I overall appreciated how the reading emphasized music’s inextricability from the body. Because we grew up ensconced in Western philosophies (pointing fingers at you Plato & Descartes & Kant), I believe we, albeit subconsciously, mistakenly divide the mind and the body. The lofty Mozart-esque realm of music seems more associated with “the mind” while dance belongs to the realm of the body, but if we look within, I believe we all intuitively understand that the gap was never there. But the historical assumption of that gap is why this reading exists in the first place, which it outright acknowledges: “I am arguing that a significant component of such a process occurs along a musical dimension that is non-notatable in Western terms – namely, what I have been calling microtiming.” That’s why I had to laugh when I read: “Though these arguments are quite speculative, it is plausible that there is an important relationship between the backbeat and the body, informed by the African-American cultural model of the ring shout.” Modern academia – always the cautious skeptic, for better and worse. Also always the exclusionary imperialist. Like, oh you finally caught up! (Not speaking to the reader, just speaking in general.) The idea of the drum set as an extension of the body makes complete sense. The bass drum at the feet, stable and steady. The snare at the hands, which, with their greater dexterity, can more readily linger or attack, flavoring the music, giving it “that feel.” Literally our feel.

There were some phrases I really liked that particularly spoke to this: “It is a miniscule adjustment at the level of the tactus, rather than the substantial fractional shift of rhythmic subdivisions in swing.” I also loved this quote: “It seems plausible that the optimum snare-drum offset that we call the “pocket” is that precise rhythmic position that maximizes the accentual effect of a delay without upsetting the ongoing sense of pulse. This involves the balance of two opposing forces: the force of regularity that resists delay, and the backbeat accentuation that demands delay.” I also love how everything “seems plausible” hahaha. I also really loved this phrase: “bears the micro-rhythmic traces of embodiment…”

I was thinking of a couple things. One, what is the source of the pulse? Our breathing, our heartbeat, walking, running, how rocks feel on a hot day. Two, the main point of the reading, how to reconcile computers with the music of our bodies. The reading goes into several methods people have used to do this, the best of which, to me, was when it went over how DJs sampled songs by scratching records, and how the music is the material manifestation of the movements of the hands themselves. See here: “…bears a direct sonic resemblance to the physical motion involved” and “causing it to refer instead to the physical materiality of the vinyl-record medium, and more importantly to the embodiment, dexterity and skill of its manipulator.” These are just really great observations.

So when it comes to computers? Where to start? I had a conversation with dad I still remember a year ago. He said our phones are stupidly made because they’re made for our eyes, to please the Kantian aesthetes in us hahah. If they were really made for our hands, they would be designed like small conch shells. Look at the antiquated wall phone, how slenderly it wrapped itself inside your palm. I’m trying to say that the devices we use today were not built for us. (The divorce we made between the body and the mind is hurting us.) The computer is inherently disembodied, and we all know this. This is why I really like hyper pop, because its very sound contains the shifting disembodiment of a generation, yet, our inviolable presence throughout. It is us dancing through the divorce hahah. None of this is bad, it all just tells the story. So yeah, I’ll employ the tips and tricks the reading offered. Mostly, I will focus on the computer’s liaison with my hands.

When I think about what music is saying, this passage makes it clear: it is not about words. I realized I have been looking for a hidden message when the real conversation is in how it makes you feel. The call and response in a song is not sharing information. It is sharing a moment.

The idea that this happens through microtiming was interesting to learn. Musicians are not just playing notes to each other. They are listening and answering in real time with their timing. That is the communication.

Music’s meaning is not something you decode. It is something you experience together, a connection built note by note. The conversation is the feelings that it invokes in those who hear it.

