Viewing each moment as an intersection of experience, my project investigates the interaction between rhythm and technology. The goal is to reveal and encourage the use of sound and technology to understand the multitude of rhythms that surround us.

These projects are not instructional tools but are instead a series of design-based meditations on how rhythm can be realized, understood, and applied. Our ability to decipher and recognize the rhythms, cycles, and patterns that constantly impact us is key to finding the balance that can exist in ourselves and our surrounding environments.

Sound and music deal with relationships at its most crystalline form. The absence and presence of sound determines mood, tone, temperature, feel, etc; all of these anthropomorphic terms that are applied to what surrounds us are relevant when dealing with space and time. What is especially interesting is sound always requires a form of interaction. Even at its most incidental, in order to have sound, there must be interaction.

In this thesis project, rhythm and experience will be seen as one and the same. Our understanding of rhythm is based on its periodic variance of existence, oscillating between “is” and “is not”. Since rhythm is the experience, each moment is an interaction of rhythms. In discussing the relationships between everyday life, rhythms, and “the way social time actually behaves,”¹ Henri Lefebvre, the French sociologist, intellectual and philosopher, and Catherine Régulier wrote, “Our rhythms insert us into a vast and infinitely complex world, which imposes on us our experience and the elements of that experience.”²

In light of the understanding of the constructionist view that we learn by making and experiencing³, I have spent the majority of my life investigating and learning about rhythm in a very literal sense, as a classically-trained percussionist and as a competitive runner. Despite my intimacy with it, answering the question “What is rhythm?” is complex. With a new set of skills and approaches gathered during my time here at Parsons, I now have the opportunity to further my exploration into answering this question. When responding to “What is rhythm?”, Lefebvre and Régulier wrote:

Everyone thinks he knows what this word means. In fact, everyone perceives it in an empirical way that is very different from knowledge; rhythm is part of the ‘lived’, but that does not mean that it is part of the ‘known’. There’s a big gap between an observation and a definition, and an even bigger one between grasping a rhythm — the rhythm of a tune, of breathing, or the beating of the heart — and being able to conceive of the simultaneous intertwining of several rhythms, their unity in diversity.⁴

The projects that encompass Rhythm look to use sound and technology as a way to bring us closer to perceiving the intersections of these multitude of rhythms. Current visual music projects, such as using recorded sounds to impact image-based particle systems that are pasted up as street art for public viewing (see below) and public installation pieces that use visual codes that embody music and can be read/translated by a program running on a mobile device, look to use technology as a tool to interpret and explain how rhythms can impact our lives.

In the book Philosophy of Modern Music, Theodor Adorno writes, “The adaptation to machine music implies a renunciation of one’s own human feelings”.⁵ In an era where the majority of all popular music is recorded and performed with the drums toeing the line of a click-track, the voices auto-tuned, the guitars processed through digital foot-pedal interfaces, are we all a little less human for hearing (and possibly enjoying) this metronomic machine music? Is it Adorno’s feeling that we have relinquished (or surrendered) our autonomy and placed a computer behind the wheel of our culture and our music?

Adorno is missing one of the most exciting areas to explore with beats and rhythm and that is the area that resides between the spaces left by the computer’s methodical measurements of time. Having spent hours upon hours hearing a metronome measuring out hurdles of time, the drummer will find the deeper, more human elements of rhythm that exist at or around the automated time-keeping machine.

In addition, as opposed to focusing on musician as the performer, Adorno could also look to the club dancer as the performer. In Urban Media and the Politics of Sound Space, Peter Shapiro writes, “music organises time with its rhythm, and dancing to it is one of the few ways we have to suspend and stretch time. Even more than solar and lunar cycles, rhythm machines are presently the arbiters of time.”⁶ Using the steady pulse of the machine, our human motions warp its measurements with dance.

