The rise of DIY rituals in the 21st century

YouTube:

Can Rituals Save Us? | Robert Wright & Bruce Feiler

0:00 Teaser
0:52 Bruce’s new book on ritual, A Time to Gather
3:12 The "Lifequake" that led Bruce to study ritual
8:10 The current "shadow ritual" renaissance
12:42 What is a ritual?
15:26 The origins of the shadow ritual renaissance
18:25 Forest bathing and the essence of ritual
26:11 Ritual as the original human algorithm
31:39 Honor walks: a quintessentially modern ritual
36:23 Rituals across Christianity
42:07 What rituals do
46:47 Heading to Overtime

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I discuss ritual in my book on music, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, pp. 79-82:

Subjectivity is an aspect of neurodynamics, and neurodynamics is open to the world through sensory organs and through the motor system. When people are coupled with one another through musicking, each steers her own raft of subjectivity in the collective sea of neurodynamics. The motions of each raft are transmitted to the others through the sea, as Huygens’ clocks transmitted vibrations to one another through the walls. These subjectivities thus adjust themselves one to the other, for they are all components of the same process.

Let us reconsider, then, the musicking with which we opened this chapter. We were at a party where lots of musicians were jamming. Near the end of a jam on Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” several people spontaneously joined in on the refrain. It wasn’t planned ahead of time, nor did those singers discuss it among themselves while the rest of us were playing.

When I originally told the story I talked of my deliberate intention to “drive” the group by playing a simple line and “bearing down.” That decision was a conscious one, though not as clear and differentiated as it may seem when I spell it out in words, and it resulted in a certain shift of my consciousness. “Bearing down” is something I do quite often when playing. It involves attending to and adjusting the tension in my trunk musculature but has no specific differentiated effect on the music beyond a certain intensity and emotional tone. In this case I was playing a very simple melodic line, but I will also bear down while playing the most complex lines. In that situation, my fingers and tongue may be spitting out 10s of notes per second, but they’re on their own; I’m still attending to muscles in my abdomen, shoulders and back, and my buttocks. Those are the muscles that most strongly affect the overall airflow, and that’s what I care about when I’m bearing down.

And that, by our conception of consciousness, is where my nervous system is reorganizing and making minute adjustments. I have no introspective awareness, of course, of just what neural areas are reorganizing, but I’d guess that we are dealing with circuitry involving both emotional expression and voluntary control of large muscles. Even as I am attending to those muscles, I am always listening to the sound, not just mine, but the group’s. I’m bearing down just so in order that the sound I hear may also be just so. But my sound is only a part of the group sound and, at this particular point, it was a subordinate part. What this means is that my nervous system’s reorganizational activity is responsive to the sound made by each and every person in the musicking group. I am attuning my motor and emotive system to the sound that is the joint activity of this group. And each one in the group is, in turn, doing the same thing. Each one, merely by being a conscious musician, is making minute adjustments to his nervous system in response to the sounds that all are creating.

We are now in territory explored by Walter Freeman in a recent essay on music and social bonding. Freeman is interested in those rituals where a core group of celebrants move from one status in society to another, as from child to adult or single to married. In these rituals, as individuals are conveyed from one social status to another—recall our discussion in the previous chapter—they require changes in the collective neuropil. Funerals, of course, are also in this class. As the bodies of the dead are conveyed to a final resting place, the living must disengage from their attachments to those who are no longer among the living. In this case, and entire persona (see Figure 1 in the previous chapter) must be disengaged from active use in the collective neuropil. Conversely, when a child is born, the group must undertake a ritual that creates a new persona in the collective neuropil.

In all of these situations the bonds between individuals must be altered in fundamental ways that require considerable neural reorganizing. Freeman suggests that such rituals involve a neuropeptide called oxytocin. He asserts that oxytocin "appears to act by dissolving preexisting learning by loosening the synaptic connections in which prior knowledge is held. This opens an opportunity for learning new knowledge. The meltdown does not instill knowledge. It clears the path for the acquisition of new understanding through behavioral actions that are shared with others.” As the oxytocinated individuals are moving to the rhythms of well-established ritual, their synaptic connections are restructured in patterns guided and influenced by the events in the ritual. Obviously, the microdynamics of each individual will be unique; but they will be shaped by rhythmic patterns common to all . These rituals provide a space in which individuals can mold themselves to one another as the infant molds her actions to those of her mother.

Such ritual would likely have benefits on less extreme occasions than those requiring the restructuring of social relations—think of our little jam session. Social life is difficult and taxing. Hostilities build up. Such ritual may well help take the edge off of growing tensions, reconciling individuals to one another and allowing them to “reset” their relationships on more favorable terms.

Thus we have another core hypothesis:

Freeman’s Hypothesis: By attending to one another through musicking, performers attune their nervous systems to one another, restructuring their representations of others. This results in more harmonious interactions within the group.

Each individual consciousness may be an island of Cartesian subjectivity, but in the close coupling of musicking, those subjectivities are intimately and delicately conditioned and regulated by one another.

