Originally Posted by
peterleyenaar
... I have observed some musicians tapping their feet totally out of time almost no timing at all, their playing reflects it, really weird to see that.
I've seen that with dancers too (not contradance or line dance or anything structured like that, but just regular rock-n-roll freeform dance such as one might see in a bar gig), some dancers' movements have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the beat of the song, they just jump around randomly.
I'm not being critical, nothing any rhythm-challenged dancer could do would adversely affect the music itself, so it's just an observation of how different people perceive rhythm differently.
As long as they're enjoying the music and having fun, that's the whole point of dance anyway.
But it's a huge contrast to other dancers on the same floor and the exact same song, who do a lot more precise job of timing their movements to the beat of the music.
Myself, I've always preferred the latter, to get into the 'groove' of each song or tune. But there are some songs that don't even seem to have much of a 'groove', they're just a straight boring 1-2-3-4 over and over, ugh, not inspiring, I always figured that's a good excuse to sit that one out and rest up for a while and wait for the band to play something that's actually interesting. I think a lot of it is the bass - a good bass line goes a long ways towards setting a cool groove that gets dancers out on the floor.
But back to the topic, one wonders how much of rhythm-challenge is not due to lack of training, but perhaps some other condition.
I know that people can actually be "tone deaf" (used to be called "tin ear", some of those in my family) where they can't discern pitch, it's an actual physical condition, so could it be possible that there could be some other physical/medical condition that makes it so people have difficulty discerning where the beat is?
Ok I just found something on Wikipedia, in the "amusia" article, in the part about "temporal relations":
"The brain analyzes the temporal (rhythmic) components of music in two ways: (1) it segments the ongoing sequences of music into temporal events based on duration, and (2) it groups those temporal events to understand the underlying beat to music. Studies on rhythmic discrimination reveal that the right temporal auditory cortex is responsible for temporal segmenting, and the left temporal auditory cortex is responsible for temporal grouping. Other studies suggest the participation of motor cortical areas in rhythm perception and production. Therefore, a lack of involvement and networking between bilateral temporal cortices and neural motor centers may contribute to both congenital and acquired amusia."
From earlier in the article:
"Two main classifications of amusia exist: acquired amusia, which occurs as a result of brain damage, and congenital amusia, which results from a music-processing anomaly present since birth."
I guess I'll go read the rest of that article now... looks interesting. I'm not a doctor, so my comprehension of medical stuff is limited. It's amazing how much of what we consider to be 'talent' might actually be just the result of how neurons and stuff interact... or something like that.
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