Martin Amis’s prose style has been profoundly influential, and so has the consistency with which he foregrounded questions of style in his fiction and non-fiction. This chapter discusses what Amis meant when he spoke about style. It also discusses what it might be possible to say about style as such and argues that we can only really argue about a given style. It goes on to anatomise Martin Amis’s prose style using the tools of close reading, quoting from his novels Money and Time’s Arrow as well as his memoir Experience and his short story ‘The Coincidence of the Arts’. It discusses Amis’s style as a hybrid of postmodern and liberal-humanist insights into the nature of the world; as essentially urban; as positing style as a dandified response to British post-imperial decline; and, finally, as intrinsically comic.

The Classic Bardic period is remarkable for its conservation of dán díreach, a highly elaborate set of formal protocols that underwrote bardic composition of eulogy, elegy, and satire. Dán díreach features complex syllabic meters, such as deibhidhe and rannuigheacht, that accompanied a rich set of rhetorical and generic conventions at the core of the bardic repertoire. This chapter examines the intricacies and affordances of such forms, as well as other styles that traveled outside of the aristocratic milieu, which were characterized by an increased use of alliterative meters such as ógláchas and brúilingeacht, a preponderance of folk motifs and song forms, and an emphasis on topics and concerns that tended not to find their way into the poems of the professional bards.

As the accentual and highly alliterative meters of pre-Christian poetry came in contact with Latin hymnody, they incorporated forms of syllabic versification. These nùa chrutha [new forms] emerged from an ecclesiastical setting and were initially resisted by the filid, but they were then slowly folded together with native compositional tendencies on the way to the highly formal dán díreach style (syllabic, stanzaic, complexly rhymed) that would dominate professional Irish poetry until the seventeenth century. This chapter will look at the development of early Irish versification.

This chapter is concerned with Pindar’s poems as performance events, compounds of words, vocal melody, and instrumental music. My central claim is that such performances, as well as being events that are listened to, direct and refashion the act of listening. Following an overview of Pindar’s references to music, with which he positions himself as a creative participant in music’s still-developing history, I elaborate this claim in readings of Nemean 4, fr. 152, and Paean 8. In each of these texts, Pindar’s combinations of unusual diction, intertextuality, rhythmical framing, and other aspects of poetic form enable his audiences to listen to words and their meanings anew, and thereby to apprehend musical sound taking on fresh significance.

A phenomenon that received considerable attention is the propensity for an alternating rhythm in speech. However, algorithms for the calculation of linguistic rhythm are sparse and limited to binary alternation and very short and isolated structures. In the context of a production study, I introduce an algorithm for the calculation of rhythmic well-formedness that goes beyond such a binary alternation and works for sequences larger than short phrases. The algorithm is based on the idea that rhythmicity is defined by a balanced distance of similarly prominent syllables. The study shows that the produced sentences as well as the perceived prominence of the German object pronoun ihn, "him," vary systematically with the predicted degree of rhythmicity. The algorithm can be applied to any linguistic structure once the accented syllables are identified.

In spoken communication, one can observe a near-constant presence of both communicative gestures and noncommunicative movements, involving the limbs for actions or locomotion. This suggests that the physical underpinning of spoken communication extends beyond the articulatory system. It may find its roots in breathing, a pivotal element that plays a crucial role in the control and rhythms of both speech and limb movement. This hypothesis has recently garnered attention in interdisciplinary research. Within this framework, this chapter examines evidence of the impact of breathing and limb movements on speech rhythms. First, it highlights breathing as a fundamental rhythm unique to speakers, acting as a conductor for the temporal organization of speech at various linguistic levels. The chapter then further explores the influence of co-speech gestures and noncommunicative motions on the temporal organization of speech. The intricate interplay between speech and breathing, as well as speech and motion, conceptualizes breathing as a potential bridge connecting speech and limb motions at different levels.

Music rhythm and speech rhythm share acoustic, temporal and syntactic similarities, and neuroscience research has shown that similar areas and networks in the brain are recruited to process both types of signals. Rhythm is a core predictive element for both music and speech, allowing for facilitated processing of upcoming, predicted elements. The combined study of music and speech rhythm processing can be particularly insightful, considering the stronger regularity and predictability of musical rhythm. Although speech rhythm is less regular, it still contains regularities, notably at syllabic and prosodic levels. In this chapter, we outline different research lines investigating connections between music and speech rhythm processing, including the recently proposed processing rhythm in speech and music framework, as well as music rhythm interventions and stimulations that aim to improve speech signal processing both in the short term and the long term. Implications for developmental language disorders and future research perspectives are outlined.

Almost no seminar, book, or YouTube tutorial on successful public speaking is without the established and traditional “cork exercise.” It is supposed to enhance speakers’ rhythm and intelligibility, for which there is, however, no scientific evidence so far. Our experiment addresses this gap. Twenty speakers performed a presentation task three times: (1) before a cork exercise intervention, (2) immediately after it, and (3) some minutes later after having completed a distractor questionnaire. The intervention was a video recorded by a professional media trainer. Results show significant rhythmic (and related melodic and articulatory) differences between presentations (1) and (2), suggesting a positive effect for speakers in (2). However, in presentation (3), all measurements revert to the baseline presentation (1) level. Thus, the "cork exercise" basically works and yields positive effects; however, they are short-lived. The chapter ends with suggestions for further research and practical ideas for a more sustainable design of the cork exercise.

