But we have dwelt too long on the general characteristics.
Although our examples have been drawn mostly from the field of
music, the preceding principles apply to all kinds of rhythm,
tactual and visual as well as auditory. It is time to show why
the rhythm out of all comparison the strongest, most compelling,
most full of emotional quality, is the rhythm of music.
It has long been known that there is especially close connection
between sounds and motor innervations. All sorts of sensorial
stimuli produce reflex contractions, but the auditory, apparently,
to a much higher degree. Animals are excited to all sorts of
outbreaks by noise; children are less alarmed by visual than by
auditory impressions. The fact that we dance to sound rather
than to the waving of a baton, or rhythmical flashes of light
for instance--the fact that this second proposition is felt at
once to be absurd, shows how intimately the two are bound
together. The irresistible effects of dance, martial music,
etc., are trite commonplaces; and I shall therefore not heap
up instances which can be supplied by every reader from his
own experience. Now all this is not hard to understand,
biologically. The eye mediated the information of what was
far enough away to be fled from, or prepared for; the ear what
was likely to be nearer, unseen, and so more ominous. As more
ominous, it would have to be responded to in action more
quickly. So that if any sense was to be in especially close
connection with the motor centres, it would naturally be
hearing.
The development of the auditory functions points to the same
close connection of sound and movement. Sounds affect us as
tone, and as impulse. The primitive sensation was one of
impulse alone, mediated by the "shake-organs." These shake-
organs at first only gave information about the attitude and
movements of the body, and were connected with motor centres
so as to be able to reestablish equilibrium by means of
reflexes. The original "shake-organ" developed into the
organs of hearing and of equilibrium (that is, the cochlea
and the semicircular canals respectively), but these were
still side by side in the inner ear, and the close connection
with the motor centres was not lost. Anatomically, the
auditory nerve not only goes to those parts of the brain
whence the motor innervation emanates, and to the reflex
centres in the cerebellum, but passes close by the vagus or
pneumogastric nerve, which rules the heart and the vasomotor
functions. We have then multiplied reasons for the singular
effect of sound on motor reactions, and on the other organic
functions which have so much to do with feeling and emotion.
Every sound-stimulus is then much more than sound-sensation.
It causes reflex contractions in the whole muscular system;
it sets up some sort of cardiac and vascular excitation.
This reaction is in general in the direction of increased
amplitude of respiration, but diminution of the pulse,
depending on a peripheral vaso-constriction. Moreover, this
vasomotor reaction is given in a melody or piece of music,
not by its continuity, but for every one of the variations
of rhythm, key, or intensity,--which is of interest in the
light of what has been said of the latent motor image. The
obstacle in syncopated rhythm is physiologically translated
as vaso-constriction. In general, music induces cardiac
acceleration.
All this is of value in showing how completely the attention-
motor theory of rhythm applies to the rhythm of sounds. Since
sound is much more than sound, but sound-sensation, movement,
and visceral change together, we can see that the rhythmical
experience of music is, even more literally and completely
than at first appeared, an EMBODIED expectation. No sensorial
rhythm could be so completely induced in the psychological
organism as the sound-rhythm. In listening to music, we see
how it is that we ourselves, body and soul, seem to be IN the
rhythm. We make it, and we wait to make it. The satisfaction
of our expectation is like the satisfaction of a bodily desire
or need; no, not like it, it IS that. The conditions and
causes of rhythm and our pleasure in it are more deeply seated
than language, custom, even instinct; they are in the most
fundamental functions of life. This element of music, at least,
seems not to have arisen as a "natural language."