The Poetry of Prediction: Musical Time, Rhythm and Groove

Good evening everyone. Um, so good to see so many people here. Um, this evening I'd like to talk about music and time and the baffling intersection of these baffling concepts. So music and time have a strange relationship 'cause music has delivered us to us in time, wrapped up in this rhythm of this ribbon. Unlike a artwork or a sculpture where we can take as long as we like to assess it and look at it in any order, music takes as long as it takes. It needs time to function, but it's not subservient to time. It actually changes our experience of time itself. Even silence in different musical contexts feels fundamentally different. So if music is made of time, what do we mean by rhythm? Well, let's be annoyingly thorough and look across the whole spectrum of time from the tiniest sliver, the highest frequency to the longest expanse, and see where music exists. So let's imagine this continuum where you have the tiniest sliver with most, the, the theoretical limit of time, this plank time length. And we'll slowly widen the gap and see if we can find music along this continuum. The first thing we find is the visible spectrum, visible components of music, which are important particularly for people like bin with synesthesia, where there are direct links. And we also see in the wifi and radio wave range transmission, where we might send a child's voice to the moon and back, for example. And this is where something magical happens. We get to the point where we can actually hear these frequencies. The audible spectrum, this is the subject in the next lecture, but you might might recognize Mary Clayton's Chill Zone from last time. And this is the stuff, the wa of music instruments, chords, notes. But as we slow it down, again, there's this magical transformation from the what to the when of music. This zone here, which is considered rhythm. If we carry on, we get onto the compositional of length of time and Mozart's complete output. There is actually a very long piece of music, which is in its 22nd year of being played organi by John Cage. Um, it's got another 620 years to go. It's been performed in a small church in Germany. Um, imagine living next to that. You're gonna be long, but usually most pieces are done in the hour range. And as we extend upwards, we go into geological, astronomical time past the gala galactic ear, and into the subject of lecture six, the Infinite in Music. But let's come back to this range here 'cause there's something very interesting about it.'cause the reason we perceive this timescale as rhythm is that in intersects with our bodies, how we engage with the world and with each other. So if we think about this range here, our perception of time, our reaction times to it is the start of the rhythmic zone and then onto our heart rate and our walking and running speeds, which align really well to the tempo range in music and our short-term memory. And collectively, this makes up our rhythmic spectrum that we'll be looking at this evening. So if we analyze a huge corpus of music, this is 10,000 tracks. We found this mountain range of tempos from around 50 to 250 beats per minute. A few things without pulse at all, but this is the typical range. So let's interrogate this tempero range and see how it affects our bodies and how it relates to us as humans. You'll note that the typical heart rate from an athlete at rest 40 BPMs to being late for an exam at 200 plus is actually represented by a traditional metronome. I don't think it's a coincidence. I've also put here typical stride rates, the, and also, um, uh, heart rates. So let's start at the bottom end of this and see if we can feel these pulses together. So here's the 40 BPM range, which is about the limit of slowness a little faster. Here is the speed of meditation perhaps, or very zen tidying up or perhaps a child when it's time to leave for the airport. Next range, we start not quite walking, but certainly swaying and staying at home and gesticulating. And here's where we head into the walking rate. So this is a slow leisure walk around an art gallery. Perhaps You can imagine yourself walking at the shade. Now here's walking, not in a rush, but with a bit of pep in your step like you're pleased with yourself. Okay, this is, you're slightly late for an appointment, but you don't want to appear like you're in a rush. And here's the point where we start moving, transitioning from walking to jogging, and it turns into exercise. Feet leave the ground. So this is the fast range of tempos. Um, and this is where we head into the anaerobic range. So you can move this fast, but not for a sustained period. Pop the Canavan Pop Canavan. And this is the stride rate of Usain Bolt in the a hundred and meters final, around 260 BPM. So I could actually animate him to this music <laugh>. And here's the point where we go beyond, um, a full physical motion into fine motor control. So we might be able to dance to this, but we would dance to it half the tempo, like a rhythmic octave below it. But it's really the fine motor control at this point, positions <laugh>. So, um, really we have to just admire it. Now, you could move