Rhythm and Timing in Music

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of research relating to the temporal dimension in music. It focuses primarily on small to medium-scale temporal phenomena in music, the domain that commonly referrers to as rhythm, rather than the larger-scale properties of form. The chapter has adopted a view of rhythm that sees it as the interaction between meter and grouping. There are theoretical accounts of the conditions for the formation of grouping structures. The term timing used in this chapter refers to the temporal microstructure that is characteristic of performances of music and is widely regarded as the generative consequence of a performer's conception of musical structure. Research in rhythm and timing, is a shift from a rather abstract symbolic approach to perception and production toward an outlook that takes more account of properties of the auditory and motor systems, and of the body in general, or makes use of sub-symbolic principles, which require fewer explicit rules to be built into the models.