Filling In: Syncopation, Pleasure and Distributed Embodiment in Groove

DOI: 10.1111/musa.12082

MARIAA.G.WITEK

FILLING IN:SYNCOPATION,PLEASURE AND DISTRIBUTED EMBODIMENT IN GROOVE

On a live recording of the funk and soul saxophonist Maceo Parker’s ‘Shake Everything YouGot!’ from the album Life on Planet Groove (1992),1 the drummer, Kenwood Dennard, is allocated almost two minutes for his solo. After being accompanied by Parker’s rhythmic stuttering and shouting, Dennard is left to play the groove alone in what is now a classic marker of funk – the drum break.2 Dennard continues in the designated tempo (ca. 120 beats per minute) with a rhythmic pattern which is complex but rarely strays from the track’s regular 4/4 metre. The rhythm is heavily syncopated across the drum kit, but the audience captured on this live recording demonstrates its metrical certainty by clapping hands on every second beat (beats 2 and 4). At two points during the drum break, Dennard syncopates in such a way that beat 4 is entirely omitted, leaving only the audience’s clapping to signify the beat. Here, when the drums are silent, the listeners sound the beat with their body movements. The audience seems to find this deeply satisfying, as indicated by the sound of cheers following Dennard’s return on ‘the One’.3 Thus, even when we are listening to the recording, removed from the jazz club hosting the concert (Stadtgarten, Cologne, 1992), we can gain the same enjoyment of the audience’s momentary embodied expression of the beat. What is it about this scenario that feels so enjoyable? What is the significance of syncopation in groove, and to what extent can it explain the pleasure we experience through physical embodiment and synchronisation in dance- and movement-directed music? In this article, groove is analysed phenomenologically as a triangulation of rhythmic structure, embodiment and pleasure. A consideration of groove research and theories of extended mind and affective practice demonstrate how groove is distributed between mind, body and music. In this distribution, musical pleasure is not simply caused by sensory stimulation; rather, it emerges dynamically through the intertwining of the corporeal, material and psychological. Syncopation provides an example of the structural complexity of groove that opens up empty spaces in the rhythmic surface which invite the body to fill in through entrainment. By filling in temporal gaps, bodies extend into the musical structure, and the desire to fill the gaps and complete the groove affords a participatory pleasure.

Groove During the last few decades groove has attracted attention from a number of disciplines, most noticeably ethnomusicology, musicology and psychology. It is therefore surprising that the current deﬁnition of groove in the New Grove Dictionary Online, while highlighting some of its most signiﬁcant aspects – most important, its effects on the body and degree of repetition – accepts some very vague descriptions of the relationship between the structural and the experiential:

In the realm of jazz, a [groove is a] persistently repeated pattern. More broadly, Feld (1988), studying groove from an ethnomusicological perspective, deﬁnes it cautiously as “an unspeciﬁable but ordered sense of something that is sustained in a distinctive, regular and attractive way, working to draw the listener in”. Connections to dance are important, and the statement that a performance has, or achieves, a groove, usually means that it somehow compels the body to move. (Kernfeld 2009; emphasis added)

Furthermore, it is unclear from this deﬁnition what the groove actually consists of. Is it the music itself, a property of the music, the experience of it or our behaviour towards it? Or is it perhaps a special combination of these factors? Together with Charles Keil, Steven Feld was one of the ﬁrst to study groove as a musical concept. In Music Grooves (1994), they both directed broadly ethnomusicological approaches towards groove in cultures ranging from African American jazz communities to the Kaluli of New Guinea. In their writing, music is treated as an embodied process, and analyses are directed towards performances rather than works. In these analyses groove is found in microtemporal performance nuances, often described as ‘push’ or ‘pull’ against the main pulse, such that some notes slightly anticipate or are played shortly after time points on a strict metric grid.4 Keil coined the term ‘Participatory Discrepancies’ (PDs) to describe such nuances, claiming that small variations in timing promote participation and social interaction on the part of both performer and listener: ‘The power of music is in its participatory discrepancies. [ . . . ] Music, to be personally involving and socially valuable, must be “out of time” and “out of tune”’ (1987, p. 275). The term ‘engendered feeling’ is also employed, referring to the processual, emergent qualities of affect elicited by PDs in rhythm, qualities felt in the body (Keil and Feld 1994, p. 54). Such participatory views are now common in approaches to musical experience, and few maintain that audiences and listeners are ever passive respondents. Tia De Nora’s (2000) ethnography of aerobics classes and Judith Becker’s (2004) research on trancing, for example, both foreground the notion of human-music interaction. However, it is rare for this interaction to be analysed in detail. For example, Keil and Feld leave us wondering what it is about PDs that afford engendered feeling. What is participatory about the participatory discrepancies? Musicologists and phenomenologists studying groove have also focused on such ‘microtiming’, bringing us closer to clarifying how experience is related