Perhaps such rituals play a role in helping to establish and maintain the subjective continuity of the neural self. By entering into a wide variety of emotional states (with their various neurochemical substrates) in a socially controlled situation, individuals in a community ritual create an "equal access zone" in mental space where each can experience and contemplate extremes of joy and anger, tenderness and hate, and know that all these feelings have a place in their shared world.

Synchrony as a general and widespread phenomenon

I once asked @stevenstrogatz a simple question.
Why do so many systems in nature fall into rhythm?

He smiled, almost amused by how deep that question actually goes.

Fireflies blinking in unison.
Heart cells pulsing together.
Crowds swaying on a bridge until it starts to move… pic.twitter.com/xSa60Fu10K

— Christopher Michel (@chrismichel) April 12, 2026

Performer and audience, heartbeat in synch: Yuja Wang performs Rachmaninoff [Bonus: Music and tears]

Janet Horvath, Musicians in Sync – What Yuja Wang’s Heartbeats Tell Us, Interlude, December 7, 2023.

During the 150th anniversary of Rachmaninoff’s birth, pianist Yuja Wang undertook an extraordinary feat. She performed all the Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in one marathon concert at Carnegie Hall on January 28, 2023. Wang appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Maestro Yannick Nézet- Séguin. The audience was treated to a four-hour program, with two intermissions, consisting of 97,076 notes and 621 pages of music. But who’s counting? It turns out that noting the numbers was part of the evening. Wang was asked to wear a device to track her heartbeat during the concert, and so did the conductor, nine members of the orchestra, and six members of the audience. The results of this experiment are quite extraordinary.

Read the whole article at the link, which includes excerpts and graphs of heart-rate. This is a link to a number of articles and videos about the concert.

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From tonebase Piano:

What Yuja’s Rachmaninof marathon reveals about the miracle of live performance.

Hosted, written and edited by Robert Fleitz ‪@RobertFleitz‬

In January 2023, Yuja Wang performed all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in a single evening at Carnegie Hall — a feat once thought impossible. But this concert was also an experiment. Yuja, conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and audience all wore heart-rate monitors, revealing the invisible instrument at the center of it all: the human heart.

In this video, Robert Fleitz explores what Carnegie Hall’s data revealed — not only about Yuja’s extraordinary focus and endurance, but about the shared physical and emotional pulse that connects performer and listener. Drawing on insights from Juilliard performance psychologist Noa Kageyama, choreographer Martha Graham, philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and pianist-teacher Seymour Bernstein, the film asks how art lives through the body, and what it means to face our own limits in sound.

The story widens beyond Carnegie Hall: Clara Schumann’s journals describing the physical toll of constant touring, Rachmaninoff’s lifelong stage fright, and the tragedy of pianist Simon Barere, who collapsed mid-performance in 1951. From those histories to this year’s Chopin Competition — where a young pianist broke down in tears mid-performance — the through-line is clear: the greatest performances touch the limits of the human body.

Featuring performances by Nikolai Lugansky and materials from Carnegie Hall’s report on the data, this film explores how the heartbeat, the body, and the audience’s breath all become part of the same living organism — and why that fragile aliveness may be the real miracle of performance.

⌛ CHAPTERS ⌛
0:00 A cold night at Carnegie Hall — January 2023
0:23 Yuja Wang takes on the impossible
1:09 Rachmaninoff’s concertos: a marathon for one pianist
1:30 The hidden instrument: the human heart
2:09 Taming the body — the pianist as cowboy
2:46 “The mood is gone.” When control meets chaos
3:05 Coughing fits and breakdowns at the Chopin Competition
3:24 The delicate, dangerous art of live performance
3:56 What Carnegie Hall’s heart-rate data revealed
4:31 The shocking calm of Yuja’s Rach 3
5:08 Heart racing in the Fourth Concerto
5:40 The science of learning, memory, and adrenaline
6:25 Lessons from Lugansky, Avdeeva, and others
7:20 “It’s not just intellectual — it’s biological.”
7:55 Schumann and Rachmaninoff at the edge of their limits
9:05 Simon Barere’s final performance
9:45 The Romantic obsession with suffering
10:12 “There is only one of you in all of time.”
11:14 Profound data and deeper questions from Carnegie Hall
11:40 When performers and audiences breathe together (feat. Lady Gaga)
12:07 Yumeka Nakagawa’s tears at the Chopin Competition
12:25 The miracle of performance
13:24 “Unable to stop smiling.”
14:08 tonebase biggest offer of the year
15:20 (Yes, we can do jokes here.)

Playful conversational riffing is the way to connect

Maya Rossignac-Milon and Erica Boothby, You’re Probably Doing Small Talk Wrong, NYTimes, Sept. 4, 2025.

There’s a moment in human connection that defies easy explanation — that sudden, electric feeling when you meet someone and feel your minds merge. It happened to the two of us when we met at a psychology symposium: Our small talk during a break quickly gave way to playful theories about coffee drinkers versus tea drinkers. We went to find seats together, unaware that this conversation was the start of a decade-long collaboration and friendship.

