Last week I found myself thinking about the effects of listening to music while exercising. I run a lot but have never listened to music while doing so. The reason I guess is that I want to listen to the cadence of my feet and hear ambient sounds around me for safety reasons. My attention is diffuse enough as it is–I don’t need more distraction!
Anyway, I was wondering specifically about syncing one’s athletic movements to the tempo of music. (I wrote about music and entrainment a while back here.) What would be my ideal running music? I thought about how I take between 180 and 190 steps per minute, my feet functioning like a steady metronome click. But 180 beats per minute (bpm) is a super fast musical tempo. Here’s a classic drum ‘n’ bass track by A Guy Called Gerald called “Fever” that clocks in at a mere 162 bpm. It’s really fast:
Maybe music with a half-time, 90-95 bpm tempo would be my ideal running soundtrack? (BTW: You can hear a half-time, 81 bpm feel in the Guy Called Gerald Track too: drum ‘n’ bass always had those two layers of musical time going on.) The music would have a lot of delay effects thrown in too to up the dub quotient. By the way, my walking pace is just slightly faster than this half-time pace, falling in the 105-108 bpm range.
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A recent Wall Street Journal article discusses research on the optimal tempo for workout music as being between 125 and 140 bpm “when people aren’t trying to time their movements to the music.” Music with this tempo–such as a lot of contemporary pop–has been found to reduce one’s sense of fatigue as well as boost motivation. And when we do synchronize our movements with the tempo of the music (whether fast or slow), the sounds can increase endurance–our wherewithal to keep going– by altering our emotions and attitude just like any stimulant. The findings of this research, says David-Lee Priest of the University of East Anglia in England, is that music is well-designed to divert our attention away from whatever “unpleasant feedback” exercise presents us with by way of a neurological mechanism. Music interferes with transmission of unpleasant sensations from exercising, such as having difficulty breathing, sweating or stiff and tired muscles.
“Practice, repetition, and repetition of the repeated with ever increasing intensity are its distinctive features for long stretches of the way.”
– Eugen Herrigal, Zen in the Art of Archery
Reduced to its essentials, drumming is fundamentally about repetition.
Imagine for a moment that you’re a drummer. You stand in front of a snare drum (snares off), sticks in hands, poised and ready to play. You raise your right stick about twelve inches above the drum and make a single downwards stroke: waack. Nice. It’s a full and resonant sound and you bask in it for the brief moment of its sharp attack and fast decay. But as a musical event, this single snare drum stroke is cruelly evanescent in that it has disappeared almost as soon as it has sounded. So what do you do?
You strike the drum again of course! But this time you follow your right hand stroke with a left hand one, its mirror image: waack, waack. Using your two hands you have cloned that initial drum stroke, turning one beat into two. Two beats convey more musical sense that does one in that the interval between your right-and left-hand waacks suggests some kind of timing or pulsation. But your left hand following your right was only a one-off occurrence. The whole waack-waack sequence of sound is still quite brief. You want to extend this moment somehow, if only because playing the drum and hearing it sounding is so enjoyable.
You begin striking the drum again and this time you keep your hands moving steady in a right hand-left hand alternation: waack, waack, waack, waack…over and over again. Now something is happening: the repeated waacks suggest a regular pulsation and tempo. They also create their own kind of flow. This feels good. You don’t want to stop playing, for why would you want to destroy your own flow and enjoyment of the drum sound?