Music Analysis, 36/i (2017) © 2016 The Author. Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 140 MARIAA.G.WITEK to the musical structure. In her book on the funk grooves of James Brown and Parliament, Anne Danielsen (2006) treats microtiming as a way of creating forward motion and rhythmic interplay between textural layers. Together with repetition, metric displacement and cross-rhythm, such structures promote a ‘groove mode of listening’ (pp. 147–9), in which time is organised cyclically. While in ‘the state of being in a groove’, listeners are immersed in an ‘eternal present’ and an attentional equilibrium (p. 154). Because the groove is repetitive, listeners’ expectations with respect to events of rhythmic tension do not move forwards and backwards in protension and retention, but are directed inwards to what is happening at that moment in time. This does not mean, however, that groove is static. Inspired by Jacques Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), in which a productive and dynamic kind of repetition is identified, Danielsen (2006, pp. 162–4) describes how the groove is constantly moving; the same structural gestures are simply repeated time and time again. For Danielsen, groove is neither fully within the music nor within the listener, but emerges only in the relationship between the two.5 She distinguishes between figure and gesture, between the imagined and the sounding: the figure is the referential structure, while the gesture is the musical utterance that expresses the figure. A rhythmic pattern notated according to traditional metric categories (i.e. on a metric grid) is the figure, while the rhythmic pattern as performed, with all its articulations and microrhythmic nuances that cannot easily be transcribed, is the gesture. However, the figure is not simply a mental representation, abstracted from the perceived gesture, but a virtual component of it, actualised in its gestural form. In other words, there is always a mutual relationship between reference structure and sounding event, and structure is both virtual and real, in both the listener and the music.6 The relationship between musical structure and listener is equally important in Tiger Roholt’s (2014) more recent phenomenological analysis of groove. As in Keil and Feld’s (1994) work on PDs, it is ‘rhythmic nuance’, the microtemporal sophistication in rhythmic expression, that is the source of groove; Roholt’s arguments thus resemble those surrounding engendered feeling. He claims that, although the timing nuances are important, they must be experienced ‘engagedly’, not ‘analytically’, in order for groove to occur (p. 3). This ‘feeling’ of groove is inseparable from the body that feels it. Groove is to be understood by the body and requires body movement to be actualised. The kind of embodiment that Roholt finds in groove is an instance of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) ‘motor intentionality’, which describes an unconscious yet practical directness towards an object, a bodily knowing that feels more like ‘grasping’ than representing (Roholt 2014, pp. 96–103). According to Roholt, groove is the affective dimension of motor intentionality afforded by the tension between moving with the beat and the deviating rhythmic nuances (p. 105). He concludes that groove is only partly located in a recording, that it is ontologically incomplete and requires listeners’ embodied engagement.

Syncopation, Entrainment and Affect While many groove-based genres do indeed involve microtiming (e.g. jazz, funk, R & B and hip-hop), others do not. In particular, some forms of electronic dance music (e.g. house and techno) are not microrhythmically sophisticated in this way, but nonetheless ‘compel the body to move’, involve repetition and generally fit the New Grove definition of groove (Kernfeld 2009). After musicologists and behavioural psychologists had established the basic experiential effect of groove (Iyer 2002; Zbikowski 2004; and Madison 2006), leading to its psychological definition as a musical quality associated with a pleasurable desire to move (Janata, Tomic and Haberman 2012), researchers began examining which musical structures best fit this experience. Perhaps surprisingly, only a few experiments have shown that microtiming is positively related to the experience of groove (Klichenmann and Senn 2015). Most studies have shown the opposite – that the more microtemporally extreme the rhythm, the less listeners experience the desire to move (See Madison and Sioris 2014; Butterfield 2010; Davies, Madison, Silva and Gouyon 2013; and Fruhauf,¨ Kopiez and Platz 2013).7 Psychological experiments have found another rhythmic feature that more reliably relates to the pleasurable desire to move in groove: syncopation.8 It is hard to find a piece of groove-based music that is not syncopated in some way, a particularly common source being the superimposition of two rhythms with different metric tendencies, such as 4/4 against 3/4. This is common in funk, electronic dance music and Afro-Cuban clave (Danielsen 2006; Butler 2006; and Washburne 1997). One experiment, using an online survey, found an inverted U-shaped relationship when syncopation in groove (x) was plotted against ratings of wanting to move and pleasure (y) (Witek, Clarke, Wallentin, Kringelbach and Vuust 2014).9 After listening to 50 drum breaks, mostly from the funk and soul repertoire, participants rated those with medium degrees of syncopation as making them want to move more and eliciting more pleasure than those with extreme levels of syncopation and those with little syncopation.10 Such an inverted U-shaped function of complexity – the quadratic, or Wundt curve – has been thought to explain perceptual stimulation in art more broadly (Berlyne 1971 and Wundt 1874), although the optimal affective level of complexity depends on the type of art and its aesthetic criteria (Orr and Ohlsson 2005). Considering the synchronous character of the body movement in groove, it seems obvious that too much syncopation would prevent the experience of a pleasurable desire to move, since it risks obscuring the main beat to an extent that prevents rhythmic regularity and sensorimotor synchronisation. But why should medium syncopation be more pleasurable and more movement inducing than low syncopation? For one thing, syncopation has been shown to inhibit synchronisation in finger-tapping experiments (Fitch and Rosenfeld 2007): the more syncopated the rhythm, the less accurately we are able to tap along to it. But an inability to synchronise accurately may not deter us from tapping. Indeed, moving to music may be enjoyable even when we are not perfectly synchronised.

