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6

Macrotemporal listening dimensions:

Movement, Pulse, Rhythm and Melody

The macrotemporal dimensions, discussed in chapters one, three and four,

create the experience of time in the listening process. The basic macro-

temporal listening dimensions are movement and pulse. Movement and

pulse evoke two kinds of temporal experience which are qualitatively

different, the experience of beginning, duration and end, and the experience

of a regulated continuity of equal durations.

Between movement and pulse, rhythm arises as a secondary listening

dimension. Rhythm arises when the movement of a succession of sounds

is related and adapted to the regularity of a pulse. Rhythm is a temporal

shape of movement.

Furthermore, the basic macrotemporal dimension movement interacts

with the basic microtemporal dimension pitch height, giving rise to the

secondary listening dimension melody. Melody arises when the move-

ment of sound height is related and adapted to a pattern of pitch intervals.

Melody is a spatial shape of movement.

The shaping of rhythm and melody is the theme of the present chapter.

Rhythm is the temporal shape of movement

Rhythm is a Greek word, and the definition of rhythm goes back to ancient

Greece. The French psychologist Paul Fraisse gives this reference;

Rhythmos appears as one of the key words in Ionian philosophy,

generally meaning "form", but an improvised, momentary, and

modifiable form. Rhythmos literally signifies "a particular way of

flowing." Plato essentially applied this term to bodily movements,

which, like musical sounds, may be described in terms of numbers.

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He wrote in The Banquet "The system is the result of rapidity and of

slowness, at first opposed, then harmonized." In The Laws he arrived

at the fundamental definition that rhythm is "the order in the move-

ment." (Fraisse, 1982)

Plato's definition, Rhythm is the order in the movement, is adopted here. This

definition describes the interaction of movement and pulse. Movement

implies the awareness of change, pulse implies the awareness of regularity.

Order in the movement is created by the integration of change and regularity

in a temporal shape.