So you keep repeating—keeping you hands moving at a steady tempo. As you repeat you notice things that weren’t apparent when you played just a single snare drum waack or two. First, you notice the shape of the sound you’re making. Repetition affords you the opportunity to aurally observe your sound in motion, each waack like a specimen offered for your inspection. Each waack sounds similar, but subtly different too. You notice that your right and left hands don’t make exactly the same sound, and that the waacks change depending on where your sticks land on the drumhead. It’s something to pay attention to simply because it has your attention. Second, as you listen to the drum strokes and the shapes of their resonance, you notice the spaces between the strokes as a kind of negative space created in the brief absence of sound. You never noticed these spaces before, probably because you thought more about the moment of striking the drum. Finally, you notice that the space between your strokes has some relationship to the movement of your hands and arms. Specifically, the spaces align themselves with the upward movement of your hands and arms as they ready the sticks for the next stroke. In a shift of perception, you realize that what you thought was a simple right hand-left hand waack, waack, waack, waack alternation actually has more depth to it and the hand and arm movements required of you to play repeating strokes contain within themselves a way of subdividing the pulsation of your playing. Paying attention to the spaces between the notes and the upward as well the downward movements of your hands you now hear something different: waack (and) waack (and) waack (and) waack (and) . . . Your waacks now feel like a kind of breathing. Through repetition, you are not simply striking the snare drum; you’re keeping time.
Thus, when I speak of drumming as being fundamentally about repetition I mean to say that it only begins to offer its perceptual lessons when we allow ourselves to make a percussive gesture and then repeat it. A single stroke on a snare drum is one thing (and in great hands can be an awesomely beautiful thing). But repeating it, and then repeating that repetition for long stretches allows for an interesting series of transformations in our attention to take place.
“…the music, the words of the mottoes, the steps of the dance, trigger the strange mechanism.”
– Jean Rouch in Gilbert Rouget, Music and Trance (1985:181)
Yesterday I ran the NYC Half Marathon (in a time that qualified me for the NYC Marathon–yes!). One of the things I noticed along the route was the presence of live musicians and DJs playing music every few miles or so. I’ve never run with portable music players, because I’ve never bothered trying and because the sound of the music “shaking” with my body movement doesn’t sound right to me. Maybe talk radio would work, but wobbling music? No thanks.
But if the music comes from somewhere outside a set of headphones–and I have no choice whether to listen to it or not–I’m open to it. On the 13.1-mile course that took us from Central Park down through Times Square, over to the West Side Highway, down to Battery Park, and then finishing at South Street Seaport, there was music all over the place. A number of race fans had these little cowbells–the real cowbells that I assume cows wear, complete with little strikers inside–that they shook to create a mighty racket as we went by. In any other context the cowbells could get on your nerves, but on the course they sonically signified fan support and enthusiasm, as if saying: “We see you and feel your pain. Keep it up. You’re doing great.”
There were also lone musicians along the course, all of them men with acoustic guitars, most of them seeming a little “off” in one way or another. Their enthusiastic strumming didn’t carry very far in the open air, and none of them seemed to be playing anything recognizable as music anyway—they just strummed away. But like the sound from the cowbell folks, the strumming came across as welcome enthusiasm, as if to signify: “I don’t know why you’re running, but I shall play my guitar in solidarity with your effort.” As strange as it was, I appreciated the strumming.
On the open expanse of the West End Highway (highways are surprisingly calm places to be when there aren’t any cars around), there were a few bands too. Two guys looking like a 1980s-era Beastie Boys tribute band (complete with oversized gold chains and sunglasses) did some awfully bad rapping. And a few miles down the road was some kind of vintage punk rock trio. As I ran by trying to get Gatorade down my throat without choking it occurred to me how gentle punk has become in the context of the 2012 musical landscape. It still signifies punk-ness, I guess, only it doesn’t shock anymore. Running by the punk trio with Gatorade running down my shirt, I actually got a sad for a moment as I thought about it. This happens with almost every musical idiom: what was once cutting edge becomes assimilated, just another style for musicians to draw on, to be put to yet further tasks of cultural signification. (Maybe that punk trio, like the Beastie Boys-ish rappers, was being ironic? But how could I know for sure?)