Such experiments have yet to explain why syncopation makes people want to move, or why it is pleasurable. The psychological and music-theoretical definition of syncopation may appear to lead us in the right direction. According to both theoretical and empirical study,11 at a schematic level we expect event onsets of a rhythmic pattern to coincide with strong metric accents and rests to fall on weaker accents, at least in Western tonal music. Syncopation occurs when an onset falls on a weak accent, which is then followed by a rest on a strong one, confounding expectations. Expectancy violation is one of the most oft-cited explanations for emotional experience in music, from both music psychologists and theorists (see Juslin and Sloboda 2010). In particular, Leonard Meyer’s theory of expectation and emotion (1956) and David Huron’s more recent anticipation theory (2006) inspire empirical researchers who aim to demonstrate how structural deviations in music stimulate expectations and arouse emotion. Meyer claimed that musical perception is based on gestalt principles and that our temporal experience of music is teleological. He argued that when the completion of a gestalt is prevented – for example, by delaying the resolution of a build-up of tension – a listener’s emotions are aroused (p. 28). Huron has related such expectation- led theories of musical emotion to biological mechanisms, adding that we feel pleasure from music because the brain rewards successful prediction, regardless of how relevant the reward is for adaptation and survival. As for syncopation in general, it is likely that some low-level expectation-based mechanism of pleasure is at play, that listeners become emotionally stimulated by the brief unexpected silence on a strong metric accent (Keller and Schubert 2011). But when considering syncopation in the context of groove, violated expectations alone cannot explain the characteristic embodied and affective experiences, because syncopations in groove are constantly repeated. Since the music is not moving towards a definite goal, the structural development is not teleological in the way that Meyer thought would stimulate our emotions (Danielsen 2006, p. 155). Groove, both as music and as experience, and moreover in the relation between the two, is cyclical and reciprocal. The unexpected in groove is fully expected, and the affective experience is somehow intimately linked with the body in ways that manifest themselves as synchronised body movement or dance. If syncopations in groove have a different effect to syncopations elsewhere, then are they actually different? Danielsen references a distinction made by Olly Wilson between primary and secondary rag in ragtime: the former involves the momentary displacement of phenomenal accents (that is, syncopations), while the latter involves the cross-rhythmic combination of two different pulses with different metric tendencies that repeat over a longer period (Wilson 1974). Danielsen finds this second kind to be most relevant to groove, describing syncopation in this context as ‘counter rhythm with a tendency towards cross- rhythm’ (2006, p. 62). Accordingly, the notes on weak metric accents form part of an independent pattern whose onsets indicate a different organisation of metre to that of the main beat. The ‘4-against-3’ pattern is a classic example, now

© 2016 The Author. Music Analysis, 36/i (2017) Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd FILLING IN 143 conventionalised across many groove-based music genres. Danielsen suggests that the balance between the main beat and the counter-rhythm creates a structural tension that propels the groove forward, positing further that listeners and dancers directly experience this tension by synchronising body movements to the main beat, thereby embodying the properties of the music that are being metrically ‘countered’ (pp. 61–72). Some theories suggest that synchronisation relates to affect by way of entrainment. Entrainment is a process by which two or more independent oscillating periodicities come into contact and adapt in phase and period until they synchronise (Clayton, Sager and Will 2005; Phillips-Silver, Atkins and Bryant 2011; and Jones 2008). It was ﬁrst described as a physical concept by Christiaan Huygens in 1665 upon his discovery that, when placed on a common support, the independent periods and phases of two pendulum clocks would synchronise (Clayton, Sager and Will 2005). In music, entrainment takes place on different levels: motor, physiological, attentional and social.12 It provides the basis for beat perception, sensorimotor synchronisation and dance via the entrainment of our rhythmic attentional and motor processes to the rhythmic processes in the music. Its affective dimension is a topic of recent research, and one of the proposed mechanisms whereby entrainment is associated with positively valenced experiences is emotional contagion (Trost and Vuilleumier 2013; and Overy and Molnar-Szakacs 2009): when overtly (or covertly) synchronising to music in a social context, the emotional states of one person may be transferred to another via shared attention to time and dynamics. McGuiness and Overy (2011) claim that, underpinned by the brain’s mirror neuron system, musical entrainment affords experiences of pre- reﬂective co-subjectivity in which a shared sense of pulse opens up a space for the exchange of emotions, whether between dancing partners or a listener and recorded vocalist. Others contend that entrainment itself results in pleasure, and that there is an evolutionary explanation for this (Bispham 2006; and Merker, Madison and Eckerdal 2009). Because group cohesion, helpfulness, and cooperation follow interpersonal synchronisation (Kirschner and Tomasello 2010; and Hove and Risen 2009), it is claimed that music and dance evolved as social tools. Since social functioning is evolutionarily advantageous, it is likely that the brain developed to reinforce musical behaviour by integrating it into its reward system (Kokal, Engel, Kirschner and Keysers 2011). Why, then, is the music we enjoy dancing to not completely regular? If entrainment enables emotional contagion or is the direct cause of pleasure via its pro-social functions, then the most pleasurable music should be that which affords the most successful synchronisation. In other words, the simpler the rhythm, the better we should be able to synchronise and the more pleasure we should experience. However, this does not seem to be the case in groove, which is rhythmically complex yet elicits a desire to move and feelings of pleasure. In fact, it seems that rather than affording synchronised movement despite its syncopatedness, groove seems to elicit a pleasurable desire to move because of it.

Filling In the Gaps In order to address this paradox we need a closer examination of how syncopation can work in groove. Fig. 1 presents a notational transcript of the main rhythmic pattern of the house track ‘Drum Track’ by Helix (Beau Thigpen) from 2012,13 with the tactus, or main beat, indicated above. This is a recent product of the London ‘house scene’,14 whose latest productions have been described as ‘anti- house’ owing to their high levels of syncopation, even in the bass drum.15 The tempo is relatively high (ca. 180 beats per minute), and the main pattern, which is heavily syncopated, permeates this very percussive track, constantly moving between the textural layers of the bass drum, rim-shots, hand claps and two synthesisers. It is a typical example of the conventionalised pattern that tends towards four against three.16 The first group of four notes acts against the first three beats of the main pulse, indicated in Fig. 1. However, this cross-rhythmic tendency resolves at the end of the pattern where the last note realigns with the final beat of the pulse, reinforcing the track’s overall 4/4 metre. I refer to this pattern as ‘syncopated’ rather than ‘tending towards cross-rhythm’ (Danielsen 2006, p. 62) because it allows me to address more directly the individual moments in the rhythm. The track avoids a ‘four-to-the-floor’ bass drum on each quaver beat – a metric underpinning which characterises more classic house music (Butler 2006, p. 78). Rather, for most of the track, the hi-hat (in some rare and short-lived cases replaced by a bass drum or synthesised percussive sound) indicates the main beat, albeit either only on the quaver offbeat or as a constant stream of regular semiquavers. The result is that, although the hi-hat is regular, the main beat lacks the stability that other, more traditional house tracks afford. Listeners and dancers have to extract the quaver pulse from the hi-hat. Furthermore, at certain

