Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1: Containing Sixteen Experimental Investigations from the Harvard Psychological Laboratory.
Science
Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1: Containing Sixteen Experimental Investigations from the Harvard Psychological Laboratory.
Psychology, Experimental
The investigation of the problems presented by the psychological
phenomena of rhythm has of late years occupied much attention and been
pushed in a variety of different directions. Some researches have been
concerned with an analysis of rhythm as an immediate subjective
experience, involving factors of perception, reaction, memory,
feeling, and the like; others have had to do with the specific
objective conditions under which this experience arises, and the
effect of changes in the relations of these factors; still others have
sought to coördinate the rhythm experience with more general laws of
activity in the organism, as the condition of most effective action,
and to affiliate its complex phenomena upon simpler laws of
physiological activity and repose; while a fourth group has undertaken
a description of that historical process which has resulted in the
establishment of artistic rhythm-types, and has sought to formulate
the laws of their construction.[1]
[1] Description: (1) Of the psychological factors of the rhythm
experience: Angell and Pierce, Ettlinger, Hauptmann, Mentz,
Meumann, Stumpf, Wundt, et al. (2) Of its objective conditions
and products: Binet et Courtier, Bolton, Ebhardt, Hurst and
McKay, Meumann, Schumann, Sievers, et al. (3) Of its
physiological accompaniments: Bolton, Brücke, Dogiel,
Hausegger, Mach, Mentz, Ribot, Sherrington, Scripture, Smith,
et al. (4) Of its historical evolution: Bücher, Moritz,
Scherer, et al.
This differentiation has already made such progress as to constitute
the general topic a field within which specialization is called for,
instead of an attempt to treat the phenomenon as a whole. It is the
purpose of this paper to describe a set of experiments having to do
with the second of these problems, the constitution of objective
rhythm forms. In the determination of such forms it is, of course,
impossible to avoid the employment of terms descriptive of the
immediate experience of rhythm as a psychological process, or to
overlook the constant connection which exists between the two groups
of facts. The rhythm form is not objectively definable as a stable
type of stimulation existing in and for itself; the discrimination of
true and false relations among its elements depends on the immediate
report of the consciousness in which it appears. The artistic form is
such only in virtue of its arousing in the observer that peculiar
quality of feeling expressed in calling the series of sensory stimuli
rhythmically pleasing, or equivalent, or perfect. In no other way than
as thus dependent on the appeal which their impression makes to the
æsthetic consciousness can we conceive of the development and
establishment of fixed forms of combination and sequence among those
types of sensory stimulation which arouse in us the pleasurable
experience of rhythm. The artistic rhythm form cannot be defined as
constituted of periods which are 'chronometrically proportionate,' or
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