Where does that spark come from, exactly? What makes someone feel like a lifelong friend after just a couple of minutes? People tend to assume it’s similarity: that they are especially likely to hit it off with someone who shares their background or personality traits.

But in our research, we’ve found that many of the strongest bonds come less from pre-existing similarity and more from riffing playfully. In these moments, people create a little world that belongs just to them, a process we call “building a shared reality.” Collaborative riffs are surprisingly central to our mental well-being: They’re the glue that binds us together, adds color to our lives and gives us a sense of purpose.

And yet, our culture’s conversational rituals revolve not around playful co-creation, but around exchanging formalities.

The art of riffing:

Riffing doesn’t require being naturally funny or witty, just being attentive and embracing spontaneity. Like any conversational skill, it takes practice. When riffing, speakers resist the urge to counter every observation with their own separate example, instead building bridges to new ideas (“That reminds me of. …”) or tossing in a “Can you imagine if …?” They reference earlier parts of the conversation to create inside jokes (“Looking forward to our miniature potluck committee!”).

Riffing isn’t just for new acquaintances. Over time, it creates a feeling of having merged minds and inhabiting a private universe. Patti Smith described her relationship with her late husband as the “silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind.”

There's more at the link.

What's happening to fireflies around the world?

Here's a video:

Here's a post by biologist Jerry Coyne.

Perspective on musical neurodynamics

Harding, E.E., Kim, J.C., Demos, A.P. et al. Musical neurodynamics. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-025-00915-4

Abstract: A great deal of research in the neuroscience of music suggests that neural oscillations synchronize with musical stimuli. Although neural synchronization is a well-studied mechanism underpinning expectation, it has even more far-reaching implications for music. In this Perspective, we survey the literature on the neuroscience of music, including pitch, harmony, melody, tonality, rhythm, metre, groove and affect. We describe how fundamental dynamical principles based on known neural mechanisms can explain basic aspects of music perception and performance, as summarized in neural resonance theory. Building on principles such as resonance, stability, attunement and strong anticipation, we propose that people anticipate musical events not through predictive neural models, but because brain–body dynamics physically embody musical structure. The interaction of certain kinds of sounds with ongoing pattern-forming dynamics results in patterns of perception, action and coordination that we collectively experience as music. Statistically universal structures may have arisen in music because they correspond to stable states of complex, pattern-forming dynamical systems. This analysis of empirical findings from the perspective of neurodynamic principles sheds new light on the neuroscience of music and what makes music powerful.

Patty Cake

Empathy is not in our genes

Cecilia Heyes, Empathy is not in our genes, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Volume 95, 2018, Pages 499-507,ISSN 0149-7634, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2018.11.001.

Highlights

• Empathy is a cornerstone of healthcare, social justice, and international relations.
• Empathy depends on automatic (Empathy1) and controlled (Empathy2) mechanisms.
• The automatic mechanism, Empathy1, is constructed by associative learning.
• Self-stimulation, synchronous emotion and affect mirroring provide inputs to learning.
• Empathy can be enhanced by novel experience and broken by social change.

Abstract: In academic and public life empathy is seen as a fundamental force of morality – a psychological phenomenon, rooted in biology, with profound effects in law, policy, and international relations. But the roots of empathy are not as firm as we like to think. The matching mechanism that distinguishes empathy from compassion, envy, schadenfreude, and sadism is a product of learning. Here I present a dual system model that distinguishes Empathy1, an automatic process that catches the feelings of others, from Empathy2, controlled processes that interpret those feelings. Research with animals, infants, adults and robots suggests that the mechanism of Empathy1, emotional contagion, is constructed in the course of development through social interaction. Learned Matching implies that empathy is both agile and fragile. It can be enhanced and redirected by novel experience, and broken by social change.

Keywords: Affect mirroring; Affective empathy; Associative learning; Emotional contagion; Empathy; Empathic understanding; Learned Matching; Mirror neurons; Self-stimulation; Synchronous emotion

Bipedalism, Hominin Fetuses, and Musical and Linguistic Evolution

Matz Larsson and Dean Falk, Direct Effects of Bipedalism on Early Hominin Fetuses Stimulated Later Musical and Linguistic Evolution, Current Anthropology, Published online February 21, 2025.

Abstract

We hypothesize that auditory and motor entrainment evolved in early hominin fetuses in direct response to their mothers’ bipedal footsteps and, later, contributed to the evolution of music and language via two related processes. First, selection for bipedalism transformed feet from grasping into weight-bearing organs, which negatively affected infants’ ability to cling to their mothers, provoking the emergence of novel affective vocal exchanges between mothers and infants that became building blocks for the emergence of motherese. Second, the derived ability to entrain movements to sound was incorporated during the prehistoric emergence of wide-ranging rhythmic behaviors such as synchronized chanting of nonlexical vocables and coordinated rhythmic clapping and stomping, which became instrumental during the more recent evolution of music. Like the derived ability to keep beat with rhythmic sounds, nascent motherese entailed entrainment of motor behavior (the physical production of pitch, timing, and vocalization rate) with external sources of sound (conversational utterances). If motherese was a precursor for language evolution, as many believe, music and language share phylogenetically derived substrates for auditory and motor entrainment that stemmed directly from bipedalism. If so, bipedalism was more important for serendipitously sculpting advanced cognition in our prehistoric ancestors than previously believed.