Fig. 1 Basic notational transcript of the main syncopated pattern in ‘Drum Track’ by Helix (2012). The lower panel shows the phenomenal accents audible in the music, while the upper one represents the main beat of strong metric accents. Grey arrows and broken circles indicate where among the notes these metric accents occur. At moments when phenomenal accents co-occur with metric accents, the circles encompass the notes. At times when they do not co-occur, the circles are empty, illustrating that open spaces or gaps appear in the rhythmic structure.

© 2016 The Author. Music Analysis, 36/i (2017) Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd FILLING IN 145 moments the syncopated pattern is allowed full rein, completely unaccompanied by the hi-hat.17 I adopt the terms ‘phenomenal accents’ and ‘metric accents’, coined by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff (1983, p. 17), to distinguish between the physically measurable acoustic signal that constitutes the rhythmic surface of the track and the regularly alternating strong/weak accents of the metre.18 Accordingly, the main syncopated pattern of Fig. 1 is made up of phenomenal accents, while the main beats indicated above are the strong metric accents, the quaver pulse extracted from the hi-hat.19 The occurrences of strong metric accents are also indicated by arrows from the main beat to grey broken circles on the phenomenal level. When phenomenal accents coincide with metric accents, the circles encompass the note heads; when the two do not coincide, the circles are empty. It becomes apparent that when the syncopated pattern is unaccompanied, few of the phenomenal accents coincide with metric accents. In fact, half of the main beats’ metric accents are silent. These silent metric accents can be thought of as open spaces in the rhythmic surface. The empty broken circles demarcate pockets of sonic absence. Where strong metric accents do not coincide with phenomenal accents, gaps are revealed in the rhythm’s fabric. However, even if we define a gap as an absence of matter, it depends on the matter’s being perceivable in the background for its absence at a given location to be recognised as such. Essentially, the syncopations in ‘Drum Track’ are not merely creating silences, but exposing the metric accents of the rhythm, which are as real and as perceived as the sounds of the phenomenal accents themselves.20 Despite not always being acoustically expressed in the sonic material, metre in groove is always perceived. In fact, it has been shown that not only does a regular beat or pulse entrain synchronised neurophysiological responses in the brain, but when imagining a specific metric organisation of the beat, additional frequencies respond that correspond to the metre but are not actually present in the signal (Nozaradan, Peretz, Missal and Mouraux 2011). In other words, although metre can be abstracted in a theoretical sense, when experienced as reference structure in a rhythmic pattern, it is always a sensory stimulus.21 In his phenomenology of sound, Don Ihde (2007) considers sonic silence through visual metaphor. Distinguishing between different modes of auditory attention such as ‘focal’ and ‘field’, he addresses ‘horizonal attention’ (p. 105), that is, the limits of our perception at the intersection of presence and absence. In auditory terms, the horizon is experienced not spatially, but temporally. For Ihde, ‘the sense of horizonal “absence” is the experienced temporality of sound’ (p. 108). It is at the point of this temporal horizon that sounds come into being. As such, silence is a dimension of the horizon and is ‘given in absence’ (p. 109). Thus, silence is relative, and can be thought of as something concealed within present experience. Silence is the hidden depth of audition: ‘[j]ust as the visual is co-presented as a face in profile and an intended absent depth, so in listening there is sound which shades off into the co-presenting “emptiness” of silence’ (p. 110). Ihde considers this relativity of silence with regard to music: ‘[t]he

Music Analysis, 36/i (2017) © 2016 The Author. Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 146 MARIAA.G.WITEK pauses, or rests, in musical phrasing add to rather than subtract from the totality of the music’ (p. 110). Danielsen also recognises the signiﬁcance of silences in groove, claiming that, although the beat forms the basis for how the music is played, danced and listened to, it does not need to be acoustically manifested to achieve this goal. She shares this idea with the ethnomusicologist John Miller Chernoff (1974), who analysed African drumming music:

In groove music in particular, the space between the notes seems very important. It is as if the silence creates a tension that locks the groove: the gaps between the sounds create the groove as much as the sounds themselves do. The gaps almost represent a ﬁeld of power, making the gestures stick to their positions. [...] Similarly,Chernoffsuggeststhatitmightbefruitfultostudymusicasa pattern of open spaces: ‘The music is perhaps best considered as an arrangement of gaps where one may add a rhythm, rather than as a dense pattern of sound.’ (Danielsen 2006, p. 54; italics in original)22