We conducted two experiments, testing the iambic–trochaic law (ITL) with speakers of English, Greek, and Korean. They heard sequences of tones varying in duration, intensity, or both; stimuli differed in the magnitude of the acoustic differences between alternating tones and involved both short and long inter-stimulus intervals. While the results were not always compatible with ITL predictions and did not show strong grouping preferences, language-related differences did emerge, with Korean participants showing a preference for trochees, and Greek participants being more sensitive to duration differences than the other two groups. Importantly, grouping preferences showed substantial individual variation, evinced by responses to both test sequences and controls (sequences of identical tones). These findings indicate that results from ITL experiments are influenced by linguistic background but are also difficult to replicate, as individual preferences and specific experimental conditions influence how participants impose rhythm structure to sound sequences.

The afterword synthesizes the chapters in this volume to draw out themes, lessons, and future directions and acknowledges the importance of the ethnographic approach of this work. We expand on the three themes of ideals in tension with practices, the shifting nature of acquaintanceship to friendship, and the enactment of public and private across space and place. We argue for three valuable insights gained from reading these chapters together. First, they point towards the importance of how people read our intentions, friendship performances, and relationships. Second, friendships impinge on our ontological security. Third, there are rhythms to connections across space. Interactions are temporally bound and accounting for the temporal is helpful in completing analyses of friendships. Ultimately, we show how these chapters sit at the intersection of critical theory and symbolic interaction. We also underscore that this volume marks not the end, but a beginning of a renewed research agenda on critical friendship, one that began with contributors who were mostly strangers but who are now mostly friends.

This chapter opens with the pivotal scene in Goethe’s bestselling novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, when Werther reads Ossian to Charlotte. In describing this moment, Goethe reproduces Ossian’s patterns of rhythm and syntax in his own prose. The effect suggests that Werther and Charlotte share an embodied responsiveness to their reading. Goethe here seems to be drawing upon contemporary theories of universal rhythm and debates about prosody. The idea that poetic rhythm is a sensuous experience that can be shared between readers is then pushed to the extreme in the Roman Elegies, in which he playfully compares prosody to sex. The final section of this chapter focuses on Elective Affinities and shows how the novel’s comparison between chemical bonds and bonds of human affection extends also to a comparison between human relationships and the relational structures of language and metaphor.

The theoretical position that time principally enters mental life through the portal of perceptual organization and particularly through the formation of groups is introduced. The key concept of Gestalt, that the whole is other than the sum of the parts, is illustrated through both spatial and temporal examples. Particular emphasis is placed on the emergent properties of groups experienced in music.

In Debussy’s mélodies, the placement of poetic stresses within a bar frequently contradicts the natural rhythm of the French language. In the case of his early songs, scholars have rationalised these occurrences through his ‘casual regard for the text’, his youthfulness, or his ‘budding fascination with the poetry’. However, the irregularities present in his later songs have not been explained. While confirming that Debussy’s translation of the prosody into the musical metre and rhythm is anything but strict, my study of meter and rhythm in his mélodies suggests that an exact rendering of versification was not even intended in many of the songs. To demonstrate this aspect of Debussy’s technique, I compare a few poetic lines from the 1882 and 1892 settings of Verlaine’s ‘En sourdine’ and focus on a single rhythmic alteration, whose location, in the light of the song’s other rhythmic and metrical events, reveals its purpose.

One of the lasting clichés about Debussy’s music is that it exemplifies a newly ‘static’ approach to musical time. However understandable this trope might seem in light of the post-tonal syntax and gamelan-inspired textures found in many of his major works, it overlooks his consistent, inventive engagement with quite opposite tendencies, notably the energetic, propulsive, and infectious rhythms of the dance. In this chapter, I offer a diagnostic overview and survey of dance tropes as they are deployed from Debussy’s earliest works (e.g. Danse bohémienne, 1880) to his last (Sonate pour violon et piano, 1917).

I propose a preliminary categorisation of Debussy’s oeuvre according to dance type. Such a broad survey can shed new light on the subtle evolutions within his lifelong exploration metrically hybrid dances. I illustrate how Debussy deployed a whole panoply of rhythmic characters to impart energy to an art he once defined as ‘de temps et de couleurs rythmés’.

What makes music an enduring art that has withstood the test of time across so many cultural contexts? Here we review the literature on emotion and reward as it relates to music, grounding our review on multiple methodological traditions in neuroscience, as well as newer work that combines these tools with music technology and sound design. Key to these disparate lines of research is the idea that the reward system is functionally and structurally connected to the auditory system, giving rise to individual differences in the sensitivity and felt emotion for music. We conclude with implications of this research for the design and implementation of music-based interventions for improving cognitive and brain health, especially for those with neurodegenerative diseases.