Monday, January 22, 2007
Processing in the Groove

As humans, our job is to PROCESS things. But, can we think about how to process while we are doing the processing? Yes!

We process emotions, ideas, spirit, words, sentences, feelings. We experience these things when we hear music. When we play music with other people, we take the things we hear and process them - transform them into what they will become, as if you are a filter that transforms one sort of light into another. And in putting out your own processed versions of the music that came into you, also understand that your fellow humans will be processing the input they get from you.

Of course, the trick is to do this in real time, turning on a dime. It takes a certain amount of time for a signal to travel from our ears to the brain, for the brain to react, and the for the brain to tell our thumbs or fingers what to do next. The minimum perception time is something like 1/30 of a second. The response time for hard-wired reactions is pretty fast, maybe 1/10 second, but often is more like 1/2 second or longer if the reaction requires some thought. The more complicated the response, the longer the time. Miles Davis, the great jazz trumpet player, utilized a lot of space in between his notes. This space let him ponder the great questions in between his playing - such as "Just what am I going to do next?"

Often in my kalimba playing, I am the opposite of Miles - instead of leaving space, I just let those notes fly, weaving a continuous fabric of sound and rhythm. However, if I am playing a certain riff over and over again, my thumbs know the way, and I can let my mind drift and tackle the issue of "What to do next? How should I change to go with the flow of the music as it is revealing itself to us now?" OK, it isn't as cool as Miles just waiting for the exact right instant to throw a few notes out there, but it does let me stop and think without actually stopping.

By the way, you know what being "in the groove" is, right? You have heard many beats go by, and your body and mind are synched up to the beat, as well as to some of the details of the music built on top of the beat. When you are "in the groove", you are using tens of seconds of past music to predict exactly what is happening next, and you can usually predict the instant the next beat is going to come to much better than 1/100 of a second. ie, by being clever and cool, we can overcome the limitation of that 1/30 second perception time and the longer reaction time.

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