by it's sort of a skilled motion at this point. Sorry. So it's no wonder that sound and music emerges from this connection to our physical movement. In a way, sound helps us coordinate movement. If we hear footsteps, we learn to associate that with a particular speed. And we have a high resolution for listening much higher than visual control. So perhaps music emerges from a desire to synchronize in a task and with each other. So there are examples of songs that are connected very much to an activity. And we can just drop a pin anywhere in our musical planet. Let's pick Central Africa. So this is the Congo region of Central Africa. And we're gonna look at a, um, tribe called the Bayaka tribe, and four children playing in the water partaking of a game of liquidity. It's type of water drumming. They're bathing, but they pass the time by improvising rhythms between themselves in the splashes, highly sophisticated rhythms. And so it becomes fun and they learn to coordinate and raise their spirits and still bathe. But what's interesting is that the adults reward them when they come up with a nice rhythm, they start singing along. So let's listen to a little bit of this. Um, and I've presented a visual analysis of how I hear the rhythm. It may not be how they or you hear it. And one thing to look out for is how well they coordinate the ending together. Some more examples which I could have picked from anywhere. These are prison workers, 1940s in Mississippi, doing hard time and hard labor. This is a famous Alan Lomax recording of 10 prison workers. And what you'll hear is an ax be their xis coming down on the downbeat. And then this beautiful call and response, which gives them just enough hope and, uh, spirit for the next brutal downbeat Be, be, Have been used, been used for centuries to lull children to sleep. And we recognize that immediately. Here's the seventh century Welsh lullaby, and it actually talks of durwin water and waterfalls near there, which we think are Lado falls, which we'll go visit soon. And some music is simply to alleviate boredom. Maybe it's a part of motor control and cohesion. But maybe to pass the time, this is a famous recording of postal walker workers in Ghana who have done the job of canceling stamps so much that they've built up a whole music form around the inking stamping snipping of scissors. It's phenomenal tease. But here's another recording from the nineties, again of a Ghana postal worker. So it seems like the style has stuck and actually developed, and we can see it in action this time. And there's this quote here from the first observer of it where it's not, it's not really music to anyone but each other in this activity. It's the past the time. And it me, it merges from daily life, not as an adornment to it. So what is this phenomenal stuff of rhythm, these etch marks we place in time and make sense of it. So normally we think of music as this, um, vertical structure of pitch and chords, but here we're talking about intervals not in pitch, but in time. And so at its essential basic level, rhythm is lengths of sound and lengths of silence. And we know lengths of sound and silence from Morse code of course. And in fact, Morse code, which is just two durations of sound and silence, is enough to make music. Delia Dier, the British composer electron assist, um, used to painstakingly snip tape to put these coded messages within that so we can try making music ourselves. If I wanted to spell my name, I would start with an M and an I and I would get this rhythm. And if that sounds vaguely familiar, it's because the composer, Layla Schiffrin used that as an inspiration to compose a now famous theme. Ronny Hazelhurst, the British composer, was more ambitious and put the entire title of his TV show in the theme tune. Ready? What? So how does rhythm do this? How does it turn this smooth experience of time into this musical experience of beats and durations? That means something. How do we go from the beatless to the Beatles? Quite proud of this one.<laugh> <laugh>. Now not all music has beats. There's ambient music and Japanese traditional music, which has time of course, but unfolds without specific landmarks. And Indian classical music actually waves between the two. Hindustani. Raga starts with the aap, which is like a prayer in this, um, pulseless opening and then transitions to the tallah. So let's listen to this beautiful singer transition. We'll hear a short introduction, and then when the tablet comes in, we've transitioned to the 16 Beat Tinel cycle. Ah, ah. So what is happening at that transition point? Well, we as humans are evolved as prediction machines. We scout the environment trying to work out what's going on, what we should pay attention to, and our attention is incredibly perceptive, but it's not boundless. Whilst we're paying attention to one thing, we can't pay attention to much else. So we've learned to apportion our attentional energy to what's going on. So if there's a series of of sounds that come in, we quickly learn to listen out for some sort of pattern. We might have a, um, a curve of attention, attentional energy that looks a little like this. As we pick up a pattern, it starts