Research Seminars

How to Talk About Meter: Psychological and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Prof. Justin London
Carleton College, Northfield, MN, USA

Wednesday 8 March 2006, 4:00pm, Room 105.

Abstract

What is a beat? And what makes a rhythmic or metric pattern “regular”? While musicians and music theorists have strong intuitive notions about these issues, and can find ready examples in their native musical practices, understanding their roots and causes is often more difficult to pin down.

Here I argue that at a deeper understanding of meter may be obtained (a) by taking into account the experimental literature on human temporal perception, cognition, and rhythmic behaviour, as well as (b) by looking at rhythm and meter in Non-Western musical cultures. After presenting some illustrative examples, I then clarify the distinction between rhythm and meter; meter is shown to be a kind of entrainment, a musically-specific form of our more general capacity to synchronize our attention and/or motor behaviour with temporally regular events.

The various constraints on our ability to perceive rhythms and entrain to rhythmic patterns are then surveyed. After a brief digression into the nature of timing and dynamics of human musical performance, I then turn to rhythmic and metric regularity in examples from Africa and North India. This then leads to an overview of my theory of meter (given in full in _Hearing in Time_, Oxford University Press 2004). I then conclude with some questions that remain for future research.

Biography

JUSTIN LONDON is Professor of Music at Carleton College in Northfield, MN, USA, where he teaches courses in Music Theory, Musical Aesthetics, and American Popular Music. He received his B.M. degree in Classical Guitar and his M.M. degree in Music Theory from the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and he holds a Ph.D. in Music History and Theory from the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked with Leonard Meyer.

His research interests include rhythm and meter, music perception and cognition, the history of the Delta blues, and musical aesthetics. He is the author of several articles in the recent revision of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory.

His book, *Hearing in Time,* (Oxford University Press, 2004) is a cross-cultural exploration of the perception and cognition of musical meter. In 2005-2006 is conducting research at the Centre for Music and Science of Cambridge University under the auspices of a Fulbright Foundation grant.

Professor London has served on the editorial boards of *Music Theory Online,* *Music Theory Spectrum,* and the *Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy.* He has served on the executive boards of Music Theory Midwest, the Society for Music Theory, and the Society for Music Perception and Cognition.