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But the real stars of the NYC Half Marathon sonic landscape were the DJs. Not because they were so good, but because they were so loud. At various points I heard the Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”, Biggie Smalls’ groovy “Hypnotize”, and at the race’s beginning and end, Usher’s electronic 4/4 thumper “DJ Got Us Falling In Love Again.”*
Interestingly and shockingly to me, I ran in sync to both Skynyrd and Biggie. As soon as I heard their respective songs, I instinctively locked into the tempo by adjusted my gait a little—my stride rate becoming quicker for Skynyrd and then slower for Biggie. I was happy too, because for those brief moments I was perfectly distracted from the physical task at hand, my attention pleasurably consumed by the experience of being physically in sync with songs with which I’m casually well acquainted. It was fun, through the thought (not to mention the sight!) of me smiling while running in sync to Lynyrd Skynyrd is still really disturbing.
What I was experiencing for those brief blissful moments could be called a kind of entrainment, the experience of a person syncing to an external pulse, usually one produced by others with whom one is interacting socially. You could say we do this in a mild way when we tap our feet to music, and in a more intense way when the music compels us to dance (or run) in time to it. Taken to its extreme, entrainment can set the stage for altered states of consciousness such as possession–the rhythm of an external stimulus prompting us to groove with it and ultimately enter into some kind of transcendent state.
In his book Music and Trance: a theory of the relation between music and possession (1985), French ethnomusicologist Gilbert Rouget examines the relationships among music, trance, and possession around the world through case studies ranging from the ancient Greeks to Western opera, shamanistic and ritual drumming practices in Africa and the Black Atlantic, to Islamic dhikr ceremonies in the Middle East. Rouget contends that music itself doesn’t cause trance, only helps create theconditions that might trigger it. It’s in this sense that music and its varied ritual contexts, says Rouget, can function as a perceptual launch pad that the French ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch once labeled a “strange mechanism.”
The music on the course—yes, even the Skynyrd–probably didn’t put anyone into a trance but was nevertheless my strange mechanism, energizing me because it provided a stimulus that was at once a kind of aural clock and something to focus on, giving structure and helping me make sense of a few minutes here and there as I was consumed by listening. Without music, I tend to search for sounding things to focus on anyway—things like the sound of my breathing or the regular rhythmic “swish” of my arms moving under my jacket. If you pay attention, there’s always something there to either focus on or sync to.
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After the race, in the midst of the cheering crowd and the booming music that echoed off the buildings around South Street Seaport, I thought about two possibilities for designing a race day soundscape. The first would be a completely silent race. There were brief moments of this as we ran through Central Park where the crowd was sparse and all you could hear was the sound of feet hitting the pavement. We sounded like a herd of buffalo, and because all you could hear was feet, as a runner it felt like being in a herd too—the sensation of being swept along in an animal wave. But okay, I agree with you, a silent race would be a real downer of a race in a place like NYC. So, the second soundscape possibility would be to wire the course with one huge set of connected speakers playing a single piece of music for several hours. But I leave you with questions: What would this music be? Would it be highly rhythmic, like an extended DJ set? And would its tempo correspond to the supposedly ideal running pace of 180 strides per minute, with songs clocking in fast at 180 BPM or with a half-time feel of 90 BPM? Most importantly, what would be experience of running to such an extended soundtrack feel like?
Below are those three songs I heard on the course. It’s a DJ “set” that could probably never happen anywhere else!
*I actually didn’t know it was Usher singing this song until I tried singing it myself—or at least what I remembered of the hook’s melody: “Baby tonight, na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-nah”—into the Soundhound app on my iphone, and voilà: Usher! (What can’t cellphonesdo again?)
“I don’t really go on the Internet, it’s like a Ouija board, it’s like letting someone into your head, behind your eyes. It lets randoms in.” - Burial
Although I’m clearly a few years behind the curve with this particular bit of music news, I’ve been thinking about the music of acclaimed London-based producer Burial lately and what it is that makes it work so well for me. Burial, whose real identity as William Bevan was unknown until quite recently, makes moody and evocative underground electronic music that blends dubstep, garage, and ambient influences into a signature sound. Unlike a lot of electronic musicians, Burial doesn’t sequence his work as MIDI data, choosing instead to arrange audio samples using simple audio editing software.