Nous émettons l’hypothèse que l’entraînement auditif/moteur a évolué chez les fœtus des premiers hominines en réponse directe aux pas bipèdes de leurs mères, et qu’il a ensuite contribué à l’évolution de la musique et du langage via deux processus connexes. Premièrement, la sélection en faveur de la bipédie a transformé les pieds en organes de soutien plutôt que des organes de préhension, ce qui a eu un impact négatif sur la capacité des nourrissons à s’accrocher à leurs mères, provoquant ainsi l’émergence d’échanges vocaux affectifs novateurs entre les mères et les nourrissons, qui sont devenus des éléments constitutifs de l’émergence du mamanais (motherese, en anglais). Deuxièmement, la capacité dérivée à synchroniser les mouvements avec le son a été intégrée lors de l’émergence préhistorique de comportements rythmiques variés, tels que le chant synchronisé de vocables non lexicaux et le battement de mains et de pieds coordonné, qui sont devenus des éléments essentiels durant l’évolution plus récente de la musique. Tout comme la capacité dérivée à suivre le rythme des sons rythmiques, le mamanais naissant impliquait l’entraînement du comportement moteur (la production physique de la hauteur, du timing et du taux de vocalisation) avec des sources sonores externes (les énonciations conversationnelles). Si le mamanais était un précurseur de l’évolution du langage, comme le pensent de nombreux chercheurs, la musique et le langage partagent alors des substrats phylogénétiquement dérivés pour l’entraînement auditif/moteur qui découle directement de la bipédie. Si tel est le cas, la bipédie aurait été plus importante pour sculpter de manière fortuite la cognition avancée de nos ancêtres préhistoriques que l’on croyait auparavant.

Wir gehen davon aus, dass sich die auditorische/motorische Synchronisation (Entrainment) bei frühen homininen Föten als direkte Reaktion auf den zweibeinigen Gang ihrer Mütter entwickelte und später über zwei verwandte Prozesse zur Entwicklung von Musik und Sprache beitrug. Erstens verwandelte die Selektion für die Zweibeinigkeit die Füße von Greiforganen in tragende Organe, was sich negativ auf die Fähigkeit der Säuglinge auswirkte, sich an ihre Mütter zu klammern und was zur Entstehung neuartiger affektiver Stimmaustausche zwischen Müttern und Säuglingen führte, die zu Bausteinen für die Entstehung der Motherese (Mutter-Baby-Dialog) wurden. Zweitens wurde die entwickelte Fähigkeit Bewegungen mit dem Klang zu synchronisieren, während der prähistorischen Entstehung weitreichender rhythmischer Verhaltensweisen, integriert, etwa beim synchronisierten Singen nicht-lexikalischer Vokabeln und beim koordinierten rhythmischen Klatschen und Stampfen, die in der neueren Entwicklung der Musik instrumental wurden. Ebenso wie die daraus entwickelte Fähigkeit, den Takt rhythmischer Klänge zu halten, erforderte die entstehende Motherese die Einbindung motorischen Verhaltens (der physischen Produktion von Tonhöhe, Timing und Vokalisierungsrate) in Verbindung mit externen Klangquellen (Gesprächsäußerungen). Wenn Motherese ein Vorläufer der Sprachentwicklung war, wie viele glauben, teilen Musik und Sprache phylogenetisch entstandene Substrate für die auditive/motorische Synchronisation, die direkt aus der Zweibeinigkeit stammen. Wenn dem so ist, war die Zweibeinigkeit für die zufällige Bildung fortgeschrittener Kognitionen bei unseren prähistorischen Vorfahren wichtiger als bisher angenommen.

Ipotizziamo che il trascinamento uditivo/motorio si sia evoluto nei primi feti di ominidi in risposta diretta ai passi bipedi delle loro madri e, in seguito, abbia contribuito all’evoluzione della musica e del linguaggio attraverso due processi correlati. In primo luogo, la selezione per il bipedismo ha trasformato i piedi da organi di presa in organi di carico, il che ha avuto un impatto negativo sulla capacità dei bambini di aggrapparsi alle madri, provocando l’emergere di nuovi scambi vocali, affettivi tra madri e bambini, che sono diventati elementi costitutivi per l’emergere del “maternese”. In secondo luogo, la capacità derivata di associare i movimenti al suono fu incorporata durante l’emergere preistorico di comportamenti ritmici ad ampio raggio, come il canto sincronizzato di vocaboli non lessicali e il battito delle mani e il calpestio ritmicamente coordinati, che divennero strumentali durante l’evoluzione più recente della musica. Come l’abilità derivata di seguire il ritmo dei suoni ritmici, il nascente “motherese” implicava il trascinamento del comportamento motorio (la produzione fisica dell’altezza, del ritmo e della velocità della vocalizzazione) con fonti sonore esterne (espressioni conversazionali). Se il maternese è stato un precursore dell’evoluzione del linguaggio, come molti credono, la musica e il linguaggio condividono substrati filogeneticamente derivati per il trascinamento uditivo/motorio che derivavano direttamente dal bipedismo. Se è così, il bipedismo è stato più importante di quanto si credesse in precedenza per scolpire in modo fortuito la cognizione avanzata nei nostri antenati preistorici.

