Dear Christopher,
Thank you for taking the time to give me such a thorough answer to my
question. It is a wonderful metaphor (maybe not just a metaphor?) for the
way people tune into one another's rhythms.
Your account of self-entraining when reading verse makes good sense
intuitively. Particularly with a steady meter.
Do you see Zeno's self-consciousness as being an exaggerated affect of the
negative feedback loop introduced when one tries self-consciously to
control automatized actions? (I read a pop psych account once of how the
choker - in sport - is a person who tries too hard and therefore sabotages
automatically learnt expertise. That's the kind of thing I am thinking about.)
best, Sue
At 07:45 PM 2/23/2005, you wrote:
>Sue:
>
><snip>
>Is there any explanation as to why two pendulums should come into phase?
><snip>
>
>I can't go much further than 'yes'. Except to say that vectors are involved:
>the weights of the pendulums and the directions of their swinging, plus the
>magnitude of the vibrations caused and the path they take through some
>medium such as a shelf. To make that a bit more concrete, the effect first
>observed by Huygens in the 17th C (two clocks whose pendulums moved in
>precisely opposite phase to one another) happened when the clocks were hung
>next to one another on the same wall. When they were placed on opposite
>sides of the same room it dissipated.
>
>It's more complicated (or more abstract) with say, two or more electronic
>oscillators. However, the principle is the same: direction plus amplitude.
>And there is a mathematics to all this. Which I'd better leave well alone.
>
>For an illustration of just how important phasing is in (for example) how
>sound is both rendered and perceived, let me mention the Hafler effect. You
>can get an approximation to surround-sound out of an ordinary stereo signal
>by adding two extra speakers wired in anti-phase (rear left = L-R and rear
>right = R-L) to produce difference signals.
>
><snip>
>Do you think people can be more or less expert at entraining?
><snip>
>
>Entrainment itself just happens, which is what I meant by its being more
>basic than any basic skill. But there is, of course, more to say. The
>varying capabilities of our sensory apparatus, since we are not only not all
>the same but also only as good as what we perceive; our attention; the
>degree and types of interference, and the extent to which we are able to
>reflect (more or less self consciously) on those percepts. All these are
>important.
>
>There's a nice description in Svevo's *...Zeno* of how self entrainment can
>come adrift. Zeno has a limp induced by self consciousness, and his attempts
>to master the violin are vitiated (even though 'the lowest being, when he
>knows what triplets and groups of four or six notes are, can pass from one
>to the other with rhythmic exactness') because 'with me, on the other hand,
>when I play one of these figures it clings to me and I can't get rid of it
>again, so that it sneaks into the following figure and makes it out of
>time.' So one can be one's own worst enemy, as it were.
>
>And there are obviously social influences on how we parse what we hear. We
>learn the prosody of our first language before we learn its vocabulary. We
>hear music most readily (ie: distinguish it from noise) through forms we've
>already heard. And our reading of metrical and quasi metrical poetry seems
>to me to proceed (and with luck more successfully than Zeno's efforts with
>the violin) through our (re)constructing rhythmic forms from textual cues,
>by which we then (self) entrain.
>
>As it happens there's a debate about metre on one of the other lists in
>which someone has stated poetry to be 'a volitional human, rather than a
>non-volitional natural, thing.' To my mind it is both.
>
>CW
>__________________________________________
>
>'I might have known you'd choose the easy way'
>(Franz Kline's mother)
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