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.

Before this reading, I wanted to understand what rhythm actually means. My main reference came from Arabic poetry, where rhythm is created by repeating the same final sound at the end of each line. When the poem is sung, that pattern connects words with specific musical instruments and emotions, so I saw rhythm mainly as a linguistic and musical structure.

Reading about West African and African-American music expanded this idea. I began to see rhythm not just as a pattern of words or beats, but as something felt in the body through movement and collective action.

The idea of microtiming surprised me. It reminded me of my time in the military, when marching depended on listening very carefully to the music. Being even slightly early or late could cause serious problems, which showed me how tiny timing differences can have real meaning.

I also feel music in my body when singing, especially in moushat (a traditional Andalusian-Arab musical and poetic form performed in groups with complex rhythms), where feeling, words, and music work together. I prefer human drumming because it can adapt to people and the environment. As the text says, “the drummer is said to play ‘in the pocket,’” and without these small timing deviations, there is an “absence of a musical body.”

What I found most interesting about this reading was how much weight it gives to really small things. Tiny timing shifts that are almost impossible to notice unless you are listening closely. The idea that a groove can feel expressive not because it changes dramatically, but because it is slightly off in very specific ways, made me rethink what “emotion” in music actually looks like

I also liked how the text treats musical communication as something that does not need to say anything clearly or directly. It feels more like people getting in sync with each other than sending messages back and forth. Groove becomes a shared sense of time, where musicians are constantly adjusting to one another and responding at a level that is felt more than understood

The discussion of microtiming and the body stood out to me too. A perfectly quantized beat can feel strange because it removes the trace of a human presence, but the reading also makes it clear that this absence can be intentional and meaningful. What matters is not whether a rhythm is human or electronic, but what kind of relationship it creates with the listener.

Overall, the piece made me more aware of how much expression lives in small imperfections, and how being slightly off can be what makes something feel alive in the first place