Rhythm and synchronicity

This excellent TED lecture by Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz has really gotten me thinking about the role of rhythm in life, biological, human, and otherwise, and I highly recommend it. The lecture covers some really interesting examples of how rhythms, or what he calls examples of "sync" arise spontaneously in everyday situations.

One familiar example from the biological world is schooling (in fish and birds, etc), where are all of the movements of tons of individuals are coordinated to give the impression of choreographed action. As it turns out, schooling works on some pretty straightforward principles. He shows a mathematical model of schooling each individual's behavior is determined by some exceptionally simple rules: each individual is only aware of those nearest to it, all individuals tend to line up in the same direction, and that all of the individuals are attracted to each other, but keep a set distance between them.

Strogatz also goes over some less animate examples of spontaneous sync. He shows that two metronomes will sync up if you give them a way of "communicating" with each other mechanically, which in this case was a mobile platform that he put both on. Also pretty cool was the example of how people's footsteps tended to get into rhythm at the opening of the Millenium Bridge in London in 2000, which caused the entire massive bridge to start wobbling and had to be temporarily shut down.

Pretty cool examples of how rhythms can arise between individuals spontanteouly, and they all seem to really interesting example of the larger idea of emergence. Since watching the lecture I've been thinking about the pervasive rhythms are in life that I don't really notice most of the time (traffic patterns, cadence of conversation, moods, everything seems to have its own rhythm on some scale).

More than anything though, it reminded me of all of the old church, gospel, country, and other "americana" music I've bene listening. Especially in the old gospel stuff (especially Goodbye, Babylon and Classic Southern Gospel), there's some really energetic in so many of the songs that's hard to put my finger on, and I can't help connecting it in my mind to this sort of spontaneous development of alignment and rhythm between people. Many of the recordings are field recordings, so the recording quality is often poor, but the blistering energy and rhythms come through clear, and it's kind of amazing that people would so frequently and so universally get together to make music. I mean, it sounds like a silly question, but why does it make so much sense for people who are thinking something (about God, or poverty, or teen angst, or love, or whatever) to get together and make sounds in rhythm together, from the church choir to the transcendent drum circle to the dance club? It would make a lot of sense to me that people are expressing something really fundamental and instinctive that comes out in music, something that stretches way beyond human life into the rest of the living and even non-living world. Well, in addition to it just being fun...