to focus in where we expect it. So there's two things to remember. It's dynamic, it's adaptive to what we hear, but it also sustains. You'll see there's a missing beat there, but it still comes back to check again. And this is essential for music. So let's test yours right now. All I'd like you to do is tap along to what you hear as naturally as you, as you feel. It's not a test, it's just whatever feels right for you. And then we'll explain what you were doing. Taking Notes. Awesome, We've got 'em all I think. So this is a North African, uh, an Arabic rhythm called the Maxim. And um, it's an ancient rhythm and you're entrained to it beautifully. Um, so this is what the pattern was. Some of you were playing every beat of it, every pulse that we heard, others found a, uh, a simpler solution perhaps. And these are the sort of taps I just saw here. So we could either clicking along to it or ta aka da da or we could find this middle ground pulse, da da. And the thing about that middle ground pulse is it doesn't hit every sound that we hear. Um, and it also hits when there is no sound, but somehow because it's the same length, it's a natural occurrence to us. These are the levels of time that we experience and they happen to happen at different time ranges. The central one is the beat the pulse, or if you wanna get a PhD, the tactus. And then we have beat groups above it like daca, da da da, and then the meter, and then groups of meters, um, hyper meter and then sectional above it. Below the beat is, um, the subdivision sometimes called the Tatum, which is a contraction of temporal atom. So it means the largest object that fits everything. And so that subdivision you would see will hits all the greens. That's the tatu. It's also a homage to art tatu, the jazz pianist. And below that is the, I guess the subatomic layer of micro timing that we'll look at. And music notation catch these as a little bit. When we say four four, we mean a meter which has four beats in it. And those beats are usually divided in twos and fours. There's a hidden code that isn't really told, but it's sort of understood. And if we, um, We understand that we're making predictions on all of these at the same time, that's the phenomenal thing. And if we look at a huge amount of music, particularly from the western tradition, we see these sort of patterns. I'm not expecting you to memorize this, but you see on the blue one is two groups of two, and then the green is four groups of two. So we have all these numbers of grouping that happened. And when we analyze this, it turns out that two, four eights and 16 and 32 are by far the most common groupings on all these multiple levels. And then it's something called mixed dupal and triple two times three, six or 12. And then the next most common ones is threes and nines, pure triples, and then all the rest. So there's this h hierarchy of primes that happens. Perhaps it's our bipedal nature and we're expecting walking, or maybe it's cognitively more simple, but we tend to expect music in pairs at multiple levels. So we do this even with just a repeated pulse. We absorb it very quickly as a set of pairs and then pairs of pears and so on upwards. And when, when we talk about strong beats and weak beats, this is the sort of way it emerges. It's not that they're louder there, it's that they, they're a superposition of lots of expectations, not just the pulse, but a pair of pulses are gonna land at this point. So we get this if I extend it out, this is a sort of profile that we expect to hear with music if it's just one thin line of repeated notes. But what does music actually give us?'cause it could give us anything we like. And it turns out it gives us something really, really close to that Roberto Rican folk, Scott Jolin rags. Even Hayden has this exact form, not exactly the same. It couldn't be exactly the same, but it's remarkable how similar it is. And we get this constant strong, weak pattern from the odds that evens that repeats and repeats and repeats and again, extraordinary. And what that means, both in the music that we hear and what we expect is that every point in time feels slightly different. If we get this pulse, we remember those attentional waves, we would get something like this for pears and then for pears of pears would get this. And then onwards into these mountains, to every point of this, we've got a different wave. We like riding these waves, and musicians are amazing at creating these waves and surfing between them. And if we can think of a comp, a composite of these expectations, they might look something like that. And that's what it feels like to have these strong beats. And it explains why not that, not just that four, four is common, but that groups of two bars and four bars and eight bars and 16 bars are really common because there are the landing points and they're a, um, potential for expressive power. So I've been working on how to illustrate this and I've come up with this, which is a circle with each of these moving at factors of two, one beat, two beats, four beats, uh, eight beats and so on. And you should feel some epinal events. The bigger the dial net passes. So there'll be a series of