For me, there are two striking aspects of Burial’s music. The first is the music’s rhythms. In contrast to a lot of electronic dance music that has sharp, squared-off and quantized edges to its beats, Burial’s rhythmic textures are a little more off-kilter and therefore interesting. In interviews Burial has spoken about his intuitive beat-making process. Working with the software program Sound Forge, he lines up his drum samples one at a time just by looking at the waveforms and without relying on quantization to snap everything to a grid. He works, as the old saying goes, by feel. This working method produces skittering, choppy rhythms that sometimes seem a fraction of a beat short of a 4/4 meter, making them sound as they are subtly hicupping their way forward in time. You can hear this time sense on the piece “You Hurt Me”:
In 2007, Burial spoke with Mark Fisher in the Wire (December 2007) about the influence of early 1990s UK garage music on his approach to rhythm and drumming in his tracks:
“With garage the drums are taken back, they’re quite soft, it’s more about being slinky. They’re like a fishbone, a spine, an exoskeleton that cradles the sounds. It’s not about the deepest kick or biggest snare. The drums are more about trying to thread sounds and vocals together, they flicker across the surface of the tune, it circles around you, it’s not just chopping you up, it’s not about the sounds being big.”
Another attractive aspect of Burial’s music (and a feature of garage music too) is its use of looped and re-pitched sampled voices veiled in delay and reverb. These voices are always just beyond intelligibility–their edges blunted and blurred so that they almost seem to be saying something coherent but never do. In this way, the voices mix seamlessly with the other ambient textures in the music and help draw the listener inwards. You can hear this sensibility on the pieces “Forgive” and “Broken Home”:
One of the symmetries between the psychological state of boredom and the experience of listening to music is that they both shape how we feel time. In his book Boredom (Yale University Press, 2010), Peter Toohey quotes the poet Joseph Brodsky speaking of boredom as representing “pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor” (186). Elsewhere, Toohey also discusses how music is a “powerful source of enrichment and stimulation” (177) that reliably keeps boredom at bay. (In one study cited by Toohey, playing classical music significantly reduced boredom-fuelled abnormal behavior in elephants.) How interesting, then, that Brodsky’s characterization of boredom as “repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor” seems to equally apply to a lot of music that we find appealing. (Or at least that I find appealing.)
We often use the aural splendor of music to avoid boredom and structure time in our lives because music seems uniquely suited to the job. The musicologist David Burrows has written eloquently on music’s role in the temporalities of our lives. In his pioneering articles ”Music and the Biology of Time” (1972), “A Dynamical Systems Perspective of Music” (1997), and his recent book Time and the WarmBody (Brill, 2007), Burrows suggests that music offers a kind of virtual modelling of our experience as living beings constantly in pursuit of a stable yet dynamic equilibrium. Whatever else music may be–notes on a page, cool chord progressions, political tool or sonic signifier of social relationships–it’s also, when you get right down to it, a perceptual technology for helping us understand the flow of time as we live it. Consider that music, notes Burrows, “takes place in its own almost total sonic absence”, creating “a now whose content changes ceaselessly” (1997:529). Music, then, is not a thing but a process that is constituted through encounters between sounds and their listeners–encounters that allow us to virtually inhabit one kind of temporality or another, experiencing time as an ongoing present and a series of linked moments.
But back to boredom. How is it that attributes of our lives we find boredom-inducing–again, think about repetition, redundancy, and monotony–can create pleasure in the context of music? Is it because musical experience is such a clearly bounded space where we accept what would otherwise be maddening in non-musical contexts? Similarly, how is it that music licenses all kinds of behavior–singing, clapping, whistling, dancing, acting euphorically–that would be awkward in everyday, non-musical contexts? If music is, as Burrows suggests, a kind of virtual modelling system, then perhaps we embrace its mobilization of say, repetition, in tacit agreement to be guided and taught some of its potential aesthetic uses. In this case, music can teach us that repetition need not be boring, static and monotonous, but rather invigorating, transformative and lively.
