Attending to Free Rhythm

I. Free Rhythm and Meter: A Problematic Opposition

This article addresses the concept of entrainment in connection with a musical performance often described as lacking meter, or, phrased more positively, possessing "free rhythm" or "flowing rhythm."¹ Entrainment—a concept ever more visible in music scholarship—refers to a synchronization of two or more rhythmic systems that persist through perturbation.² As Justin London notes, entrainment is not a specifically musical phenomenon, and can also refer to the coordinated actions of athletes or circadian rhythms.³ In musical terms, these rhythmic systems may be synchronized among different groups of performers, different performers within a group, or different limbs within a single performer.⁴

A fundamental feature of entrainment as described in the literature is periodicity (i.e., equal durations between events or pulses)—the same feature said to be absent or intermittent in music with free rhythm.⁵ The entrainment models of Edward Large and John Kolen, for example, show how one rhythmic system in oscillation can match the periodicity of another by monitoring asynchronies and adjusting its periodicity until synchronicity is accomplished.⁶ Mari Riess Jones and Marilyn Boltz's related theory of dynamic attending is also predicated on regular shifts in attention.⁷ In practical applications, the connection between periodicity and entrainment underlies many current beat-finding algorithms.⁸ Entrainment is also crucial for many of the most recent considerations of musical meter. Indeed, the leap made by London and others from a theory of entrainment to a theory of meter is a short one: musical meter arises through the simultaneous entrainment of several integer-multiple-related periodicities, such as a periodicity associated with the tactus and another associated with downbeats. To emphasize the centrality of bodily entrainment in this view of meter, perhaps in contrast to the more cognitive orientation of Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff or the poetic orientation Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard Meyer, I call this view of meter meter-as-entrainment.⁹

Importing the idea of entrainment into a theory of musical meter confers several benefits. First, a theory of meter-as-entrainment sidesteps some of the controversies surrounding metric theory in the past thirty years. One such controversy is the necessity of hierarchy in the definition of meter. While the idea of metric hierarchy (i.e., a graded contrast between strong and weak beats) features prominently in many Western-oriented theories of meter, many scholars of various African musical traditions resist the necessity for hierarchy.¹⁰ In order to accommodate this difference, a theory of meter-as-entrainment need only allow for some listeners to resist entraining to all available periodicities; the conceptual framework of the theory need not be altered. In contrast, a theory like that of Yeston is greatly diminished without metric hierarchy.

Second, a theory of meter-as-entrainment is more responsive to some aspects of music's temporality. Two rhythmic systems whose periodicities have the same frequency may be entrained, even if they are not exactly aligned. In other words, so long as the period is the same, the phase, represented as φ and ranging 0°–360°, may differ. By attending to the relative phase of different rhythmic systems—some in phase, some anti-phase, some a few degrees off—a theory of meter-as-entrainment can describe not only meter as such but also phenomena often associated with groove.¹¹

Third, a theory of meter-as-entrainment connects the concept of meter to the many benefits associated with entrainment in the psychological literature. By facilitating synchronous group behavior, entrainment is associated with greater group cohesion, prosocial behavior, and wellbeing.¹²

Finally, a theory of meter-as-entrainment highlights the embodied aspect of the cognition of musical meter. As Toiviainen, Luck, and Thompson show, the actions of people spontaneously moving to music reflect the meter of the music.¹³ In their study, spontaneous movement was coordinated to periodicities in the music. Furthermore, the slower the periodicity entrained, the larger the muscle groups the periodicity set in motion (i.e., the fastest periodicity was reflected in the arms while the slowest periodicity was reflected...