifting the tempo, and deviating from the nominal values of the notes they were playing . The resemblance to paralinguistic emotional expression is obvious—sadness also slows down our speech, happiness makes it faster, and anger makes it louder to the point of actually shouting. From a PCP point of view, fear and sadness were especially interesting in Laukka and Gabrielsson’s study. As I said, invalidation of our anticipations when listening to a piece of music creates a feeling of tension, and in fact fear has been associated to invalidation in PCP terms. The connection between invalidation and fear could actually explain why in this study fearful versions had by far the largest deviations from the note durations corresponding to the nominal values as given in the notations. Fearful drums sounded, thus, faster (like a heart racing with fear) but also insecure and disconcerting, arrhythmic—as if missing a beat. As far as sadness is concerned, the study of musical chills suggests they are evoked far more often by sad music than by happy music (Grinde, 2000). Neuroscientists such as Panksepp (e.g., 1995) have proposed that chills are a consequence of the direct connection of music to our brain’s primitive emotional networks. Despite being accompanied by sensations typical of painful sadness, such as a lump in the throat or weeping, thrills are actively sought. From a constructivist point of view, the preference for “such sweet sorrow” (typical not only of music but also of cinema and literature) demonstrates again that life cannot be explained simply as a process of maximizing pleasure and avoiding pain. We enjoy being thrilled to tears by a dramatic



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movie, a novel, or a particularly emotional passage of our favorite music—no matter whether it is a Wagnerian overture or the latest top-40 pop hit. My personal experience when drumming has evolved from feeling that I had to make an almost painful effort to keep the tempo and to play the right grooves and fills in the right way, to play more relaxed and almost become one with the groove. This is surely (but not only) the product of practice and of the slow development of more advanced technical skills. I once talked to a student who had been practicing classical dance for 10 years and she described this process to me as going from being “you and the dance” to “being the dance.” Driven to this point, as in the case with any other mindful practice, I realized that drumming is one way to transcend one’s self. I am sure this feeling of self-transcendence is shared with other forms of human activity, like painting, literature, singing, dancing, and sports. Drumming, however, has a distinctive advantage in terms of connecting with the rhythms of the universe: It consists in the rhythmic manipulation of sound in itself, and one of the fundamental things we know about matter is that it is vibrating. Closing Thoughts and Reflections Learning to play drums has been for me a source of immense pleasure and an unexpected form of mindfulness training. So I would like to close this article by responding to the guest editors’ invitation to reflect on our own activity—focusing on the “psychological” side of what I have learned rather than on the technical aspect of it, and particularly dealing with mind, body, and relationships. One of the first things I realized was actually prior to attending my first drum lesson, holding a drumstick or hitting any drum: I realized that I had prejudices about my own capacity for learning a skill so alien to my everyday job as a psychologist, psychotherapist, and professor at the age of 40. I was painfully aware of my age the day I realized that the student who came after me to take his drum lessons was 12 years old. This was indeed a source of mindful insight for me, because I had to face the fact that I trusted my students’ and clients’ change processes more than my own. However, I came across a passage in a drum


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instructional book that had an almost immediate inspirational effect: The author reminded people with the same prejudice that Paul Gauguin began painting seriously when he was 40 years old. What the book author forgot to mention is that Gauguin abandoned his wife and five children when he decided to take painting seriously . . . but that is the not-so-inspiring part of the story. Another important thing I learned (and this one is probably obvious to anyone who practices any form of physical activity requiring formal training) is that the intellect is of only limited use sometimes. I had to face the fact that my arms and legs have a muscular memory (and apparently a free will) of their own, and that sometimes they simply refused to play the drums, snare, and cymbals in the order that my more abstract mind knew was the right one—to my teacher’s great amusement. What’s more, once I finally made it and got the new challenging groove in the pocket, it kept interfering with the newer ones. I also realized, however, that with the passage of weeks and months, this dynamic dance of learning, unlearning, and relearning became a source of flexibility. There came a point when learning a new groove or rudiment actually increased my ability to play previous ones. I also realized how important it is to trust someone who guides you during the learning process and who is not only a skilled technician but also capable of adapting to your learning pace. This, of course, is not enough if you don’t practice, practice, and practice. All of these lessons have increased my sensitivity to my clients’ and students’ learning, change, and growth processes. I remind myself of Gauguin’s example whenever I am faced again with the self-limiting power of their (and my) deep-rooted beliefs. I recognize and respect the difficulties of “unwiring” old rigid connections and “rewiring” new ones, and how this sometimes-painful process increases one’s adaptability and creative freedom in the end. I am also acutely aware of how important our therapeutic or educational relationship is, and to what extent my own capacity to trust my clients’ and students’ processes can foster these very processes—provided they have the willingness and courage to change. I guess I knew all this before embarking on the adventure of learning to play drums; in fact, I am sure I knew it, especially


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as a constructivist. However, rediscovering all these important points by means of experiencing them bodily, sensomotorically, and emotionally through drumming has made them all far more experientially vivid for me. As I keep on grooving, and until my drumming improves, however, I will follow the good old advice of the musical scene: “Don’t leave your day job yet.”


Notes 1. The title of this article is a deliberate pun on jazz drummer Peter Erskine’s instructional video “Everything Is Timekeeping” (Erskine, 2000). 2. “Star Guitar” was the second single from the Chemical Brothers 2002 album Come With Us. According to the information displayed on the Internet’s Wikipedia, “the video is based on DV footage Gondry shot while on vacation in France. They shot the train ride 10 different times during the day to get different light gradients.” A streaming file of the video can be accessed at http://www.thechemicalbrothers.com/disco/videos/star/ index.html. 3. Baraka is an award-winning, unconventional movie produced in 1992. Instead of a narrative plot, it features a series of highquality images from locations around the world, with music by Michael Stearns. All of the movie scenes are related to human spirituality, human interconnection, nature, and our impact on the planet.

References Dogantan-Tak, M. (2006). The body behind music: Precedents and prospects. Psychology of Music, 34(4), 449–464. Erskine, P. (2000). Everything Is Timekeeping [Instructional video]. Van Nuys, CA: Warner Brothers Publications. Flatischler, R. (1992). The forgotten power of rhythm. Mendocino, CA: LifeRhythm. Grinde, B. (2000). A biological perspective on musical appreciation. Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, Nordic Journal of Music Therapy(2), 18–27. Kelly, G. A. (1955/1991). The psychology of personal constructs (Vols. 1&2). London: Routledge. Laukka, P., & Gabrielsson, A. (2000). Emotional expression in drumming performance. Psychology of Music, 28, 181–189.

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Ockelford, A. (2006). Implication and expectation in music: A zygonic model. Psychology of Music, 34, 81–142. Panksepp, J. (1995). The emotional sources of “chills” induced by music. Music Perception, 13, 171–207. Rosenfeld, A. H. (1985, December 1). Music: The beautiful disturber. Psychology Today, pp. 1–4. Sheinfield, T., Trehub, S. E., & Nakata, T. (2003). Maternal singing modulates infant arousal. Psychology of Music, 31(4), 365–375. Tagg, P. (1999). Introductory notes to the semiotics of music. Retrieved 1 December 2006from http://www.tagg.org/texts.html.