Rhythm and the Wheel

I'm tired of working on this post. It's been a work in progress for a month now and it's about time it got out there for the world to see.

The celestial cycle

Western culture through its influence by many Eastern traditions believes in the image of a wheel of time or wheel of history. Time is cyclical and works in great circles, sine and cosine values of life and death. The wheel of time in such a context is the story of history.

This idea of the cycle, the wave and the circle, has consequences because it encompasses and includes its own alterity. For every up, there is a corresponding down.

Everything moves in cycles. There are the great cycles, the astrological and the minute, the mundane shift from day to night and back again. Even the simple repetition of a heartbeat echoes the waveforms of life.

In that we keep time in music, that we must repeat these cycles of rhythm and form to maintain the music, music reflects that selfsame story of history, and indeed music as a reflection of culture and style shows us history. Music then is one of the closest physical manifestations to this kind of cyclical movement to be found in day to day life.

We can conceptualize and interpret music in a way that we cannot when looking at other aspects life, but through analogy, we can assign meaning to music that allows us by association to explore these other areas. Music then is a reflector and an interrupter of our normal rhythms.

Anything worth doing is worth doing again. Any song worth listening to is worth listening to again.



As we progress forward through history though, we find an interesting evolution in music. It changes form and storage. Originally it was mental. You memorized a song to perform it, it did not exist physically. Then it got written down and on paper took the rectangular shape.

It is in this form that we find music has the longest recorded history. And even then it had to be filtered somehow to be produced. Either a mechanical like a player piano that could clip-blip it's way around a metallic form, or a musician to interpret and perform the music.

We find what Attali in his Noise: The Political Economy of Music describes as the beginning of repetition versus production. You could mass produce the simulacrum of music that was the written form as we represent sounds with notes on a line.


With the creation of the of the phonograph and the record, we find the ability to directly record music as sound itself. And what I find interesting, especially in the context of this post is how the recordings of this storage took on the rounded shape, similar to that of a wheel.

The repetition vs production differentiation then became exponential in that the middle-man, the performer, got cut out after the initial "printing." As we move towards the digital age, we find that an increase in quality of recording as we shift from the record to the cassette to the CD, all of which retain this wheel-like appearance.

But then we come to the mp3, the fully digital format. And enter a realm of alterity. How do you conceptualize an mp3 and visualize it? We can't. The repetition has come full circle to the production in that once again it's intangible.

But what does it mean to be intangible? Is it a ghost? It is not human. It is not physical and I see no way in which we could anthropomorphize it.

It moves us with its alterity. It moves us in circles.