- Copyright Page
- Acknowledgements
- List of contributors
- About the Companion Website
- Introduction
- Time in Music and Philosophy
- Forms of Time in Nineteenth-Century Music: Geology, the Railway, and the Novel
- Music as Time, Music as Timeless
- Rhythm, Time, and Presence
- Politicking Musical Time
- To Be in Time: Repetition, Temporality, and the Musical Work
- Distracted Attention, Temporal Switches, and the Consolations of Performing
- Music, Evolution, and the Experience of Time
- Timescales and the Temporal Emergence of Musicking
- Understanding Musical Instants
- Cross-Modality and Embodiment of Tempo and Timing
- The Mind Is a DJ: Rhythmic Entrainment in Beatmatching and Embodied Temporal Processing
- Non-isochronous Metre in Music from Mali
- Towards a Cognitively Based Quantification of Metrical Dissonance
- Maelzel, the Metronome, and the Modern Mechanics of Musical Time
- Rhythm Quantization: Notes on the History of a Technocultural Practice
- 11-, 12-, and 13½-Bar Blues: Time and African American Country Blues Recordings (1925–1938)
- Metrical Displacement and Group Interaction in ‘Evidence’ by the Thelonious Monk Quartet
- The Politics of Musical Time in the Everyday Life of Ballet Dancers
- Temporalities of North Indian Classical Listening: How Listeners Use Music to Construct Time
- Timing in Palaran: Coordination, Control, and Excitement in Javanese Collaborative Vocal Accompaniment
- Here at the Bottom of the Sky…: Negotiating Time through Phrase, Form, and Tradition within a New York Performance Network
- Time and Ensemble Dynamics in Indeterminacy: John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra
- ‘Making, Not Filling Time’: Time and Notation in Improvised Musical Performance
- Musical Time in a Fast World
- The Radical Temporality of Drum and Bass
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter sketches a general history of rhythm quantization as a widespread practice in popular music culture. Quantization—a sound technology that automatically maps microrhythmic fluctuations onto the nearest beat available within a predefined metric grid—challenges traditional notions of musicking as an embodied activity that is grounded in the co-presence of human agents. At the same time, it encapsulates cultural and cognitive processes that are entirely human, fitting into a broader historical shift towards chronometric precision in Western music. Questions arising from this apparent contradiction are taken up in this chapter, which situates rhythm quantization as an emergent technocultural practice, examining its attendant technologies and requisite structures of music-theoretical knowledge, as well as its reception within the context of different musical genres.
Keywords: rhythm quantization, microrhythm, metric grid, technoculture, sound technology, popular music
Landon Morrison, College Fellow in Music, Harvard University.
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- Copyright Page
- Acknowledgements
- List of contributors
- About the Companion Website
- Introduction
- Time in Music and Philosophy
- Forms of Time in Nineteenth-Century Music: Geology, the Railway, and the Novel
- Music as Time, Music as Timeless
- Rhythm, Time, and Presence
- Politicking Musical Time
- To Be in Time: Repetition, Temporality, and the Musical Work
- Distracted Attention, Temporal Switches, and the Consolations of Performing
- Music, Evolution, and the Experience of Time
- Timescales and the Temporal Emergence of Musicking
- Understanding Musical Instants
- Cross-Modality and Embodiment of Tempo and Timing
- The Mind Is a DJ: Rhythmic Entrainment in Beatmatching and Embodied Temporal Processing
- Non-isochronous Metre in Music from Mali
- Towards a Cognitively Based Quantification of Metrical Dissonance
- Maelzel, the Metronome, and the Modern Mechanics of Musical Time
- Rhythm Quantization: Notes on the History of a Technocultural Practice
- 11-, 12-, and 13½-Bar Blues: Time and African American Country Blues Recordings (1925–1938)
- Metrical Displacement and Group Interaction in ‘Evidence’ by the Thelonious Monk Quartet
- The Politics of Musical Time in the Everyday Life of Ballet Dancers
- Temporalities of North Indian Classical Listening: How Listeners Use Music to Construct Time
- Timing in Palaran: Coordination, Control, and Excitement in Javanese Collaborative Vocal Accompaniment
- Here at the Bottom of the Sky…: Negotiating Time through Phrase, Form, and Tradition within a New York Performance Network
- Time and Ensemble Dynamics in Indeterminacy: John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra
- ‘Making, Not Filling Time’: Time and Notation in Improvised Musical Performance
- Musical Time in a Fast World
- The Radical Temporality of Drum and Bass
- Index
