Scarlet & Grey
Ohio State University
School of Music


Musical Rhythm: Some Guiding Questions


  1. What is time?
  2. How do we describe the psychological experience of time?
  3. What is "now"? How long is "the present"?
  4. What is "a moment"? How long is "a moment"?
  5. What is "brief"? When does something become "long"? Are "brief" and "long different for visual and auditory stimuli?
  6. How is it that the same physical duration can sometimes be perceived to pass "slowly" or "quickly"?
  7. Do children perceive the passage of time differently from adults? If so, why?
  8. What is the role of memory in the perception of time?
  9. Can music be created without regard for time?
  10. Does listening to music change our experience of time?
  11. Under what circumstances will successive sounds be perceived as grouping together?
  12. Can a single sound be perceived as belonging to more than one group?
  13. How do musicians decide to group successive sounds in one way as opposed to some other way?
  14. What is "rhythm"?
  15. Why are patterns of inter-onset intervals more salient than patterns of durations?
  16. What is tempo?
  17. Is there a preferred tempo?
  18. What makes something sound "slow" or "fast"?
  19. What are the psychological consequences of increasing tempo?
  20. What are the psychological consequences of decreasing tempo?
  21. In a musical ensemble, what causes some performers to play faster or slower than the others?
  22. How steady is the beat in performed music?
  23. Do people hear a physically steady beat as psychologically steady?
  24. Why does rubato exist? Why does music sound so much better when the rhythms aren't played strictly according to the score?
  25. What makes some patterns of rubato sound better than others?
  26. Why does Baroque music sound better with less rubato than Romantic music?
  27. Why does the tempo nearly always slow down at the end of a work?
  28. Why does so much music involve repeated time patterns? I.e. Why is most music "cyclic"?
  29. Why are there so few meters? What's wrong with 53/8? 117/16? Why aren't there hundreds of meters?
  30. Why doesn't all music have the same meter?
  31. How do listeners infer the meter when listening?
  32. How quickly can listeners infer the meter of some work?
  33. Why do most musical works retain the same meter for the entire duration of the work? Why don't meters change more often?
  34. What is the musical purpose of rhythm?
  35. What is the difference between meter and rhythm?
  36. Why aren't beats commonly subdivided into 5? Why are beat subdivisions more likely to be 2 rather than 3?
  37. What is the relationship between meter and grouping?
  38. How is it that group boundaries need not coincide with metric cycles?
  39. When does a sound begin? End?
  40. At what point do sounds sound asynchronous?
  41. How closely coordinated are the timings of musicians?
  42. Why do some ensembles require a conductor, but not all?
  43. What is the effect of asynchronous onsets?
  44. Why are the beginnings of sounds (sound onsets) more noticeable than the ends of sounds (sound offsets)?
  45. What causes a sound to be perceived as accented or stressed?
  46. What is syncopation? Are there "degrees" of syncopation?
  47. What is the difference between syncopation and hemiola?
  48. Why do people enjoy syncopation?
  49. What is the relationship between meter and motion?
  50. Why do people tend to tap their hands/feet when listening to music? Why does the downward motion coincide with the beat rather than the upward motion?
  51. Why doesn't all music make you want to tap?
  52. How does music encourage people to dance? Why don't people dance without music?
  53. How does rhythm relate to style or genre.
  54. What is the relationship between musical rhythms and speech rhythms?
  55. How do other cultures conceive of rhythm? E.g. the talas of Indian music, or Bulgarian aksak meters.
  56. Are some rhythms more common than others? What makes a good rhythm?
  57. How are rhythms mentally coded?
  58. What are the main theories about rhythm?
  59. How do we analyse musical rhythm?



This document is available at http://csml.som.ohio-state.edu/Music839D/Notes/questions.html