A Phenomenology of Polyrhythmic Music

Authors

  • Adrian Yee The University of British Columbia

Keywords:

Music, Hegel, Phenomenology, Phenomenology of Spirit, Consciousness, polyrhythm, polyrhythms, rhythms, time, relationship, emergence, systems theory, systems, instruments, musical instruments

Abstract

The thesis I will develop in this paper is the claim that polyrhythms have a property of ‘emergence’ that is distinct from the perception associated with atomic rhythms, as aided by the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel's theory of phenomenology. I will argue that the specific qualia sensations associated with apprehending polyrhythms are distinct from both the sensations of mono-rhythmic music and polyrhythmic music taken as just the sum of atomic rhythms. Using Hegel’s text, The Phenomenology of Spirit, I will demonstrate how Hegel’s concepts of ‘Sense-Certainty’ and ‘Perception’ play a crucial role in understanding the cognition of polyrhythms at the phenomenological level. Using Hegelian concepts such as: the indexicality of ‘Here’ and “Now’ and the perception of ‘Also’ and ‘One’, I will demonstrate how polyrhythms are a specific phenomena that is greater than the sum of its parts, such as how a chair is not perceived as a bunch of wood arbitrarily constructed but as a unified whole. The key difference that I will make is that it is possible for a listener to apprehend a coherent soundscape that is perceived as a unified whole while at the same time retaining the multitude of differences contained within it; in this sense, polyrhythms have an ‘emergent’ property. In part 1 of this paper, I will discuss Hegel's phenomenology of music, as aided by the section on 'Consciousness' within the chapter on 'Perception' ; in Part 2, I will describe the Hegelian understanding of poly-rhythms as two terms of my own: 'notion-of-polyrhythm' and 'itself-of-polyrhythm'.

Published

2013-03-09

How to Cite

Yee, A. (2013). A Phenomenology of Polyrhythmic Music. Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the ISSS - 2012, San Jose, CA, USA. Retrieved from https://journals.isss.org/index.php/proceedings56th/article/view/1836

Issue

Section

Relational Science