In stark contrast to Adorno, Jonathan Kramer, in Postmodern Music / Postmodern Thought, lists out 16 characteristics that he deemed representative of postmodern music. Two that are supremely relevant to this project are that postmodern music “considers music not as autonomous but as relevant to cultural, social, and political contexts,”⁷ and postmodern music “considers technology not only as a way to preserve and transmit music but also as deeply implicated in the production and essence of music.”⁸

In reflecting on these two statements, similar to games and the playing of games, music is not something that resides outside of what it is to be human or social beings, but instead is a direct result, a clear reflection, and a contributor to our nature and our culture. Does that explain our natural ability and desire to understand and physically respond to rhythm? Also, does that belief define music, rhythm, and our understanding to it as reactionary?

In discussing rhythm, music, and our minds, Oliver Sacks, professor of neurology/psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, wrote, “We anticipate the beat, we get rhythmic patterns as soon as we hear them, and we establish internal models or templates of them.”⁹ We cannot help but create models and templates that allow us to understand, but what Sacks does affectively is bring up a valuable point that patterns don’t necessarily have to be felt but can also be heard and seen.

Sacks discusses further the implication of rhythm and the group mind, and writes, “[t]he binding is accomplished by rhythm–not only heard but internalized, identically, in all who are present. Rhythm turns listeners into participants, makes listening active and motoric, and synchronizes the brains and minds (and, since emotion is always intertwined with music, the “hearts”) of all who participate.”¹⁰ The rhythmic patterns and models that we have are not just constructed by individuals but are a key component to group understanding and learning.

John Cage, in The Tiger’s Eye, wrote “any attempt to exclude the irrational is irrational. Any composing strategy which is wholly ‘rational’ is irrational in the extreme.”¹¹ This is a powerful statement, especially when applied to the design process. Does the final form need to be “rational”, or is the “why?” and “who cares?” capable of holding a set of irrational outcomes together to say something meaningful?



Cage goes on and writes, “Structure–that is, the division of a work into successive sections and phrases–is controlled by the composer’s intellect. The method of composition and the composer’s materials may either be controlled through rational decision or may be the spontaneous result of improvisation and inspiration. Form, the final result, is the actual content of a composition.”¹²

For “Convent of La Tourette”, the composer and architect, Iannis Xenakis, applied a visual, rhythmic pattern to the design of the windows, causing Le Corbusier to call the work “musical screens of glass.”¹³ Using Le Corbusier’s Modular theory, Xenakis “plotted out varying widths, the intervals creating shifting rhythms, a kind of vertical polyphony.”¹⁴ By using his understanding of music and Le Corbusier’s questionable proportionally harmonic scale, this visually stimulating work informs how rhythm can be used, not only for sound and 2 dimensional pieces, but also for physical environments.

Christiaan Huygen, the Dutch mathematician, astronomer, physicist, horologist, and writer of early science fiction, is credited with designing the first the pendulum clock and made many investigations into time and timekeeping.¹⁵ Huygen’s experiment with 2 pendulum clocks on the same wall that become synchronized over time is fascinating and begs the question, why to rhythms in physical space naturally synchronize? It should be noted that the first pendulum clock was designed by Huygen, but built by instrument-maker Salomon Coster. Rhythm, time, and music tied together in a momentous design collaboration.

At the beginning of “Journalism in the Age of Data”, IBM researcher Fernanda Viégas states, “Half of our brain is wired for vision.” Viégas goes on and says, “Vision is the biggest bandwidth that we have in terms of sensory information to the outside world.”¹⁶ Our understanding of what surrounds us, and thus the meaning we apply to it, is driven primarily through what we see. The importance of providing a visual experience as a part of this project cannot be understated.

As a design project, it is important to understand the audience of these pieces. There is a tradition and history of graffiti art here in NewYork, and the majority of the audience who interacts with my pieces will most likely be other graffiti artists. With that said, it is important to me to provide minimal technical barriers for others. In his discussion of musak, social warfare, and social interactions, Jonathan Sterne writes, “As it is in architecture and urban planning, so it should be in media: technology and design are defining aspects of the human landscape. We need better, more egalitarian forms of urban media design.”¹⁷ This sentiment for urban experiences informs the work done in the context of this thesis.