waves that continue, but when the red one passes, that will feel strong. And the music that you hear doesn't change very much at all. I've purposely chose something that's quite flat, but you still feel this expectation. And in fact, um, listeners do that, but musicians learn to really absorb it. So as a musician learns, they learn to keep time from beat to beat and then where they are in a bar without dropping a bar. And then if you, particularly if you learn something like jazz or blues, you want to feel four bars and eight bars go by regardless of what else is going on round you. And these are the waves that we ride as we listen. I, I i, This is not just the stuff of jazz fusion. This is an, uh, depiction of that hindustani tintal rhythm that we heard earlier. And you can see it's a circle that has it's divided in two and four quadrants, and those four quadrants are each got four quadrants in them and four again. And, um, Indian classical music learns to experience those. In fact, the the fact that they're felt differently is, um, marked in the syllables that are used to count through them and also the pattern of clapping and waving. So musicians are amazing at understanding what's, um, we are expecting and then deviating it from, from it in an expressive way. And I've put together five ways that surprise is created. Now I want to say that these are just a glimpse at them because this was painful. The amounts of stuff I had to leave out these, I've spent my life examining rhythm. And um, these are, this is just the beginning, but the, um, handouts that you get and the transcript will have further reading on it. So let's go through these and enjoy ourselves, shall we? So the first type of surprise is sometimes called displacement dissonance. And that's the feeling we get where something doesn't happen on a very expected beat, it's on a less expected point in time. So we'll go back to this profile here. So if we're expecting something like this, we can, um, make music that confirms our metric expectations. So if I remove some of the weaker beats, we'll still feel a very strong metric pulse like in this passage here. Now much displacement dissonance because it's hitting the strongest beats very hard. What if we take something like this and we'll give the big downbeat, but we'll add a little weight to those even numbered offbeats. So you'll hear on the top treble stave here, there'll be a weighty offbeat push and you'll feel this gliding sensation hopefully. Or we can treat the structure like skipping stone. We can give the downbeat, but then the first offbeat and bounce off it. So we're sort of bouncing between these strong beats, which gives us forward propulsion. Obviously you follow, uh, Mozart's Stravinsky and Stravinsky with Ozzy Osborne. And it turns out that we really like these surprises. In fact, if you imagine that rhythm isn't just the music and it isn't just what we expect, it's this interplay between these two worlds. And so what happens is if we're expecting a strong beat and we don't get it, we need to fill that in with our virtual structures. And that usually involves a body motion. We sway to it to fill that point of time in. And in fact, when we maintain our me metric internal structures, despite the complexity of the rhythm, there's this dopamine, dopamine reward that we get from it. And neuroscientists have found that there's this sweet spot of surprise, of syncopation, this inverted you. If it's very expected, it's fine and it's pleasurable. If it's very chaotic, we start to dip off in our pleasure and our uh, ability to, and our ability to move to it and understand it. But right in the middle, there's this point which we shall call Mount groove, which is a sweet spot of expectation that we have that feeds our desire to predict and the reward from satisfactory, um, prediction. And perhaps the music that does this for me at least in the, uh, let's say the popular music realm is uh, uh, Brazilian popular, popular music, which is right on the tip of this, which has these incredible syncopations just pulling our sense and these amazing harmony, I dunno why they call it easy listening <laugh>, it's about the hardest thing there is and the hard rock is about the easiest they need to swap those around. Uh, so let's listen to a little bit of this. But it's not just the realm of Brazilian music and funk that has this displacement dissonance. All music does this. Here's bark. And what I've marked here is where he emits a strong beat in red and where he emphasizes a weaker beat. And it gives this as forward propulsion as if we're waiting gives, keeps us longing for a big downbeat. So, um, you'll hear this passage and you'll hear some emitted strong beats and some, and I'll try and signal the weaker beats that come. Some styles have this displacement dissonance baked into them. The backbeat is clapping on. Two and four is a displacement dissonance that is so established, it's like not fitting salt on chips. And in fact, if you go to a concert and you clap on one and three, it's worth than clapping between, between movements of the classical concept <laugh>, they're really tough, hard. Um, here's the first ever recording