For my contemporary issues in sound arts assignment, I have decided to focus on the relationship between rhythm and relationships. I had been thinking about this idea for about a month before we started speaking about this unit, and after being briefed on the unit I realised that it was perhaps something that would fit into the brief of being about culture and sound. I was thinking a lot about how rhythm can only exist with more than one sound, and all rhythm is is the relationship between these sounds (their regularity and the patterns within this regularity). I realised that this closely ties with how human relationships operate, in terms of people feeling at ease when a relationship fits their expectation and when the dynamic and regularity is conforming to the dynamics and regularity of the relationships their used to. In this same way, when a rhythm is particularly offbeat/ freeform or perhaps just in an unusual time signature, it can make people feel a bit distanced from the rhythm as they dont know where it starts and ends, and it doesn’t work as they expected it to. Also, the rhythm will sound very different after the rhythm is caught (mentally) and understood and the lister manages to catch the groove, compared to the first listen when it might appear not to make sense to the listener.
I feel like this also ties to something we spoke about during the lesson, which was the anthropology of the senses, in how different cultures have valued different senses differently. In particular, the western world valuing sight significantly higher than any other sense, and therefore assuming cultures who valued the other senses more were some how more primitive and less developed intellectually. This is of course not the case, and was largely fuelled by ignorance and racism, and the white supremacist ideals of the western world in thinking of themselves as superior to the rest of the world.