I propose that the gaps afforded by syncopations in groove are central to explaining our desire to move to music. Dancing to the beat is an active response to the music’s invitation to add to the rhythmic fabric. The gaps revealed by the syncopations in ‘Drum Track’ invite the body itself to ﬁll in for the phenomenal accents: metric accents without phenomenal events open up spaces in the musical structure that the body desires to occupy. By synchronising body movements to the main beat of the music – which is perceived despite the occasional metric silences – the body becomes the beat. Syncopation thus allows the body to enact silent metric accents and ‘phenomenologise’ the beat. In this and many similar tracks, syncopation offers a musical platform for the body to physically occupy parts of the musical structure. Thus, as in Roholt’s (2014) phenomenological analysis of microtiming in groove, our analysis of syncopation also concludes that groove requires the body in order not just to be understood, but to be complete. The embodied substitution of metric accents is both metaphorically and literally physical. Syncopation in groove leaves the metre acoustically incomplete, and for the listener, the body is the most immediate and material instrument with which the metre can be completed. Of course, in most groove music, it is rare for syncopated patterns to be completely unaccompanied. ‘Drum Track’ is exceptional, and, as mentioned, the metric accents depicted in Fig. 1 are only momentarily suspended. Normally other instruments sonically emphasise the beat or metre in some way. However, this does not invalidate my ﬁlling-in theory. In another empirical study, my co-authors and I found that while monophonic syncopations were perceived to be the least stable (i.e. violating most expectations), syncopations in polyphonic contexts – syncopations accompanied by one or two more instruments which emphasise the beat – were also experienced as unstable, although less so (Witek, Clarke, Kringelbach and Vuust 2014). In other words, syncopations in polyphonic contexts still make the groove incomplete and still require our

© 2016 The Author. Music Analysis, 36/i (2017) Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd FILLING IN 147 participation. We still experience gaps in individually synchronised textural layers of groove, even if other layers fill them. Here, though, when we synchronise our body movements to the beat, we share the open spaces with other parts of the music. At this point it is necessary to consider what is meant by musical structure. Following rock and pop musicologists’ re-evaluation of what constitutes a musical work – which include non-notated properties of music, such as performances, recordings and ‘sound’ (e.g. Gracyk 1996; Zak 2001; Theberge´ 1997; and Butler 2014) – musical structure is now more frequently thought of as something that arises in the mutual interaction of musical materials and their actualisation, in listening, performing or recording. For example, Nicholas Cook (2014) suggests that the practice of music analysis is not just descriptive, but also performative. When we analyse music, we ‘think’ the musical structures. Danielsen’s Deleuzian distinction between figure and gesture builds on similar views. Rhythm is always experienced as an interaction between sounds and reference structures: ‘musical reference structures are virtual aspects of real music, while the sounding events are actual manifestations of the same reality. The music has part of itself in a virtual domain’ (Danielsen 2006, p. 47). When I analyse the syncopated pattern in ‘Drum Track’, the musical structure is not a purely physical object, and my hearing of it is not exclusively perceptive. The musical structure emerges, rather, in perception, and I ‘perform’ it as I listen to and analyse it. Thus, to say that groove affords a ‘becoming’ or ‘occupying’ of musical structure does not mean that the physiological materials of our bodies suddenly transform into sonic waveforms (although they could create waveforms, of course, for example if we clapped our hands). When filling in, we do not literally move into an actual, physical, container-like space. Rather, while musical structure is a temporal experience, it is also in temporal experience that we become part of the groove. Sonic materials, our attentional processes, and body movements are all building blocks in a temporal and phenomenological structure which emerges through experience, varying according to perspective. However, although the musical structure of groove (as it is given to us in experience) is not visible or tangible, it is to the last degree physical. Dance is the explicit expression of this physicality, but even when covertly entraining to the beat, our bodies feel the groove. Thus, the physical embodiment of the musical structure in groove is literal; what is being physically embodied is simply in the temporal domain.

Extended Mind and Distributed Groove The participatory demand and the literal sense in which body movements ﬁll in the metric accents in groove integrate body movement and musical structure so closely that an experiential difference between music and body becomes difﬁcult to maintain. If the body substitutes for rhythmic events, then as long as the groove lasts, body and music are one and the same structure. Such a blurring of boundaries between the external and the internal in embodied phenomena

Music Analysis, 36/i (2017) © 2016 The Author. Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 148 MARIAA.G.WITEK echoes the cognitive philosopher Andy Clark’s extended mind theory (EMT: Clark and Chalmers 1998; and Clark 2008). Clark takes an anti-dualist ontology to the extreme and maintains that, in cognition, there are no fixed boundaries between the mind, the body and the world. He defines cognition as a unified system in which mind and world are coupled, and material objects that are used in aiding cognitive processing are not tools but are fully part of the cognitive process. An example from EMT is the fictional situation of Inga and Otto (Clark and Chalmers 1998, p. 12). Inga remembers how to get to the Museum of Modern Art in New York by consulting her memory, while Otto, who has Alzheimer’s disease, consults his notebook. Although Inga’s memory is internal and Otto’s notebook is external, according to EMT there is no fundamental difference between them.23 Otto’s consultation of the notebook is just as much a cognitive process as Inga’s consultation of her memory, and the notebook contains some of the cognitive processes involved in remembering. This is the essence of the parity principle, which holds that if a process in the world works like a cognitive process in the brain, then it is in fact a cognitive process (Clark 2008, p. 77). The fact that Otto’s circumstances involve overt perception and action only reinforces the point that perception and action are fully integrated in cognition. Our environments serve as scaffolding for our minds, and our active engagements with external objects enable a cognitive offloading of mental capacities onto the world, de-externalising them. Clark proposes that language is central to extending the mind into the world and, crucially, that it enables social coupling (Clark and Chalmers 1998, p. 18). This social function in EMT may also be served by music. In Making Popular Music, Jason Toynbee (2000) makes related claims. His book is about authorship, creativity and agency in popular music, with a chapter dedicated to electronic dance music and how the development of its genres and social context makes it more democratic than other genres. He describes how dance music requires participation on the part of its listeners and dancers, using Keil’s notion of PDs. However, he extends Keil’s compass beyond microtiming to include transformations of the offbeat and articulation of the sonic envelope. The weak offbeat in house and techno is said to propel the pulse in similar ways to those described by Danielsen (2006). Moving against the pulse creates structural ambivalence which leads to ‘thinking through bliss’ and the body as a distributed mind (Toynbee 2000, p. 147). Toynbee claims – and Roholt would surely agree – that the body is thought through dance. His notion of distribution is taken from network theory (Castells 1994), and dance is given the status of an alternative network in which democratic interaction is afforded by the continuous feedback loops between its actors. The dancer is described as a cyborg, liberated through the shedding of its individuality yet active in the distributed social authorship of the music. As I have shown, syncopation is a very concrete example of a musical structure in groove that affords distribution of body, mind and music. When synchronising with the beat, the body becomes a part of the musical structure by filling in