‏راه رفتن انسانهای آغازین دلیل فرگشتی بوجود امدن و پیشرفت موسیقی و زبان انسان ها دارای این توانایی منحصر به فرد هستند که بدنشان را منطبق با امواج صوتی آهنگین به صورت ریتمیک و با زمانبدیه هماهنگ حرکت دهند( آنچه که entrainment خوانده می شود).فرضیه ما این است که این توانایی در جنین های هومینین اولیه به عنوان پاسخی مستقیم به راه رفتن دوپایی مادرانشان تحریک شد و همچنین این سبک راه رفتن (قدمهای دوپا) بعداً از طریق دو فرآیند مرتبط، به توسعه موسیقی و زبان کمک کرد. پاها که اساساً اندامی برای گرفتن بودند، حالا حمل کننده وزن هستند و این امر توانایی نوزادان را برای درکنار نگه داشتن مادر مختل میکند. فقدان تماس فیزیکی، نیاز و پیشرفت ارتباط صوتی عاطفی بین مادر و نوزاد را تحریک کرد، که به نوبه خود پایهای شد برای شیوهای خاص از اصوات جهت دار به سوی کودک که مادرانه نامیده می شود. توانایی پاسخ حرکتی ریتمیک به صدا همچنین می تواند رفتارهای ریتمیک مختلف، مانند دست زدن همزمان، کوبیدن پا و نجوای آهنگین بی کلام را در هم ادغام کرده باشد.این احتمال وجود دارد که چنین اشکالی از توانایی های ماقبل تاریخ به پایه ریزی علایق و توانایی های موسیقیایی انسان کمک کرده باشد.توانایی شکوفنده ی تعقیب متوازن صداهای موزون، و همچنین رشد زودهنگام کلام مادرانه، این فرض را برانگیخت که فرد دارای ظرفیت متوازن سازی عملکرد خود در ارتباط با منابع صوتی خارجی، برای مثال کلام دیگران (برای ایجاد زیر و بمی درست، زمانبندی مناسب و سرعت کلامی سازی) است. اگر همانطور که بسیاری معتقدند، کلام مادرانه پیش قراولی برای رشد زبان بوده است، پس موسیقی و زبان، بستر فیلوژنتیکی مشترکی برای اینتریمنت شنوایی/موتوری دارند. این بستر مشترک مستقیماً از رشد انسان در راه رفتن دوپا ناشی شده است. پس به این ترتیب راه رفتن بر دوپا، گامی مهمتر از آنچه قبلاً فکر میکردیم برای توسعه ی شناخت های ارتقا یافته ی اجداد بشر بوده است.‎

Människan har en enastående förmåga att utifrån ljudsignaler röra kroppen rytmiskt och i takt (s.k. entrainment). Vår hypotes är att denna förmåga stimulerades hos tidiga hominin-foster som ett direkt svar på deras mödrars tvåbenta gång samt att denna gångstil (bipedalism) senare, via två relaterade processer, bidrog till utvecklingen av musik och språk. Fötterna, som främst varit greppande organ blev nu viktbärande, vilket försämrade spädbarns förmåga att hålla fast vid sina mödrar. Utebliven fysisk kontakt, stimulerade behovet och utvecklingen av känslobaserad vokal kommunikation mellan mödrar och spädbarn, vilket i sin tur lade grunden till det specifika och barnriktade sätt att tala som kallas motherese. Förmågan att röra sig rytmiskt till ljud kunde dessutom inlemmas i diverse rytmiska beteenden, såsom synkroniserad handklappning, stampande fötter och (ordlös) sång. Det är sannolikt att sådana former av prehistorisk entrainment var med och lade grunden till människans musikaliska intresse och förmåga. Såväl den spirande förmågan att följa med i takt till rytmiska ljud, som den tidiga utvecklingen av motherese förutsatte att individen hade motorisk förmåga till entrainment i förhållande till externa ljudkällor, till exempel andras tal (för att skapa rätt tonhöjd, tajming, och vokaliseringshastighet). Om motherese, som många tror, var en föregångare till språkutveckling, så delar musik och språk fylogenetiska substrat för hörsel/motor entrainment som kan härledas direkt från människans utveckling av tvåfota gång. I så fall var bipedalism ett viktigare steg än vi tidigare trott vad gäller människosläktets utveckling av avancerad kognition.