of a backbeat, uh, from 1927, A clapped backbeat. At least what it gives you is a sense of community because you're not, it's not like a march where you're being forced to hear the downbeat. You all feel downbeat together. But there's this community feel when you're clapping on those weaker beats. Um, there's versions of it at half the time. So here we'll hear it on beats three, which is like a back beat but slowed down. Oh, double time as we get in reggae and scar. In fact, displacement dissonance needs a metric structure for it to work. If there's no metric structure, it is just a bunch of notes in a row. So musical styles have formed by grasping this sense of the meter in claves or in funk patterns where we really feel one or we feel where the each beat is. And then we can do whatever we like as James Brown said to Bootsy Collins. So this excerpt is a track called three on E, which is exactly that. You get three downbeats on an E and then a bar. So you get these, the only thing solid is those three E's and then then it's a free for all displacement dissonance, Enjoying myself. So the thing about it though is that I told you it was a dynamic prediction. So although they, that feels like displacement dissonance, we are expecting things to happen there. What if we want to make something surprising and we had a binary structure here. If we did something like this, it would be, it would have displacement dissonance, but it'd be totally predictable because the gaps between would be binary. And even this looks quite um, random. But if we have to be careful because it's actually an opening up gap between the two. This thing is quite a, looks fairly simple, but it's actually surprisingly tricky to understand because the gaps are big and then small, they change every, does anyone recognize this rhythm? You know it, I promise. Now the extraordinary thing about that is that I know that passage so well, but it only now I actually know where the beats lie. They're always surprising and you'll notice that there are big gaps and small gaps, but they're not the same. The big gaps are getting smaller and the small gaps are getting bigger until they cross in length. So it's almost impossible to know when it happens. And I don't think he obviously worked this out like that, but he was a listener as he was. Where would be the most surprising place to put these? So the next element of surprise is one of grouping dissonance. Let's imagine we're still in a binary structure like this, eight beats, which we could think of as four twos or two fours. Now a back beat still is binary. If we hit on beats three and, uh, five, three and seven, sorry, the knits, um, they're still a binary section apart, but what we can do is surprise the listener by grouping in a number other than two, four, and eight. There are other numbers, apparently one of them is three. So imagine for a moment we group in three is above this 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. And then we give up and to the binary God and with a two space. So we land back on the downbeat and we get this pattern known as the tri, which is like ground zero of grouping dissonance and is found all over the world. We can elaborate it in many ways. We could double up the subdivisions, remove some of them and really firm up the binary structure with a backbeat sillas even happen at the hyper metric level. This is a Beatles tune, which is a three bar melody, and then the same three bar melody and then a two bar chorus, a super slow trac. So three doesn't quite fit in a binary number. Um, three will never fit in a eight or a 16 or a 32. But it's fun to see musicians try. So for here for example, we could extend that trac so that it goes over 16 bars. And so we get a whole bunch of threes, but then we have this, um, rhythmic comma at the end to make it reset. So musicians keep trying to fit three into binary numbers. They never manage it, but they make nice music in the process. So Duke Ellington has a whole series of threes, but it balances them in the middle of a binary structure here. Do what? And Bill Withers has 25 tries to make it fit. He goes, I know all the way through a 64 buyer thing, it still doesn't quite fit. It has to extend the very last one. We don't have time to listen to them all <laugh>. But there is this lovely meeting point at 24. It's not a full pure binary number, but it feels rather nice. We get three bars of eight and eight and eight groups of three. And the verse of Kmir by Led Zeppelin does this and so does top secret yellow jackets. But here's another beautiful example and you'll find the surprising epinal point at the beginning of this 24 bar cycle. We also find in music not perfect evenness and not chaos, but this sort of middle ground of rough irregularity sometimes called Euclidean rhythms or maximally even rhythms. We won't get into the maths, but I can explain it in quite concrete terms. Imagine with dealing cards out, sometimes everyone gets the same number of cards, but usually there's this mismatch that happens, but it's as fair as as possible. So imagine we have eight cards and we deal them for three people, then we get this Euclidean distribution three and