By describing the visual component of this project as graffiti, the context in which this work is being done is defined as street art and comments on the “unauthorized” nature of rhythm. Evan Roth, code-based graffiti artist, has been quoted as saying, “Great graffiti blurs the line between what is seen as illegal and what is seen as legal.”¹⁸ The goal is not to participate in illegal activities, but instead to recognize that the urban streets are rhythmically, malleable spaces.

In discussing how mobile technology changed the relationship in use and organization of public space, Eric Kluitenberg writes, “the thing that stands in the way of this preoccupation with the visual is a critical analysis of the more invisible processes which are rearranging public space and imposing a different utilization logic. Relatively invisible forms of social compulsion, which bring these processes into play, may well have a greater significance for the way in which public space can and may be used in the future.”¹⁹ All of these visible and invisible forms constitute the many differing rhythms we come in contact with throughout our day. By using street art and graffiti as a form, the embedded goal is to reclaim and encourage the democratization of urban space.

Kluitenberg believes we are living in a space in which “the public is reconfigured by a multitude of media and communication networks interwoven into the social and political functions of space to form a ‘hybrid space’.”²⁰ This is the understanding that technology and new mediums can change the nature of a space.

The artist David Ellis, emulating his childhood experience of a player piano, creates artwork that blurs the line between sculpture and musical instruments . Ellis’s “The Owl” was an instrument sculpture that was made of recycled garbage (leftover supplies and trash from a gallery showing) and is a visual manifestation of the sounds capable of the piece.²¹ I am looking to further abstract that relationship of sound and the visual, and with that abstraction, pull the audience closer to understanding rhythm in a deeper, more-complex way.

While discussing my plans for this project, fellow classmate, Manuel Rueda Iragorri, suggested I read the chapter “Bit by Bit by Bit” from the book Code. In the chapter, Charles Petzold dissects the underpinnings for bar codes (and other visual codes that can be seen by computers and by humans), and how their fundamentals are based in binary. The discussion and imagery is visually inspiring and brings up constraints that need to be incorporated into the design and architecture of the visual music codes of this project.

Michael Hensel and Achim Menges, in their article “Patterns in Performance-Orientated Design”, investigate pattern that “arises out of the interaction of man-made interventions with the natural environment”²² (as opposed to aesthetically-driven or natural-model driven pattern making) within architectural design. A relevant quote relates to their discussion of complexity and simplicity, and they write:

One of the guiding principles motivating a new generation of computationally inspired architects is the idea that simple programs can produce complex forms. From flocking patterns to fractal geometry, the reduction of complexity to a single set of abstract rules has shifted attention away from the messy, embodied realities of existence towards the very real need to create working methodologies that are inclusive, process based and physical.²³

In light of projects such as Chaoji Li’s “Conway’s Music” (an iPad app that uses the patterns of Conway’s Game of Life to play specific tones, shown below) and Mike Silver’s “AutomasonMP3” (a “custom software application that generates brick patterns linked to simple concrete structures” that also “contains a voice synthesizer that enables masons to convey and receive audible block-stacking commands in the field”²⁴), the goal of Rhythm is not to create complex, visual structures of sound representations, but instead use simple rules to create the visual music graffiti pieces that transmit the visual and sound rhythms embedded within.

In Hertzian Tales, Anthony Dunne wrote, “In a world where practicality and functionality can be taken for grated, the aesthetics of the post-optimal object could provide new experiences of everyday life, new poetic dimensions.”²⁵ In an era where media (specifically sound) consumption has become codified, standardized, and prescribed, there is a large space for play within the realm of media and sound experiences. Whether it is inefficiency with intent or deception without malice, the general public’s understanding of acceptable media experiences can be messed with.