私たちの提示する仮説は、聴覚運動の訓練は初期の人類の胎児において母親の二足歩行の足音への直接の反応として進化し、その後、二点の関連したプロセスにおいて、音楽と言語の進化に貢献したというものである。第一点に、二足歩行への選択は、足を掴む機能の器官から重力を支えるものへと変化させた。それは、赤子が母親にしがみつく能力には相応しくない結果となり、母親と幼児の間の斬新な感情的な声のやり取りの発生を促し、母親言葉の発生の構成要素となった。　第二点は、その声に由来する音への動きが、非語彙的な音に合わせた詠唱やリズミカルな手拍子や足拍子という広い範囲の先史時代のリズミカルな行動となった。それは、音楽の進化の手段となった。リズミカルな音の拍子を保つ能力が生まれたように、初期の母親言語は、外部的な音源（会話の発言）と運動行動訓練（ピッチやタイミングや発声の生産）が必然的に伴うのである。もし、多くが信じるように母親言語が言語進化の前駆であるなら、音楽と言語は、系統発生的に二足歩行から直接生じた聴覚運動の訓練の基板を共有する。もしそうであるのなら、二足歩行は、先史時代に偶然にも形成された高度な認知力にとって、以前に信じられていたよりもはるかに重要なのである。

A festival of synchronized human activity, but also birds, fish, and other creatures

The Metaverse won't work because it will be too slow for interpersonal synch

It has to do with timing lags over the internet. The auditory system is very sensitive. Adam Neely starts explaining at about 5:18, where he's talking about the difficulty of jamming with other musicians over the internet. It turns out that the speed of light is a limiting factor. Thus, he explains (5:33) that it takes almost 20 ms to travel from New York to Paris, which is ten times the 2 ms audio threshold for simultaneity. Thus musicians in New York and Paris cannot jam with one another over the internet. To do that, the musicians have to be physically close to one another to cut down the latency. He gets to the Metaverse at 6:33.

Heartbeats during a Rachmaninoff marathon: Yuja Wang, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, orchestra, and audience [synchrony]

From the YouTube page:

On January 28, 2023, pianist Yuja Wang joined The Philadelphia Orchestra and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin at Carnegie Hall for a once-in-a-lifetime, all-Rachmaninoff marathon that featured the composer’s four piano concertos plus his “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” Throughout the performance, Wang—along with Nézet-Séguin, members of the orchestra, and concertgoers in attendance—wore devices to track their heartbeats.

Unprecedented and insanely demanding, Wang made history. These five pieces include two-and-a-half hours of music, 621 pages of score, and more than 97,000 piano notes.

Heartbeat plots, with commentary, start at about 3:15. Interesting observations throughout.

c. 10:37:

Yuja: wow that's very parallel
four yeah see you know four is extremely um integrated
like it's like playing chamber music
everything depends on each other
you know it's not I'm accompanying him
or the other way around
this is just very

Interviewer: interdependent

Yuja: yeah exactly
and everybody like the strings depends on the brass and
and I depend on the brass and strings
everybody so if one person screwed up we're all screwed
we're like in this one thing

Nézet-Séguin: we think about emotion all the time
I felt on that concert
that Yuja and I were on the same wavelength
it's very beautiful
I find it very moving

Musical synchronization strikes again!

Musical synchronization emerges spontaneously and enhances social connectedness via @psypost https://t.co/VHBO8Lzuif

— Warren Mansell 🌍🌿🐼 🌈 (@warrenmansell) January 4, 2024

Research reported in the linked article: Kavaliauskaitė, D., Gulrez, T., & Mansell, W. (2023). What is the relationship between spontaneous interpersonal synchronization and feeling of connectedness? A study of small groups of students using MIDI percussion instruments. Psychology of Music, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356231207049

Abstract: Evidence to date suggests there may be a link between interpersonal synchronization and sense of connectedness to others in both music and non-music tasks. However, earlier studies have used a fixed tempo, thereby ruling out the study of spontaneous synchronization that might emerge from a group of agents. This design is essential to test theories that implicate intrinsic systems governing rhythm within individuals as the source of interpersonal synchronization, coordination, and shared positive affect. The current study used an impromptu music-making task to study the relationship between spontaneous synchronization and sense of connectedness. A total of 49 participants were recruited in dyads or triads and were asked to play percussion sounds on MIDI keyboards for a period of 10 min. Every minute they gave a rating of how connected they felt with the other group members. Participants who showed longer periods of spontaneous synchronization during the joint music-making task reported greater average connectedness with the group members during the task, and a greater increase in connectedness over the duration of the task. Within-individual correlations between synchronization and connectedness revealed a tight coupling in around a third of the participants. We discuss the theoretical implication that the collective control of perceptual variables—such as tempo—may achieve and maintain a sense of connectedness to others.

Which version do you prefer? Two humans or one human and a muppet? [A rogue AI perhaps?]

