Rhythm in Art, Psychology and New Materialism

In Rhythm, Music and the Brain, Michael Thaut discusses how it is common for spatial images to arise in the mind while listening to music: sound durations can express extensions and distances; rhythmic and melodic contours can express images of lines and geometric figures; vertical stacks of sound can evoke pictures of multidimensional forms and layered objects. One of the most impressive and illustrative ways to study such translations can be found in the writings and works of Paul Klee (Thaut 2005, 16). We discern rhythm primarily from movement, by recognising repeat structures (periodic structures) and through variation or differentiation. The paradox, of course, is that paintings do not move or make a sound. This is similar to the way in which musicis 19 perceived as movement even though nothing in music actually moves. It may be the case that we project motor routines onto sound experienced as pulses or constants. Intervals and changes in volume and tempo may be felt as rhythmic shifts in time andplace. Danijela Kulezic-Wilson discusses the French composer Michel Chion's theory of 'transsensorial perception' which is neither specifically auditory nor visual as it becomes decoded in the brain as rhythm after passing the sensory path of the eye orear" (Kulezic-Wilson 2015, 40). The theory holds that although the senses pick up rhythm, there is a fundamental interpretative mechanism in the brain that is able to intuit rhythm beneath the senses. What can trigger the feeling of rhythmic processes inthe brain and body is an awareness of simultaneity and sequentiality, an understanding of how events or features occur or seem to affect the senses. The impression that something is moving when it is in fact static is not new.4 There are numerous ways inwhich it is possible to infer rhythm in a static medium such as painting or drawing. A well-known perceptual principle, the 'law of common fate', holds that two or more lines with similar features placed next to each other will suggest that they are moving together, when compared to other details: the two backslashes in 'http://' appear to switch to the right while the colon remains stationary"--