David Carroll, who participated in the final critique of Major Studio Interface last year, said, “look to make the experience more real than real.” This phrase is very influential in how to approach this upcoming series of projects. Now that optimally designed objects have reached the point of saturation, moving beyond efficiency and providing experiences for the brain and body that contextualize and alter how people view their daily lives should be a primary focus.

In Why the Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet, Alan Kay writes, “When I was working on personal computers thirty years ago, I realized that as long as a computer sat on a desk and looked like a time-sharing terminal, it wasn’t participating in the actual revolution. It was participating in the automation of the old.”²⁶ With “post-optimal” design theory in mind, the goal is to use technology as a tool and instrument for understanding.

Sound is more than just a mild interest but represents a life-long passion. Seated at the piano as a child, the pendulum would click back and forth representing rhythmic hurdles to play upon and constrain my movements upon the keys. As a classically-trained student of percussion, drum sticks would fall upon the small, circular practice pad in patterns while two beautiful Roger’s drums sets sat within arms reach, calling me to hammer upon them.

As a runner growing up in Syracuse, NY, the high-school coaches called a particular downhill section of the Green Lakes State Park “Melody Lane” because of the ornate tree root structure on the ground. This mass of trip-inducing obstacles required each runner to adjust their methodical patterns of leg movements to be quick and short for a moment and then long and extended for others to navigate the surroundings. Like a trumpet solo at the Village Vanguard circa 1965, the path required mastery of rhythm, self-confidence, and a lot of improvisation. Bringing this type of meaning to everyday occurrences and happenings will be a goal for these projects.

Rhythm is not only a meter or a metric, but represents my childhood, my discipline, and the lens through which I see the world. While sound is more than familiar to me and has proven its worth time and time again, I have a similar faith in the design process that it will help me continue my life-long path of discovery.

John Cage consistently emphasized that he was not interested in objects; instead he was interested in processes.²⁷ Through these processes, Cage was retelling or creating new versions of a similar story, the story of sobering and quieting the mind to become susceptible to divine influences. The idea of continuous prototyping on a set of processes, principles, or design concepts is interesting, invigorating and will be used extensively in this thesis project. Each work is a part of a much larger work (our life’s work), and these works describe micro-cycles of the much larger life cycle. The design process is not defined as a problem-solver, so is it inappropriate to think of it as a never-ending cycle of prototypes within the cycle of creating?

In the book dadaism by Dietmar Elger, the German artist Kurt Schwitters was quoted as saying, “you know exactly as I do what art is: it is nothing more than a rhythm. But if that is so, I shan’t bother myself with imitation or the soul, but purely and simply produce rhythms with whatever takes my fancy.”²⁸ Using the technical approach of individuals discussed in Petzold’s book, the experimental nature in which avant-garde artists approach their work and their subject matter (from dada and the Bauhaus to current new media artists), and the understanding that the mental constructs created by our perception of rhythm forms our views of our experiences, the hope is the projects that will encompass Rhythm will provide another step in the direction of altering our perception of the world around us.

¹ Lefebvre, 190.
² Ibid, 197.
³ Seymour Papert and Idit Harel.
⁴ Lefebvre, 193.
⁵ Shapiro, 132.
⁶ Ibid, 139.
⁷ Auner and Lochhead, 16.
⁸ Ibid.
⁹ Sacks, 261.
¹⁰ Ibid, 262.
¹¹ Bernstein, 118.
¹² Ibid.
¹³ Lovelace, 36.
¹⁴ Ibid, 40.
¹⁵ Christiaan Huygens, Wikipedia.
¹⁶ Journalism in the Age of Data.
¹⁷ Sterne, 14.
¹⁸ Patrick Taylor, Interview.
¹⁹ Kluitenberg, 11.
²⁰ Ibid, 8.
²¹ WalrusTV.
²² Michael Hensel and Achim Menges, 89.
²³ Ibid, 96.
²⁴ Lust, Chandler McWilliams, and Casey Reas, 165.
²⁵ Dunne, 20.
²⁶ Kay, 8.
²⁷ Cott and Cage.
²⁸ Elger, 60.

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