Onttech1. What is the groove?

Discussion

Books on the Groove

• Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structures, Theory, and Analysis by Lawrence Zbikowski, Oxford University Press, ISBN: 0195140230, November 14, 2002, 374 pages. ABSTRACT: The book shows how recent work in cognitive science, especially that developed by cognitive linguists and cognitive psychologists, can be used to explain how we understand music. The book focuses on three cognitive processes--categorization, cross-domain mapping, and the use of conceptual models--and explores the part these play in theories of musical organization. The first part of the book provides a detailed overview of the relevant work in cognitive science, framed around specific musical examples. The second part brings this perspective to bear on a number of issues with which music scholarship has often been occupied, including the emergence of musical syntax and its relationship to musical semiosis, the problem of musical ontology, the relationship between words and music in songs, and conceptions of musical form and musical hierarchy.

Internet Resources on the Groove

• "Modelling the Groove: Conceptual Structure and Popular Music" by Lawrence M. Zbikowski, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 129 no. 2 272–297 © Royal Musical Association 2004.

• "Feeling the Groove: Shared Time and Its Meanings for Three Jazz Trios" by Mark Russell Doffman, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Music at The Open University, October 6, 2008.

• "A Novel Representation for Rhythmic Structure," by Vijay Iyer, Jeff Bilmes, Matt Wright, and David Wessel, Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, U.C. Berkeley. ABSTRACT: We have developed a representation for musical rhythm and rhythmic structure based on concepts derived from African and African-American musics. Included in the representation are a model for expressive timing against an isochronous pulse, and a cellular approach to musical organization. In our implementation, the representation and its data structures are controlled and modified in real time using MAX. The richness of control over many meaningful musical quantities distinguishes our representation from those in more common usage, such as music notation programs, sequencers, and drum machines.