eight, A three, A three and two. It's not perfectly even, but it's as fair as we can make it. And that of course is the T and you make music from around the world. Six in eight is the maximum you were tapping along to 10 and 16 doesn't seem like much, but you get something you wouldn't all know, shuffle them around and we'll get some Something else. These Euclidean rhythms are the gateway drug to odd meters. They're so effect and sound and so danceable and infectious that they don't need to add up to a binary number. So for example, we could take five cards, split them in two, and we get a rhythm like this. Fuck, Or seven cards split into two and get this 4, 2, 4 Into 10, six into 10. And in fact, Dave Brubeck heard rhythms like tour in Turkey and was inspired to write these meters. Another person completely inspired by them these rhythms was Bella Bartok and he wanted to capture this irregularity. And so hacked music notation like this in these additive meter forms three plus two plus three, he could have written eight, eight or four four, but he wanted to mark those beat groupings which were so important. So here's one of his, um, six answers in the bog Bulgarian rhythm with a 2, 2, 3. It's quite fast . But the extraordinary thing about Euclidean rhythms is they have this property that they're hiding another Euclidean rhythm, you can actually turn them upside down and you get this other rhythm, a shadow rhythm hiding in those gaps back beat seven, eight. And we go on and on. We can get a mess of 35 cars, steal them out to 15 people and get the veno horo Bulgarian rhythm. D dga d dug. The the um, the iWay tribe in Africa have the abeco, which is seven and 12. You see these here and if you squinted it, that might look oddly familiar though white and black markings it Because it's a diatonic scale. The diatonic scale on the piano is a Euclidean rhythm, which means we can borrow those concepts of modes, for example. And Steve Wright, um, took this rhythm and used the mixolydian mode for clapping on this to show the connection between these different parameters on our audible and rhythmic spectrum. And of course it hides the pentatonic shadow rhythm. If music is this conversation between what is heard and this internal grid, it might mean that we can hear music in multiple ways. And in fact we can do this quite simply by, by just running two rhythms at the same time. Three beats against two beats, but wake them evenly. And we can't, we don't hear one as the meter one as background or foreground. We fluctuate between the two in this liminal meditative space. We can even imply at the same tempo, different superimposed tempo. So here's Winston Marsals playing autumn leaves and the tempo doesn't change, but the rhythm section divider two bars into 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. So there's this false acceleration that happens. They do it in reverse at the end. It's very cool. The flamenco clock, 12 beats is one rhythm dka, but there are different rhythmic forms based on where we start. The so goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, the, um, the, the uh, s is your left hand facing you. And the two longest fingers are the two longest beats for that. Unless you have an abnormality <laugh>, I didn't mean that. That's true. Um, and in fact when we listen to 12 beats, we're hearing all these relationships between these beat points and a listener or a composer can make us hear this in various ways. Here's a simple but beautiful example of Steve Reich making us here. Four threes and three fours switching between the two And some styles and instruments have this multiplicity baked into them. This is the Berra, the thumb piano of Zimbabwe and the Shona tradition. It seems so simple. It's played with a thumbs obviously on, on two sides and it's almost always in a left right, um, bipedal fashion with the notes emerging from the center. But this version has three manuals, three layers of notes which are related to the voices of children, men and women, which is rather beautiful embedded in it. It's 24 beat cycle is this multiplicity. We go left, right? But we go women, children, men, children, women this way. And so we can hear it as six twos or three eights or eight threes. And these amazing melodies emerge from it, particularly because, uh, another one, multiple BUAs are played sometimes displaced. So we hear multiple melodies at once and we'll hear this example. This is ne Ma mu Sasa, which is a ancient Shona song. And what's beautiful about it, it means, uh, a temporary shelter and it's sung at points of Celebration. Um, and it's thanking our ancestors and our former selves for doing everything they can so that this moment in time is safe. But it's also sung at moments of consolation. Yes, times are bad, but we can make times better for our descendants and our future selves. So embedded in it is musically multiple times, but also conceptually the idea of multiple times To this point, we've been assuming that these moments in time are absolute dots, these infinitesimal points that have to be hit, but actually time is smooth, that's curved and we have a great acuity for these moments in time. So, um, this is