© 2016 The Author. Music Analysis, 36/i (2017) Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd FILLING IN 149 gaps in the rhythmic surface. The mind and the body extend into the music – keeping in mind that music is something given in experience. As long as we are entraining to the beat, whether overtly or covertly, the rhythm contains parts of our cognitive process. There are no boundaries between mind, body and sound, and groove is not just the mutual relationship between the brain and the world but is a system that emerges in the co-operation of musical structure, body movement and attention. When dancing with other people, body movements are synchronised not just to the music, but to the movements of other bodies. Collectively ﬁlling the gaps in syncopation draws many bodies into the same space, in which bodies are distributed and the boundaries between different agents are further blurred. This might explain why clubbers often report ‘feeling at one’ with both the music and the people (Rietveld 1998, pp. 165–8). The open spaces in syncopated groove become portals through which people can share the same mental, temporal and physical dimensions. Syncopations may thus also provide gateways through which emotions are transferred during social entrainment. Filling in the gaps becomes a matter not only of anticipating the movements of other bodies, but also of sharing their affective states.

Processual Pleasure in Groove But what makes this compulsion to move in groove feel pleasurable? The emotional contagion afforded by entrainment and syncopation may explain how we ‘catch’ the emotions of others, but what is it about the distribution of mind, body and music that has positive affective significance? The importance of cognitive extension and its relevance for musical emotions has recently been discussed by Joel Krueger (2014). Entrainment is central to his claims that we engage with music by ‘synchronously organizing our reactive behavior and felt responses; and we take pleasure in letting music assume some of the organizational and regulative functions that, in other contexts, normally fall within the scope of our own endogenous capacities’ (p. 4). In other words, music is a part of the environment into which we can offload some of the regulatory processes involved in our emotions. Our emotions are therefore extended into the music, which partly structures our affective responses. Via feedback loops, the music can enhance the functional complexity of the various motor, attentional and regulative capacities responsible for generating and sustaining affective experience. Thus, music can directly modulate and regulate our emotions. Krueger claims that this gives rise to ‘new’ musically emotional experiences to which we do not have access in any other way. Because we enter into a mind- body-music system, our emotional processes are more complex and powerful than those that are solely contained in the brain, and we enjoy these ‘enhanced’ experiences. While something akin to a pleasure of offloading emotions onto music may pertain to groove, I believe that another process is also operating – a consequence of cognitive distribution that is more directly related to active participation.

When we physically enact the metric accents by moving to the beat, our action is motivated by a desire. The music makes us want to move.24 Sigmund Freud ([1920] 1961) insisted that pleasure is the result of satisfying a ‘drive’. He saw all human behaviour as motivated by drive to resolve ‘unpleasurable tension’. The classic example is the orgasm, where pleasure is released following a resolution of tension from genital excitation. Such a linear and causal theory of pleasure may be appropriate for teleological models of music, such as that of Meyer (1956), and for music involving structural climaxes. However, it is not appropriate for groove. Groove is not teleological, as there is no structural-developmental goal, such as a climax.25 Rather, because the rhythmically complex patterns are constantly repeating, groove is cyclical and thus more appropriately compared with sexual foreplay – a type of pleasure that Freud found hard to explain.26 Against Freud’s pleasure principle, Jacques Lacan proposed that there is a kind of pleasure without drive – jouissance (Braunstein 2003). Richard Middleton (1990, p. 255) refers to it as ‘pathogenic enjoyment of the signifier’ and, following Roland Barthes (1975), separates jouissance from plaisir. The latter is a kind of pleasure that arises in enjoyment as it relates to the subject, for example via the identification of the listener with the communicated meaning expressed by the music (as signification). It is pleasure from the meaningful reading of musical codes that structures the self in relation to its interests, concepts and goals. However, jouissance relates to the materiality of the music – the Barthesian ‘grain of the voice’ – enjoyment of which results in a ‘loss of self’, a fracturing of ‘the structures of signification through which the subject knows himself or herself’ (as signifiance) (Middleton 1990, p. 261). It is an immersive kind of pleasure that does not require the successful decoding of musical meaning or satisfaction of drive. Middleton claims that jouissance characterises the aesthetic pleasure of popular music, although he insists that there is always a combination of both. In groove, syncopation is a structure that affords this kind of immersive pleasure, fractured subjectivity and experience of materiality. The desire to move and to fill in is not motivated by a drive to achieve an end goal – the groove can never be ‘filled up’. Rather, we want to move and occupy the open spaces in the rhythm in order to feel the jouissance of physically losing ourselves and thus actively becoming the music. In a similar vein, Ermanno Benchivenga (1987) explores the difference between Freud’s stimulus-response model of pleasure and apparently non- teleological yet enjoyable experiences. He considers the writing of Konrad Lorenz (1970), who described the in vacuo activity of animals,27 concluding that there is something like a ‘drive to perform a certain activity, which will in general, but by no means always, be conducive to the achievement of a goal’ (Benchivenga 1987, p. 626; italics in original). In other words, there can be drive for practice and pleasure taken in the process of certain behaviours. Such practice- and process- oriented views of pleasure are believed to follow logically from extended views of cognition (Wetherell 2014; Scheer 2012; and Stephan, Walter and Wilutzky 2014). When viewed as practice, emotions are distributed across body, mind

