Sonny and Cher claimed in their song that " The Beat Goes On". I want some clarification about this. Which particular beat are we talking about? More importantly, what has neuroscience got to sat about which beat it is? The human brain is a remarkably sensitive instrument when left to its own devices,
without any conscious mind input. It can notice differences of thousandths of seconds in the beat of music. The listener experiences this as a jarring sensation when a beat is even a tiny bit out in a musical piece.
White people and black people experience this differently. The early mixed race Soul and Funk bands named this "White Man's Offset". Apparently allowance had to be by these bands for the fact that white and black people hear rhythm differently. In terms of the beat, white people suffer premature ejaculation, and have to train to ease off several thousandths of a second in their rhythm so as to be in time with the black musicians.
When I first started listening to funk and soul, and particularly reggae, the rhythms just felt wrong to me. But my ear has now attuned and my heart seems to beat in time with the music. My conscious mind has difficulty dealing with seconds. But my unconscious deals easily with thousandths of a second.
Rhythm seems to me to be a feeling rather than an understanding. If I can just shut my thinking down for a moment I can feel a multi-layered symphony of beats. Their is the beat of my heart, my breath, sleeping and waking, my jaw as I eat, day and night, phases of the moon, seasons, years and lifetimes. All of them proving a backbeat to the melody of life. From the smallest to the largest beat , I can feel them all and sense when something is going wrong.
I experience all this in my own unique way, as you do. So if I do not keep pace, it is because I feel the beat differently (thanks Henry David).
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