BenG549 said:
OK well I guess that the temporal characteristics of speech; varying rate of speech for dramatic (or at least, non robotic) effect and not just speaking one word per beat in 4/4 time does give it some sense of rhythm it's just not strict. So in a sense I guess I'm actually starting to agree with you when you say "I think it is because all the little pieces of different rhythm (which have their own rhythmic integrity) are arranged in sequence". Watch out this doesn't happen too often lol!
I think we are starting to converge toward something.
Let me develop my model further:
Objectively, one whole note equals four quarter notes. It also equals thirty two thirty second notes, and so on.
In speech there are other things going on besides counting time that allow a "whole note" to be balanced psychologically by, say, only twenty four thirty second notes. In particular, emotional valence. We can try to emulate that with sound. We could make up for the eight missing notes by having the 24 played louder than the whole note, by having them crescendo in volume as they also rise in pitch, or by playing them on some vastly different instrument than the whole note which calls attention to itself. Anything we do that psychologically makes up for the apparently missing "weight" of the twenty four thirty second notes will suffice. I think this sort of thing is going on in speech all the time. It's very hard to put your finger on and define, but we all know a nice, satisfying prose sentence when we hear it, and it certainly does not involve one syllable per beat according to some time signature, as you pointed out. Balance is being created by balancing things of different species. Apples are as good as oranges, and can be brought into balance psychologically. Two apples = one orange,
if the apples are dusty and muted in color and the orange is polished and bright. And so on, in the same vein.
So can we say that any music has to be in essence rhythmical, however, there are varying degrees of "Rhythmical integrity". So we can say that some of the examples posted above are rhythmical, but just to a far lower degree than, say, a drummer playing a beat. Because that works for me. Having said that, even though we haven't actually defined how you would measure "rhythmicality", we would have to say that you can measure the rhythmical qualities of any audible sound (i.e. time varying signal) whether our measure be subjective or objective, I'm not sure you could say in this sense that things have no rhythm, because it would be very hard to define the boundary between a low rhythmicality and not rhythmical.
I'm with you, except that I think you're taking it in the wrong direction to call speech-like rhythms examples of "lower" rhythmicality. I'd actually characterized them as more sophisticated. More complex. If we think of conventional rhythm as many stacks of, say, 4 equal weights (4/4 time with each stack representing a measure) balanced against various stacks of whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth, thirty second, etc, notes, all in different proportions but each stack, again, equaling one measure, then we can imagine speech as being just as balanced, but balanced by all kinds of sophisticated irregular considerations, none of which have to literally be weight. A short, sudden crescendo of 8 sixty-forth notes might, psychologically, turn out to be just as "heavy" as two mildly sounded whole notes joined by a tie. If they do balance, then the rest of the two measures (the remaining unsounded 64th notes) might be required to be silence. I heard something like this going on all over the place in the piece linked to by atyy.
I think this mobile by Calder is a good analogy:
http://www.vmfa.state.va.us/uploade...-Century_Art/Calder_51_20_s1_TF_200910_XL.jpg
One side balances the other, but both sides consist of irregularly measured weights and shapes.
I would argue that we're naturally tuned into this kind of balance when it's translated to sound sequences, and that when it doesn't happen, we know it.
The rhythm is right in that mobile, even though it's unmetered. Same with the Duchamp, though that one is not literally hanging in balance to prove it.
By my draft definition I would probably suggest that someone playing in time would be objectively more musical than someone playing out of time, but playing out of time can (and evidently is, given the above examples in this thread) a part of what a lot of people would consider musical.
Consider the difference between the "wrong" proportions in a good caricature, and the
wrong proportions in a portrait done by someone who can't get the hang of proportion.
firstly just because biology can be art doesn't mean that art is biology (all X can be Y but not all Y can be X). Secondly the term artist and biologist generally refer to people who get paid to do work in those respective fields so its easier to define.