© 2016 The Author. Music Analysis, 36/i (2017) Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd FILLING IN 151 and environment, and their cultural, historical and situated nature cannot be ignored. In this view, emotions are not simply caused by certain triggers in the environment; rather, they are more reciprocally and cyclically manifested between mind, body and stimulus. Emotions are neither ‘inside’ humans nor ‘outside’ in the environment, but emerge in the active engagement of humans with their environments. I am not the first to suggest that teleological models of pleasure insufficiently explain affective engagement with groove-based music. Luis-Manuel Garcia (2005), for example, has proposed an alternative based on the predominance of repetition in this kind of music. Adapting Karl Buhler’s (1927) tripartite pleasure system, he rejects the Freudian ‘satiation pleasure’ as an appropriate model for affect in repetitious electronic dance music (EDM) and suggests that the other two forms of pleasure, ‘process pleasure’ and ‘creation pleasure’, are more appropriate (Garcia 2005, pp. 8–9). Process pleasure is much like the type described above: it ‘arises from the process itself, rather than the process’ results’ (p. 8). Creation pleasure is related to process pleasure in that it is afforded by the satisfaction of mastering an activity, ‘a task/product well done’ (p. 8). In EDM, then, Garcia argues that repetition, or ‘looping’, is a structural activity that provides opportunities to exercise mastery of listening and dancing. The gradual introduction and removal of loops in EDM provide ‘aural cues’ that invite listeners to shift their attention within the dense texture of overlapping layers, allowing them to create their own ‘sonic pathways’ in the music and prolong the pleasure process (p. 11). But it is not just the dynamic layering of loops that affords processual and creative pleasure in EDM and other forms of groove music. Clearly, the syncopations that occur within the loops are equally important in offering opportunities to create the music. When synchronising our bodies to the beat, we enact parts of the musical structure by filling in the gaps; as long as the syncopations are repeated, we continue to participate, and processual pleasure is prolonged. Our desire to move is motivated by this opportunity to practice the musical structure. There is no drive to resolve tension; rather, we want to be an active part of it. Syncopation in groove does thus not cause pleasure but enables our engagement in a pleasurable activity. Benchivenga’s (1987) discussion of the pleasure found in process is an attempt to explain why aesthetic value is ascribed to art that is restrained in its expression and is somehow ‘incomplete’. He claims that it is precisely the opportunity – given to the spectator, listener or reader – to partially construct what is seen, heard or read that affords appreciation. However, there are limits to the amount of involvement we can offer. Benchivenga claims that there is something like an optimal level of ‘incompleteness’ in art, and that our taking part in the construction of it must not be overstrained. He implies that there is an inverted U- shaped relationship between completion in art, active participation and pleasure, a function that, as discussed above, also describes precisely the relationship between syncopation and ratings of wanting to move and pleasure in groove

(Witek, Clarke, Wallentin, Kringelbach and Vuust 2014). In other words, models of active and processual pleasure may explain why medium syncopation is the most affectively significant in groove. Too few syncopations prevent opportunities to participate in the pleasurable process, since the rhythm is already completed by the musical structure. Too many syncopations place demands on us that are too great: we cannot feel the structure for all the gaps, and thus the body cannot provide structural support, blocking the access to the pleasure process. But with medium syncopation, there are just enough gaps to invite physical enactment of metric accents through synchronised body movement. Medium syncopation is optimal because it enables the filling in of open spaces in the musical structure and the distribution of mind, body and music, affording experiences of immersive, participatory and processual pleasure. Compared to Keil and Feld’s (1994) theory of participatory discrepancies, I have provided an explanation of the participatory nature of groove which more directly describes how its listeners and dancers participate. Microtiming clearly plays an important role in groove, and rhythmic nuances like those described by Keil and Feld (1994) and by Roholt (2014) afford active participation on the part of listeners and dancers. But I further argue that another common structure in groove – syncopation – affords participation. By filling in the gaps exposed by the syncopations – using our own bodies – we enact aspects of the musical structure. Thus, groove becomes distributed across mind, body and music. Furthermore, I provide an account of how the embodied participation in groove becomes pleasurable, and demonstrate that syncopation – particularly at intermediate degrees – is central to explaining the pleasurable desire to move. Pleasure is afforded by the fulfilment of the desire physically to complete syncopated beats, but not in a stimulus-response or teleological way that would imply the satisfaction of a psychoanalytical drive. Rather, pleasure is itself the process of actively completing the groove, of occupying the embodied dimension of groove as distributed across mind, body and music. That is what is so satisfying about the audience’s handclaps during the silent syncopation in the drum break of ‘Shake Everything You Got!’ When Kenwood Dennard omits one of the metrically strong main beats and allows the audience alone to ‘play’ it with their own hands, they – and we, listening to the recording – become part of the groove. And this being-part-of is what makes groove feel so good.

NOTES The original version of this article, presented at popMAC at the University of Liverpool in 2013, was awarded the Adam Krims Memorial Prize by the Society for Music Analysis. The author is grateful to Anne Danielsen, Patrick Valiquet and Kenneth Smith for comments on the paper; to Rowan Oliver for drawing attention to the Maceo Parker/Kenwood Dennard example; and to Adam Harper for suggesting the Helix track.