The reading further how I believed in how percussion in music is able to drive so much emotion, even without the usage of words. One thing I have noticed however within electronic music especially is the prevalence of technology and ease of having percussion always be perfectly on time. Although this makes a song sound “perfect” it has no character, it lacks the emotions that were able to be conveyed through a traditional drumkit. The “funk” of drumming is gone. However, with the improvements in technology, there are so many effects that could be used artistically by different artists that I believe is able to express themselves in different ways and evoke different emotions within the listeners. One genre in specifically I believe that captures this usage of both technology while keeping the sound and emotions of drummers is jungle. Utilizing sampled drum breaks, they are able to utilize technology to alter the drum breaks, sequencing them in their own artistic way, all while keep the original swing and groove to it.

I think the author’s understanding of “feel” in music is significant in the context of computational music. If musical feel emerges from microscopic deviations in timing and intensity, then computational systems expose a clear tension: computers prioritize precision, while groove often depends on subtle imprecision. Strict quantization can therefore erase the traces of bodily presence that make rhythms sound relaxed or “in the pocket”, even when they are metrically correct.

This tension becomes especially clear in live coding. While live coding environments often emphasize algorithmic structure and real-time precision, they also introduce a performative and temporal dimension that reopens space for musical feel. Rather than encoding a fixed groove in advance, live coding unfolds in time, making timing decisions visible and responsive. Small changes in code, like shifting delays, densities or rhythmic patterns function less as abstract instructions and more as gestures comparable to microtiming adjustments in embodied performance.

Halfway through the reading, I realized that I should turn on some beats to understand what “microtiming” rhythm actually feels like. 

I never really thought about music through the lens of rhythm before, whether from the notes in piano, or the lyrics in the operas and pop songs, I didn’t realize how the beats, the tempo and the rhythm magically taps and leads my body around in the spaces. Music has always been a mystical yet intimidating realm for me.  I feel its magical power in the sudden shift of atmosphere, mood, emotions and the dynamic human interactions, but being able to “know music” or “create music” seems to be always tightly linked with talent and gift. It seems like you’ll need to learn piano for 9 years or guitar or knowing all the instruments to actually create something that can be called a piece of music.  

This reading, though, makes me realize it’s actually not impossible for someone like me to try something. I don’t have a drum set, so I tried to clap and stump to recreate and emphasize the magical “backbeat” following the author, and wow, it’s actually so simple to create something you can vibe with. I really appreciate how the reading helps bring music outside the podium of “the blue hall” for me. With the table, a chair, the hand claps, it’s actually not that hard to create a rhyme following some guidance of the beat patterns.  

The groove music is very improv based, testing a sudden variation and deviating from the original pattern by layering it with another beat or tone brings so much more texture.  It’s like in theater when we improv, we want unexpected tensions and events. Something needs to happen. And I realize it’s very important in music too. The reading says that the“variety of expressive timing against an isochronous pulse contains important information about the inner structure of the groove.” It’s the patterns that don’t go as expected that incorporate the human aspects of music.

With the live coding platform, we can recreate this delay of beat or the sudden deviation with our programming language to bring the human body into dance moves. 

Culturally, I felt an immediate connection when the author cited Ghanaian percussionist C. K. Ladzekpo, noting that he would stop playing to chide students for playing without emotion. This validates something I have always felt while listening to music from home: the feel of a rhythm is not just about keeping time but about conveying a universe of expression through simple, repetitive patterns. The text articulates that this African and African-American aesthetic relies on microtiming, sensitivities to timing on the order of a few milliseconds.
However, reading this through a technical lens, I was fascinated by the author’s attempt to quantify soul. The explanation of the pocket as a specific backbeat delay, where the snare is played slightly later than the mathematical midpoint, was a revelation. It transforms an abstract emotional concept, playing laid back, into a programmable variable. The text says that understanding these minor adjustments is crucial to using computers to create rhythmically vital music. We often think of computers as tools for rigid quantization, but the author points to a gray area between bodily presence and electronic impossibility. If musical messages are passed through deviations from strict metricality, then the challenge for me as a programmer is not just to code the beat but to code the deviation. It suggests that, to make electronic music that feels alive, like the Afrobeats I grew up with, I need to treat the error not as a bug but as the most essential feature of the code.