Rythm is the key

Number One, Jackson Pollock


Our inate sense of timing. What separates mankind from the rest of the animal kingdom? Toolmaking or language? None has been proved quite unique enough, quite a few creatures use tools, and chimps seem to learn language. The fundamental aptitude is Rhythm.The capacity of taking up a rhythm or to catch it from someone or something else. Only human beings, it seems, imitate and enjoy rhythm in this way.”there is not a single report of an animal being trained to tap, peck or move in synchrony with an auditory beat.”
People do it all the time. Even when they are not thinking about it, in their heartbeat, in their breathing. Is that where we get it from? Is that how we clap, march, or waltz?. It is in fact very hard not to fall into rhythm. Rythm can be not only enjoyable but intoxicating, ecstatic. And it all seems to be part of a peculiarity of the human brain. That is, we not only perceive rhythms – we also rapidly internalize and reproduce them. And like that, we create internal templates, reproducible ones. We are incredibly good and tempos in music, for example.
And it is not only music. Comedy, although it might seem as a cliché, depends incredibly on timing. Timing in comedy, comes down to the intuitive manipulation of the rhythmic flow, so that the punchline comes at just the right, unpredictable moment! It's incredible how many comedians also performed in a rhythmic musical idiom. Spike Milligan was a trumpeter, Mel Brooks was in fact a drummer, and Peter Sellers worked as a drummer and dancer. What goes for comedy goes for acting too, where, if not everything, timing is crucial. Or even poetry, explaining the relation between rhyme and rhythm, both deriving from greek, they belong to the sense of measure, motion and stream.
Rhythm is in all art. The cutting in movies, the repetition or non repetition of some paintings or arquitecture elements and maybe even in our everyday life. So a question remains, is it all a matter of rhythm?

adaptation from “Daily Telegraph” September 2008