a huge topic which I really enjoy, but we're just gonna look at, um, one example. So this is the, this is one beat and it's an illustration of where Django Reine hat likes to play. So you can imagine the entire curve and he has these moments and even though they're tiny shifts, they make a huge di difference to how we feel. Let's take this example from Nina Simone, which is one swing pattern. We know this right Now. Normally when we think about swing, we think of it in very simple harmonic ratios, two to one. So two parts to one part or three to one. But she's in neither of those. She's right between these two. And to give you an idea of how precise this is, she's an arranged 44 milliseconds between these two zones. If a, if husain bolts starts after the, the starting pistol any earlier than 85 milliseconds, it's, it's counted as a false start. This is so small, it's the difference between us saying when we say the word pill between put and E is 50 milliseconds. So this is a tiny amount, yet she manages to navigate it. Let's see if you can hear this difference. Two to one, three to one. But she's here, My baby. My, We spend much of our lives ignoring this precious commodity of time, frittering and wasting it. But music gives us access to it to really properly feel time go by. It's no wonder that we ignore it because thinking of what we leave behind us, the mess and the loved ones that we leave behind us in time and goodness knows what's ahead of us. It's a awesome and terrifying thought, but there is solace and beauty in the fact that we make this journey through time together accompanied by music. Thank you very much. Thank you. How much of the innate sense of rhythm that is built into music is part of music is coming from our natural environment. You draw the sort of physics of it and how it happens together, but the, the relationship as it were between nature, how we absorb those rhythms to create music and play music. So our ability to absorb music comes fundamentally from nature and our, and just how we engage with the world as we develop and as we step and we hear a sound. So the fundamental and building blocks are always there for absolutely everybody, but some of it is, um, has to be trained, uh, I believe for, for some of us. And so I think all humans have the propensity for great musical enjoyment, but if we're not hearing beats in time, in nature, we have the ability to, to learn beats in time. But a lot of music involves periodic rhythms and sometimes that has to be learned. So I would say that we only have music because of our natural bodies, but um, we must, some, must, must train to go further up that, So I'd rather suspect only a non-musician like myself could ask this question. But um, if you are writing some music, what comes first? Are you, are you feeling that rhythm that you want to attach a tune to or is the tune there which requires a rhythm to be developed? So this is different for different musicians of course. Usually style gives a rhythmic framework as a basis for any number of of musical compositions. However, often a melody is pitch and rhythm in love with each other, essentially this unit which works together. And that usually comes as a package in that sense. Okay, I'm gonna take, see if we've got any questions from the floor just briefly before it comes to the next one. Anybody got a question? Nobody has. Yes. One the front down Here. Um, I was thinking about neurodiversity. Um, I hope this isn't too left field a question, but um, I work with some people who are from the do the dominant, the the not from the dominant neurotype. And I was thinking about is there any research into how people who might be from that sort of, those minorities if you like, of the brain engage with rhythm? Does this make sense? So our audience has eminent neuroscientists, which I would defer the question, uh, to, but what I do know is that, um, language and for example, language and music have share a stem, but they also are have solid branches and so do pitch and rhythm also. So I would imagine it depends wildly and that's where I'll <laugh> that's the limit of my knowledge on that, I'm Afraid. I think you were, you were next to the back over here. Um, I'm interested, um, why we are so deeply ingrained to hear things in pairs. Yeah, that's a great question. Um, so it seems to be a default globally except, um, people who are raised with irregular rhythms that is rhythms that are different than ter are able to hear in pairs and elsewhere. So it seems to be like a lower default if it is a default. Um, some say that it's about walking and left right, but I suspect that it's, this is the simplest cognitive expectation to expect a repetition and a repetition of a repetition. It's as fast as heuristic in that way, regardless. It seems that we keep making music that way and expecting music in that way. And I, I'm not sure what would happen if we just refuse to do that<laugh> and what would happen to listeners. I think they can always cope with that. But there is this, even when we have a seven eight rhythm, we expect it to repeat and it seems to be baked into us. Ladies And gentlemen, please thank Milton in the usual way. Thank.