1. This recording is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=fQ8ALoSaNp8, accessed 3 March 2015. 2. The solo drum break can be heard at 642 in the YouTube recording. 3. ‘The One’ is a term used in groove music, particularly funk, to refer to the downbeat. See Danielsen (2006), pp. 138–9. 4. Microtiming is sometimes also referred to as ‘expressive timing’. See Clarke (1989). 5. See also Danielsen (2010). 6. Danielsen again uses Deleuze to define the virtual (2006, p. 47). 7. The fact that most empirical psychological experiments have failed to show that microtiming is positively related to groove does not mean that it is undeserving of the attention given in musicology and ethnomusicology. Rather, as Klichenmann and Senn (2015) have shown, it seems to matter greatly how these rhythmic nuances are implemented, and the conditions under which microtiming is effective have been difficult to recreate in a laboratory setting. 8. Other structures that contribute to the experience of groove are beat salience and event density, particularly at fast metric subdivisions. See Madison, Gouyon, Ullen´ and Hornstr¨ om¨ (2011). 9. Similar findings were reported in Sioros, Miron, Davies, Gouon and Madison (2014). 10. The degree of syncopation was indexed according to a computational model in which the number of instances, their metric locations, polyphonic context and instrumentations determined how syncopated a drum break was. 11. For theoretical accounts, see Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983) and Temperley (2010). For empirical studies, see Ladinig, Honing and Winkler (2009). 12. Entrainment also occurs in biological processes, e.g. in our regular sleep- wake cycles that are coupled with the alternating shifts of day and night. 13. Helix, ‘Drum Track’ (2012). This recording can also be found at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggspbj7PlzU, accessed 3 March 2015. 14. The producer, Helix, is American, although his music has been released on the British label Night Slugs. 15. See Harper (2013). House is normally associated with a relatively regular ‘four-to-the-floor’ bass drum, i.e. an unsyncopated organisation of the main pulse.

16. This pattern is widely used across many groove genres. Another example is the intro to Betty Wright’s soul track ‘Clean Up Woman’ (1971). Here the guitar plays the syncopated pattern while the hi-hat emphasises the underlying beat. 17. An instance of this can be heard at 049 on the YouTube recording. 18. While Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s (1983) theory can be criticised for exclusively considering Western tonal (and metric) music and for assuming a too-hierarchical nature of musical perception, these terms are useful in distinguishing different kinds of perceptual events in rhythm. 19. Weak metric accents are not indicated. 20. The metric accents are ‘real’ in the Deleuzian virtual sense, as described by Danielsen (2006, p. 47). 21. The notion that metre is truly perceived and not just inferred is thus incompatible with so-called cognitivist theories which regard the mind as an information-processing input-output machine via which cognition results solely from top-down neural decoding, abstraction and representation. Rather, alternative models called ‘embodied’ or ‘situated’, as well as ecological theories, are better suited since they insist that cognition and perception come about through interactions of embodied agents with the environment – in other words, in the mutual relationship between the mind and world. For an example of a cognitivist theory, see Marr (1982). For embodied theories of perception, see Noe¨ (2004) and Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991). For ecological theories, see Gibson (1979) and Clarke (2005). 22. See Chernoff (1974), p. 113. 23. The smartphone is another common example. When using its numerous functions, such as the Internet browser, the calendar, the calculator or the address book, the phone is not just an instrument that we manipulate in order to subsequently ‘cognise’ its outputs. Rather, our arithmetic faculties, knowledge and memories are literally extended into the smartphone, to the extent that it actually contains some of our cognitive capacities. It temporarily stores, or ‘ofﬂoads’, our cognitive processes. Thus, whenever the phone is being used for a particular purpose, such as to remember an appointment, the memory is distributed across the mind, the phone and the body. 24. See Janata, Tomic and Haberman (2012); Madison (2006); and Witek, Clarke, Wallentin, Kringelbach and Vuust (2014). 25. Music involving groove may of course also involve climaxes. For example, many forms of electronic dance music, such as trance, often feature what is

called the ‘drop’, i.e. the brief absence of a strong beat, often accompanied by a gradually increasing tension in the other instruments, followed by the reintroduction of the beat (which resolves the tension). 26. The term ‘groove’ does indeed have sexual connotations, particularly in funk. See Danielsen (2006) and Kernfeld (2009). 27. Lorenz uses the example of a hand-reared starling which was observed to perform fly-catching behaviour despite the absence of flies, and despite never having caught a fly in its entire life (1970, p. 93).

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DISCOGRAPHY Helix, 2012: ‘Drum Track’, Night Slugs. Parker, Maceo, 1992: ‘Shake Everything You Got!’, Life on Planet Groove, Minor Music.

NOTE ON THE CONTRIBUTOR

MARIA A. G. WITEK is Assistant Professor at the Center for Music in the Brain at Aarhus University and Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus/Aalborg, funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF 117). Her current research concerns behavioural, cognitive and neural responses to rhythm and groove music, as well as phenomenological analyses of groove and dance music experience. She has published widely on these topics in such journals as Music Perception, PLOS ONE and Frontiers.

ABSTRACT What is it about groove in music that makes people move? And what explains the physical pleasure listeners and dancers experience as they synchronise their bodies to the beat? In this article, groove is analysed phenomenologically as a triangulation of rhythmic structure, embodiment and pleasure. Following a brief review of groove research, theories of extended mind and affective practice are added to demonstrate how groove is distributed amongst mind, body and music. In this distributed process, pleasure is not caused by some cognitive- physical stimulation, but rather emerges dynamically in the active participation in a cyclical mind-body-music system. The syncopated nature of the music provides the structural premise for the embodied extension. By opening up empty spaces in the rhythm – as illustrated in the house track ‘Drum Track’, by Helix (2012) – syncopations invite the body to ﬁll in through entrainment and synchronised movement. When ﬁlling in the gaps, listeners and dancers enact aspects of the musical structure and thus become part of the groove itself. Rejecting drive-oriented models, this article argues that it is the process in action, rather than the achievement, that makes groove pleasurable, and it makes suggestions for how this process might be socially distributed.