Japanese hand game based on mochi pounding

The game

In the context of taiko drumming

Mochi pounding

Time out of time: The eternal return of the rhythm people [Bang on a drum!]

Jochen Szangolies has an interesting post at 3 Quarks Today, Dinner For Nietzsche: Rhythms, Rituals, And Eternal Return, Jan. 9. 2023. It speaks to some of my central concerns, time, rhythm, music, and ritual. He opens:

Time presents itself, depending on the context, under two different modalities: cyclical and linear. Linear time moves always forward, carrying us from past to present, ever towards an uncertain future; while circular time, the time of clock hands, sunrise and sunset, and recurring seasons, sees us back again at our origin.

These would seem to be somewhat in tension. But I find that time, perhaps like all the great mysteries, is only enriched by its seeming contradictions. Take ‘stopping time’, as it is sometimes portrayed in movies—that is, holding everything frozen. How long does such a state last? What is the difference between it lasting an hour, a day, or an eternity? In the absence of change, time is robbed of duration. But in an instant of time, there can be no change. Hence, any instant, it seems, might as well be an infinity, held in the palm of your hand.

Toward the middle he has a wonderful story:

Time’s cycles are often marked by ritual, and none more so than the turning of the great celestial clock. One of the most cherished rituals in Germany is to usher in the new year by watching the 1963 comedy sketch Dinner for One, recorded in black and white by the NDR (you can watch it here, if you’re not familiar).

The plot is simple enough: Miss Sophie intends to celebrate her 90th birthday, and has invited her four closest friends. Unfortunately, they have all since passed; nevertheless, she is unwilling to forgo the ritual, and thus, her butler James stands in for each. As this includes a toast with an alcoholic beverage at each course of the evening’s meal, contributing to a progressive inebriation, hijinks, as they are wont to, ensue.

I can’t quite say how the tradition came about, but it’s taken seriously—up to half of all households catch at least one of the various showings on New Year’s Eve, and it is the most often repeated programme on German television. In 2018, Deutsche Post even issued a commemorative stamp. My father’s laughter, always renewed at the always same cues, is a fond childhood memory.

The sketch is, in my unqualified opinion at least, a hilarious masterclass in comedic timing, but I doubt that alone is reason for its popularity. And it must strike one as quite strange: comedy, resting to some degree on surprise, seems to be the genre least well-suited to repeated viewing. But I think there is a lesson here, about what one might call the willing suspension of inurement: to let the new return, as new, again and again. To suspend the modern, cynical seen-it-all attitude in favor of a renewed, wilfull naiveté that renounces all pretense of aloof sophistication in favor of laughing, again, again, and then again at James’ struggle with the tiger’s head.

Still later there is this observation:

Strangely enough, there is some support for such a notion in physics: the phenomenon of Poincaré recurrence means that a dynamical system, typically after a very long time, will return to a state arbitrarily close to its initial state (provided the system is bounded in a certain sense, and nothing ‘flies off to infinity’). Taking things a step further, physicist Julian Barbour has indeed argued that there is no such thing as time, there are only moments—little slivers of eternity—which differ from each other in small details, and are ordered only in retrospect, by ‘later’ ones carrying traces—memories or records—of their predecessors, like a picture of a picture.

And that, as I observed in a comment, is at the center of my book, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. And that gives me a chance to link to the literature on synchronized clapping, a phenomenon I discuss at the end of my third chapter, "Fireflies, Dynamics, and Brain States," pp. 67-68 (you can read a final draft here). Here is a nice video of the phenomenon. It's from Budapest.

The synchronization doesn't fully emerge until about 49 seconds in, and then it is very clear. But you can hear it trying to get out. It then ebbs and flows until the end of the two-minute video.

You might also want to take a look at my working paper from 2015, The Magic of the Bell: How Networks of Social Actors Create Cultural Beings. Here's the abstract:

It is well known that music can engender altered states of consciousness that are difficult to interpret scientifically except as odd malfunctions in the nervous system. In this paper I report a phenomenon known among some musicians as “the magic of the bell”: the emergence of high-pitched twittering sounds when a group is playing interlocking rhythms on different bells. These sounds cannot be attributed to any of the musicians and they emerge only when the group is a group is playing bells with passion and precision. I argue that those sounds arise through interpersonal coupling among the musicians and that the ‘naïve’ temptation to attribute them to a ‘spirit’ or ‘spirits’ can be reconciled with a close description that does not presuppose non-physical entities. Those spirits should be conceived as the embodiment of non-mysterious and physically coherent group process. This argument has ramifications for how we think of time and how we think of longer cycles of group life.

Remember the Sabbath...[a different world]

Ezra Klein, Sabbath and the Art of Rest, NYTimes, December 3, 2022. From the introduction:

Do we know how to truly rest? Who would we be if we did?

I’ve been wrestling with these questions since I read Abraham Joshua Heschel’s stunning book “The Sabbath” in college. The ancient Jewish ritual of the Sabbath reserves a full day per week for rest. As it’s commonly practiced, that means about 25 hours every week of no work, very little technology and plenty of in-person gathering.

