Pulse and Microrhythm. Metrical Timing Patterns in Five Musical Traditions from West Africa (Mali and Ghana)

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The project studies non-isochronous beat subdivisions, or, swing timing patterns. The primary objective is to understand the reach of that rhythmic strategy in West Africa. The project aims to communicate its findings beyond Africanist ethnomusicology into the psychologically and transculturally informed, general theory of rhythm.Chronometric analyses of field recordings showed that swung subdivisions prevail in the sahel and savannah zones of West Africa (Mali, northern Ghana), but not in the coastal zone (southern Ghana). In Mali, they are performed with great flexibility and precision, and listeners can perceive and do aesthetically prefer them. They are stably associated with standard repertoires and performed with great consistence; they thus appear normative and constitutive of the metric system. On these grounds, the project elaborated a theoretical model of swing subdivisions as metric timing patterns (Polak & London 2014).In ethnomusicology, music theory and music psychology, swing timing is typically conceived of as expressive variation (Clarke 1985) or participatory discrepancy (Keil 1995) from metric pulse and rhythmic structure. Swing-timing is thus viewed as deviation from iso-periodicity, which prominent theories of meter assume to represent a basic requirement for metric regularity (metronome sense and density referent, metric projection and metric pulse, beat induction, internal clock models and categorical rhythm perception, and dynamic attending as well as neural oscillation theory; see Waterman 1952, Kubik 1988, Arom 1984, Hasty 1997, Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983, Desain & Honing 1999, Povel 1984, Povel & Essens 1985, Clarke 1987, Large & Jones, and Snyder & Large 2005). The empirical findings of the project suggest that these well-established theories do not hold for the cognition of musical meter in Mali.The objective of the final phase of the project is to operationalize and to transculturally test, by means of a psychological experiment, the contradicting assumptions of swing timing patterns as metric structure versus isochrony as fundamental requirement for metric regularity. A classic example of the various laboratory studies of European and American subjects which deny the possibility of metrical swing timing patterns (Povel 1981) shall be replicated in Mali and with a reference group in Germany. This would intensely scrutinize the project's findings and put them into the context of the psychologically informed general theory of rhythm. An eventual transcultural differentiation of the general theory of rhythm would thus be perfectly arguable and communicable.