But the Sabbath is a much more radical approach to rest than a simple respite from work and technology. Implicit in the practice of the Sabbath is a stinging critique of the speed at which we live our lives, the ways we choose to spend our time and how we think about the idea of rest itself. That, at least, is a central argument of Judith Shulevitz’s wonderful book, “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.”

Shulevitz is a longtime culture critic and currently a contributing writer for The Atlantic. Her book isn’t just about the Sabbath itself, it’s about the world the Sabbath tries to create: one with an entirely different conception of time, morality, rest and community. It’s the kind of world that is wholly different from our own, and one whose wisdom is urgently needed.

It is about engaging a different range of behavioral modes, ways the brain has of engaging us with the world. I suspect it engages the brain’s so-called default mode network, which is more dream-like, less driven, more social, more conducive to synching with others.

* * * * *

Addendum: Judith Shulevitz observes:

You are supposed to let your mind wander. We’ll gather, have a moment of just letting go. Not all the time, some of the time. But these are the positive things that the frame gives a special gloss to the way it does a work of art and says, this space here, it’s meaning. Make sense of it.

That's definitely the default mode network.

Interpersonal synch is stronger face-to-face than in video chat

Face-to-face interaction elicits more inter-brain synchronization than video-chat interaction. Moreover, associations with behavior emerge only during f2f interaction — with right temporal-temporal synchrony linked to shared gaze and right frontal-frontal to engagement & empathy. pic.twitter.com/oIQkgOJkVX

— Guillaume Dumas (@introspection) October 16, 2022

Thanks and kudos to my amazing collaborators @Lin_Scw @yoniphd @AmirDJV @YaaraShapira and of course @ruthfeldmanlab 🙌 Also grateful for the continuous support of @IVADO_Qc @FRQS1 @Med_UMontreal @CR_CHUSJ 🙏

— Guillaume Dumas (@introspection) October 16, 2022

Synchronized movement promotes cooperation

Paul Reddish, Ronald Fischer, Joseph Bulbulia. Let’s Dance Together: Synchrony, Shared Intentionality and Cooperation. PLoS ONE. 8(8) August 7, 2013.

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0071182

Abstract: Previous research has shown that the matching of rhythmic behaviour between individuals (synchrony) increases cooperation. Such synchrony is most noticeable in music, dance and collective rituals. As well as the matching of behaviour, such collective performances typically involve shared intentionality: performers actively collaborate to produce joint actions. Over three experiments we examined the importance of shared intentionality in promoting cooperation from group synchrony. Experiment 1 compared a condition in which group synchrony was produced through shared intentionality to conditions in which synchrony or asynchrony were created as a by-product of hearing the same or different rhythmic beats. We found that synchrony combined with shared intentionality produced the greatest level of cooperation. To examine the importance of synchrony when shared intentionality is present, Experiment 2 compared a condition in which participants deliberately worked together to produce synchrony with a condition in which participants deliberately worked together to produce asynchrony. We found that synchrony combined with shared intentionality produced the greatest level of cooperation. Experiment 3 manipulated both the presence of synchrony and shared intentionality and found significantly greater cooperation with synchrony and shared intentionality combined. Path analysis supported a reinforcement of cooperation model according to which perceiving synchrony when there is a shared goal to produce synchrony provides immediate feedback for successful cooperation so reinforcing the group’s cooperative tendencies. The reinforcement of cooperation model helps to explain the evolutionary conservation of traditional music and dance performances, and furthermore suggests that the collectivist values of such cultures may be an essential part of the mechanisms by which synchrony galvanises cooperative behaviours.

On the practical business of intimate intellectual collaboration, getting brains in synch

Mordechai Rorvig, The Computer Scientist Who Parlays Failures Into Breakthroughs, Quanta Magazine, June 13, 2022:

Why do you think your collaborations with Teng were so successful?

When I was starting grad school at MIT, he was an instructor there. We started working on problems then and had a very compatible working style. You’ll notice I have a couch in my office. In my office at MIT I had two couches. That meant Shang-Hua and I could both work — like, literally just spend all day lying down thinking about something, and when you have an idea, get up and talk about it. He was very happy to spend a lot of time thinking about things and talking about problems. Like me, he was happy to work on absurdly hard problems that we probably wouldn’t solve. Failure was the standard result of anything that we worked on, even if we were working on it for years. But that was OK.

David Hays and I did something similar:

This ritual began when both of us were exhausted from the intellectual work, and frustrated because we weren’t making progress. Each of us would lie back and drop into fitful reverie. Every so often one of us would make a comment or ask a question. The other would reply, to no mutual satisfaction, and the fitful reverie would continue. Eventually we would work through it, begin talking and talking, and Dave would sit down to the computer and write up some notes on what we had accomplished.

I suspect this involves relaxing into a mental mode where the brain's so-called default mode network is regnant.